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Title: Studies in the Wagnerian Drama
Author: Krehbiel, Henry Edward
Language: English
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* * * * *
STUDIES
IN THE
WAGNERIAN DRAMA
BY
HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1904
Copyright, 1891, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
TO
JOSEPH S. TUNISON
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA: ITS PROTOTYPES AND ELEMENTS.
Wagner a Regenerator of the Lyric Drama.--Greek Tragedy.--Solemn
Speech and Music.--The Poet-composers
of Hellas.--The Florentine Reformers and their Invention
of the Lyric Drama.--Peri and Caccini.--Their
Declamation.--Monteverde's Orchestra.--How Wagner
Touches Hands with his Predecessors.--Poet and
Composer.--Music a Means, not an Aim in the Drama.--A
Typical Teuton, but also a Cosmopolite.--Teutonic
and Roman Ideals.--Absolute Beauty and Characteristic
Beauty.--The Ethical Idea in Wagner's Dramas.--Fundamental
Principle of his Constructive Scheme.
The Typical Phrases.--Symbols, not Labels.--Music as
a Language.--Characteristics of Some Typical Phrases.--Wotan
in Two Aspects.--Form the First Manifestation
of Law in Music and Essential to Repose.--Tonality
and the Effect of its Loss.--Phrases Delineative
and Imitative of External Characteristics.--The
Giants, the Dwarfs, the Rhine; Loge, the God of
Fire.--Prophetic Use of the Phrases.--Their Dramatic
Development.--Wagner's Orchestra and the Greek
Chorus.--Alliteration and Rhyme.--The Ethical Idea
Again. Pages 1-36
CHAPTER II.
"TRISTAN UND ISOLDE."
The Legend in Outline.--A Subject that has Fascinated
Poets for over Six Centuries in Spite of Changes in
Moral Feeling.--Wagner's Variations from the Versions
of Gottfried von Strassburg, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson,
and Swinburne.--The Prelude.--Absence of Scenic
Music.--Fundamental Musical Thought of the Drama.--Its
Duality in Unity.--Longing and Suffering.--Wagner's
Exposition.--Use of the Sailor's Song and the
Sea Music.--Suffering and Chromatic Descent.--The
Love Glance and its Symbol.--Fatality and the Interval
of the Seventh.--The Heroic Phrase of Tristan.--The
Death Phrase.--Music as an Expounder of Hidden
Meanings.--The Horn Music.--The Signal.--The Love
Duet.--Dramatic Feeling Supplied by Music.--King
Marke.--Philosophy of the Drama.--Musical Mood
Pictures.--A Dying Man: an Empty Sea.--Tristan's
Longing and Death.--Swan Song of Isolde.--Passions
Purified by Music.--Mediæval Love.--Effect of Wagner's
Variations on the Morals of the Poem.--Excision
of the Second Iseult.--The Philter not a Love-potion.--Wagner's
Pure Humanity Freed from the Bonds of
Conventionality Pages 37-71
CHAPTER III.
"DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG."
Story of the Drama.--A Comedy Faithful to Classical
Conceptions.--_Ridendo Castigat Mores._--Its Specific Purpose
is to Celebrate the Triumph of Natural Poetic
Impulse, Stimulated by Communion with Nature, over
Pedantic Formalism.--Romanticism _versus_ Classicism.--A
Contest which Stimulates Growth.--Walther as
the Representative of Romantic Utterance.--Pedantry
Pictured in the Master-singers and Caricatured in
Beckmesser.--Sachs, the Real Hero of the Play.--An Intermediary
and Champion of Both Parties.--Form must
Adapt Itself to Spirit.--The Proposition Proved by the
Music of Sachs' First Monologue.--The Symbolism of
a Phrase Investigated.--Corrective Purpose of the Play
as it is Disclosed by the Prelude.--Sachs as a Philosopher.--The
Introduction to Act III. Expounded.--Photographic
Pictures of Nuremberg Life.--Relics of
the Master-singers.--A Master-song by the Veritable
Sachs Pages 72-111
CHAPTER IV.
"DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN."
Beautiful and Enduring Legends are Universal Property.--Parallels
Between the Elements and Apparatus of
Mythological Tales.--The Grotto of Venus, the Garden
of Delight, Avalon, Ogygia, the Delightful Island.--Pope
Urban's Staff, the Lances of Charlemagne, Joseph's
Staff, and Aaron's Rod.--The _Tarnhelm_, the
Mask of Arthur, Helmet of Pluto.--The Holy Grail, the
Horn of Bran; Huon's Goblet, the Horn of Amalthea.--Invulnerability
of Achilles, Jason, and Siegfried.--The
Sword of Wotan, Arthur's Sword, Ulysses's Bow.--Siegfried's
Prototypes in Egypt, Greece, and Scandinavia.--Von
Hahn's _Arische Aussetzung und Rückkehr Formel_.--The
Celestial Plot in the Tragedy.--Wotan its Hero.--A
Contest Between Greed of Gain and Temporal
Power and Love.--Effect of the Curse.--Wotan's Vain
Plot.--The Force of Law.--Brünnhilde becomes the
Agent of Redemption by Becoming Simple, Loving
Woman.--The Progress of the Plot is from a State of
Sinlessness through Sin and its Awful Consequences to
Expiation.--Symbols for These Steps in "Das Rheingold."--The
Golden Age and the Instrumental Introduction.--Elemental
Music.--Erda and the Götterdämmerung.--Greek
and Teuton.--The Tragic Nature of the
Northern Mythological System.--Wotan's Effort to
Escape the Penalty of Violated Law.--A Plan Doomed
to Failure from the Start.--Wagner's Mood Pictures.--How
Nature Reflects the Discord Created by the God's
Wrong Doing.--Contrasted Pictures in Two Preludes
and First Scenes: the Peacefulness of the Golden Age,
the Storm which Buffets Siegmund.--Entrance of the
Sinister Element with Alberich and Hunding.--Agents
Created to Carry on the Contest: the Beloved Progeny
of the God, the Loveless Offspring of the Niblung.--Wotan's
Tragic Grandeur in the Moment of Despair.--Brünnhilde
the Embodiment of Wotan's Will.--The
God Destroys his Agents, but Unconscious Love Carries
on the Plot.--Siegfried.--The Forest Lad Achieves
Heroic Stature.--He Discloses that he is a Free Agent
by Shattering the Visible Symbol of the God's Power.--Wotan
Disappears for the Action and Awaits the End of
his Race.--The Miraculous in Wagner's Musical System.--The
Drink of Forgetfulness.--Brünnhilde Prizes Love
More than the Welfare of the Gods.--Outraged Love
Avenged.--The Catastrophe.--The Death March a
Hymn of Praise.--The Musical Symbol of the Ethical
Principle of the Tragedy Pages 112-161
CHAPTER V.
"PARSIFAL."
Wagner's Last Drama.--Paradoxical in its Appeals to the
Spectator and Student.--A Religious Play.--Blending
of Buddhistic and Christian Plots.--Socialistic Philosophy
and Asceticism.--Identification of Parsifal and
Christ.--Monkish Relic Worship.--Ethical Idea of the
Drama.--The Apparatus, the Hero, the Trial.--Mission
of the Music.--It must Reconcile Modern Thought and
Feeling and Mediæval Religion.--Imagination and
Fancy.--Suffering and Aspiration.--Original Elements
of the Grail Story.--Parsifal an Aryan Hero.--His Name
as an Index of Moral Character.--"The Great Fool
Tales."--The Holy Grail not Originally a Christian
Symbol.--Percival and Peredur.--Parsifal in Wagner's
Drama.--His Musical Symbols.--Properties of the Talisman:
Physical, it Provides Sustenance; Spiritual, it
is a Touchstone and Oracle.--Its Prototypes in Many
Lands.--The Golden Cup of Jamshid and the Joseph
of Arimathea Legend.--The Grail and Coral.--Dr. Oppert's
Theory.--Blood the Essential Element.--The
Prelude.--Amfortas.--Question and Lance.--Herzeleide.--Musical
Symbols of Suffering and Aspiration.--Wagner's
Interpretation.--Tried by Temptation.--Klingsor.--Kundry.--The
Loathly Damsel and Herodias.--Wolfram's
Married Parzival Pages 162-198
THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA.
CHAPTER I.
THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA: ITS PROTOTYPES AND ELEMENTS.
To understand the real position which Richard Wagner occupies in the
world of art, and to appreciate the significance of the achievements
which have kept that world in a turmoil for two generations, it is
necessary to guard against a very prevalent misconception touching him
and his activities. The world knows him as an agitator and reformer,
but it does not know as clearly as it ought that the object for which
he labored as controversialist and composer was a reform of the opera,
not a reform of music in general. Outside the theatre, it is true,
he exerted a tremendous influence on the development of the musical
art, but that influence he exerted only because he was a gifted
musician who stood in the line of succession with the great ones who
had widened the boundaries of music and struck out new paths for
it--let me say Bach, Haydn, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann.
As a legitimate successor of these Kings by the grace of Genius, he
advanced the musical art indeed, but as a reformer his activities went,
not to music in its absolute forms, but to an entirely distinct and
complex art-form: the modern opera. The term which Wagner invented to
describe what he wished to see as the outcome of his strivings--the
term which his enemies parodied so successfully that the parody has
clung to the popular tongue and lingered in the popular ear, in spite
of all explanation--is "The Art-work of the Future." By this "Art-work"
he meant a form of theatrical entertainment in which poetry, music,
pantomime, painting, and the plastic arts were to co-operate on a
basis of mutual dependence--or better, perhaps, interdependence--and
common aim, the inspiring purpose of all being dramatic expression.
In the history of music and the drama certain strongly-marked phases
are found, in which the interdependence of the elements which Wagner
consorts in his Art-work can be traced; and if we look at these phases
a little thoughtfully, they may help us to understand the present
phase, and we may learn not only how to appreciate what Wagner has
done, but also how to avoid the misconceptions which so frequently
stand in the way of appreciation.
I.
Wagner, then, was a Reformer of the Opera; or, as I think it would
better be put, a Regenerator of the Lyric Drama. The latter definition
is to be preferred, because it presupposes the earlier existence of
an art-form similar in purpose and elements (however dissimilar in
scope and effectiveness it may have been) to that with which Wagner's
name is identified in music's history. The spirit which created that
art-form is as old as humanity; but the record of civilization shows
two manifestations of it so striking that even the most cursory study
ought to disclose Wagner's relationship to them. The Greek stage-plays
were much more closely allied to the modern opera than to the modern
drama. Music was an integral and essential element of them. So says
Aristotle, adding, "and their greatest embellishment." The dramatic
and lyrical elements were inseparable in Greek tragedy, which had its
origin in the Dithyramb, a dance-song. The one modified the other. The
cheer, the gravity, or the horror of the action were reflected at the
same time in the music. While there was music also in comedy, yet, as
Aristotle indicates, it was there of less importance, probably because
comedy--which was really broad enough to meet the modern notions of
farce--was beneath the true level of music as apprehended by the
Greeks. As between the lyre and flute, the Greeks gave a vastly greater
admiration to the former, as is indicated by a proverb quoted by
Cicero: "As they say among the Greeks, they are flautists who cannot
be citharists;" and it is significant that stringed accompaniments
were given to the dithyrambic chorus when its purposes were serious,
and accompaniments on the _aulos_ when those purposes were of lighter
character. Obviously the writers of Greek tragedy were of necessity
versed in the musical art of their time. Æschylus was not merely a
poet; he was also a musical composer. A fragment of a theoretical book
on rhythm by Aristoxenus, a fellow-pupil with Alexander the Great of
Aristotle, has been preserved to us. It is filled with lamentations
over the decadence of dramatic music since the good old days of
Æschylus, and accuses contemporary composers of pandering to the
depraved tastes of the public, and disregarding the noble art of the
Æschylean period. We know that Sophocles was a practical musician.
He was taught both music and dancing by Lampros (or Lamprocles) the
dithyrambist, in his time the foremost professor of these arts in
Athens. It is on record that he played in two of his own dramas, taking
the character of Nausikaa in the "Pluntriæ," and, in "Thamyris," that
of a singer stricken blind by the Muses. In this latter role he so
pleased the popular fancy that, by public vote, a portrait of him,
with a cithara in his hands, was placed in the Painted Porch--a fact
which finds mention in Athenæus. Another indication of his proficiency
as a musician is that he wrote pæans and elegies, and a work in prose
for the instruction of choral artists. It is written that Euripides,
obviously less musician than poet, had to call in the aid of a composer
to supply the essential music for one of his plays. Possibly this
explains the fact that in his tragedies the odes are less intimately
connected with the play than they are in the tragedies of Æschylus.
They no longer form part of the action, and their beauty consists in
their skilfulness of form rather than in the natural union of rhythm
and music.
In the Greek tragedies the actors did not declaim their lines as ours
do; they chanted them. The word which they used to describe what we
call dramatic declamation was _emmeleia_, from _en_ and _melos_, whence
we get our word melody; so that they literally spoke of their plays
as being spoken "in tune." Even the Attic orators, as well as the
later Roman, delivered their orations musically, and, like the actors,
sometimes had the help of an accompaniment on the lyre or flute to
keep them in pitch. Cicero and Plutarch both relate an anecdote to
the effect that Caius Gracchus once lost his pitch in the heat of an
oration, and was brought back to it by a slave with an instrument, who
was concealed behind him for that very purpose. In the plays the chorus
sang the odes which filled the pauses between the various stages of
the action; and as they sang they kept time with solemn dance-steps,
moving from side to side and around an altar which stood in the centre
of the space between the audience and the stage, called then, as now,
the orchestra.[A] The choric odes were sung in unison, but, more
richly than the declamation of the actors, they were accompanied by
instruments which I believe we are justified in assuming (though it is
a debated point) supplied a foundation of harmony for the vocal melody.
Unfortunately, none of the music composed for these tragedies has been
preserved; but we are surely justified in believing that, in spite of
its simplicity (for simple it had to be to meet the demands of Greek
philosophy), it was beautiful, impressive, and, in the highest degree,
expressive music. No people have ever come nearer than those old Greeks
to a correct estimate of the real nature of music and the role that it
can and ought to be made to play in the economy of civilized life. So
convinced were they of the directness and forcefulness of its appeal to
the emotional part of man that they refused to divorce it from poetry,
and hedged its practice about with legal restrictions, fearful that a
too one-sided cultivation of it in its absolute state would tend to
the development of the emotions at a cost of the rational and sterner
elements on which the welfare of the individual and the community
depended. Theirs was surely a lofty ideal: an art which charmed the
senses while it persuaded the reason was a noble art. But it died with
much else that was noble and lovely when the Romans succeeded the
Greeks as arbiters of the civilized world. Under the Romans the lyric
drama degenerated into mere spectacular mummery.
II.
Thus much for the first manifestation of the spirit which is
exemplified in the Art-work of Richard Wagner. I have laid stress upon
the Greek tragedy simply because it was the direct inspiration of the
second manifestation, out of which the Art-work which Wagner reformed
was evolved, through steps that are easily followed by students of
modern musical history. Wherever we turn we find the genesis of
the drama to be the same. I might have chosen the Hindu drama as a
starting-point, and found in it the same intimate association of
poetry, music, and action that characterized Greek tragedy. Or I might
have pointed to the Chinese drama, and invited you to a study of that
association as it has existed for thousands of years, and still exists
in the theatres of the Great Pure Kingdom.
Now for the second manifestation. Towards the close of the sixteenth
century dissatisfaction with the inelastic artificiality of polite
music took possession of a body of scholars and musical amateurs who
were in the habit of meeting for learned discussion in the house of
Giovanni Bardi, Count Vernio, in Florence. Their discussions led them
to formulate two aims: _First_, To give emotional expressiveness
to music by putting aside polyphony, and inventing what is called
the monodic style. They wrote solos for the voice with harmonic
support for the instruments in the shape of chords. _Second_, They
tried to revive the Greek tragedies, or, rather, to imitate them in
new compositions, to which they applied their monodic music. They
conceived the purpose of music to be to heighten the expressiveness
of poetry, and held the play to be "the thing." To "Euridice," the
first drama of the new style which was published, the composer of the
music, Jacopo Peri, wrote a preface, in which he said that he had
been convinced by a study of the ancients that though their dramatic
declamation may not have risen to song, it was yet musically colored.
This exaltation of speech he evidently thought had its basis in those
variations of pitch, dynamic intensity, and vocal quality which
Herbert Spencer, in his essay on the "Origin and Function of Music,"
shows to be the physiological results of variations of feeling, all
feelings being muscular stimuli. Peri made careful observations of the
inflections which mark ordinary speech, and attempted to reproduce his
discoveries as faithfully as possible in the musical investiture which
he gave to the poet's lines. "Soft and gentle speech he interpreted
by half-spoken, half-sung tones, on a sustained instrumental bass;
feelings of a deeper, emotional kind by a melody with greater intervals
and a lively _tempo_, the accompanying instrumental harmonies changing
more frequently."[B] He bestowed the greatest care on the rhythm of
the music, making it flow along with the rhythm of the words.
These men were as revolutionary in their day as Wagner in ours, many
times as intolerant, and, some will say, perhaps equally visionary.
They revamped the Hellenic myths concerning the power of music, not
as containing a germ of verity wrapped in an ample cloak of poetical
symbolism, but as very truth. What the ancient art had been they did
not know, but they did not hesitate to say that compared with it the
music of their own time (the time of Palestrina and the Netherland
School) was a barbarism, the creation of a people whose natural
rudeness was evidenced even in their uncouth names--Okeghem, Hobrecht,
etc. They could not reconcile counterpoint with the theories touching
the province of music laid down by Plato; and that fact sufficed to
condemn it. Count Vernio himself published a tract stating the purposes
of the reformers. The first step in the process of curing the evil
which had come over music, he said, should be to protect the poetical
text from the musicians who, to exploit their inventions, tore the
poetry to tatters, giving different voices different words to sing
simultaneously. The philosophers of old--Plato in particular--had said
that the melody should follow the verses of the poet and sweeten them.
"When you compose, therefore," said the noble amateur, "have a care
that the text remain uninjured, the words be kept intelligible, and do
not permit yourselves to be carried off your feet by counterpoint,
that wicked swimmer, who is swept along unresistingly by the stream,
and arrives at an entirely different landing-place than he intended
to make. For, as much as the soul is nobler than the body, so much
nobler are words than counterpoint; and as the soul must govern the
body, so counterpoint must take its laws from poetry." Caccini, who
was a famous singing-master, and the first professional musician to
join the Florentine coterie, made many statements in the preface to
his _Nuove Musiche_ which Gluck and Wagner only echoed when they
came to urge their reforms. Thus he recommends the choice of a pitch
which will enable the singer always to use his natural voice, so that
expression may be unconstrained. He advises that the singer emancipate
himself from a too strict adherence to measure, fixing, instead, the
relative value of notes by consideration for the words to which they
are set. More striking than either of these utterances, however, is his
condemnation of the _roulades_ which had come into use even before the
solo style had been invented. He calls these _roulades_ "Long flights"
(flourishes or whirlings) of the voice (_lunghi giri di voce_); and
says of them, literally: "They were not invented as being necessary
to good singing, but, as I believe, to provide a certain titillation
of the ears for the benefit of such as have little knowledge of what
expressive singing means; for if they understood this, they would
unquestionably detest these passages, since nothing is so offensive
as they to expressive singing. And it is for this reason that I have
said the _lunghi giri di voce_ are so ill applied. I introduce them in
songs which are less passionate, and, indeed, on long, not on short
syllables, and in closing cadences." Caccini further advises the
avoidance of artificial tones, and the use of the natural voice in
order that the feelings may have expression. Wagner urges his singers
to leave off the affected pathos which they are so prone to assume with
the song-voice, and to enunciate, breathe, and phrase as naturally
and unconstrainedly as they would if they were speaking the dialogue
instead of singing it. Caccini wished the singer to emancipate himself
from the fetters of musical metre, and to consult the rhythm of the
words. In Wagner's vocal parts the aim is to achieve through music an
increased expressiveness for the poetry, and to this end he raises it
to a kind of intensified speech, which retains as much as possible
of the distinctness of ordinary dialogue with its emotional capacity
raised to a higher power. He desires that the melody shall spring
naturally from the poetry, but also that the poetry shall "yearn" for
musical expression. Caccini recognized the beauty of embellished song,
but restricted the introduction of vocal flourishes to songs which were
wanting in expressiveness--in other words, to songs intended merely
to charm the ear. Wagner (and here I should like to correct an almost
universal misconception)--Wagner never condemned beautiful singing,
even in the Italian sense, except where it stands in the way of
truthful, dramatic utterance. But he raises the question of nationality
and tongue as one which must first of all be considered in determining
how poetry is to be set to music. Deference must be paid to the
genius of the language employed, and also to the vocal peculiarities
of the people who are to perform and enjoy the drama. This is really
Wagner's starting-point. He aims to be a national dramatist. In the
Italian opera the vocal adornments, favored by the inherent softness
and beauty of the Italian language, gradually usurped the first place,
while dramatic motive, which had inspired the invention of the opera,
dropped out of sight. For such an art there is little natural aptitude
in the German, and consequently only a modicum of sympathy. Sung to
florid tunes, German words become worse than unintelligible; the poetry
loses its merit as speech, and the music is robbed of all its purpose
and most of its charm. Believing this, and having already striven to
restore naturalness of expression in the spoken drama, Wagner wrote the
vocal parts of his lyric dramas so as to bring out first the force of
the poetry as such.
There is one more point of resemblance between Wagner and the creators
of the Italian lyric drama which I must refer to briefly. It may help
us out from the sway of that prejudice which we are so prone to feel
towards an innovator, to learn that in so many essentials Wagner has
simply given new expression to old ideas. Already, in his "Euridice,"
Peri concealed his orchestra behind the scenes; but as this device
was borrowed from the old Roman pantomimes, and was a general custom,
I lay no stress upon it. Monteverde, who did not belong to the band
of Florentine reformers, but adopted their theories and put them
into practice with far greater skill than any of the originators
of the new style, added to the instrumental apparatus until he had
a reputation for noise with which that of Wagner, in this respect,
is no circumstance. In his "Orfeo" he employed thirty-six different
instruments, and it has even been suspected that he was the precursor
of Wagner in the device of characterizing his personages by relegating
to each a certain instrument or set of instruments. But this, I am
convinced, is based on a misunderstanding. It is certain, however, that
he used his instruments in such a way as to emphasize climaxes, holding
some of them back until the arrival of moments in the action when their
sudden entrance would have a particularly telling effect.
III.
Where does Wagner touch hands with the first creators of the art-form
of which I have called him the regenerator? What are the fundamental
features of his system? What were the impulses which led him out of the
beaten path of opera composers? I will try to answer these questions
on broad lines, keeping essential principles in view rather than
trifling details.
Wagner must be associated with the Greek tragedy-writers: _First_ (and
foremost), because he is poet as well as musical composer. He unites in
himself the same qualifications (but with the tremendous difference in
degree brought about by the changed conditions) as did Æschylus.
_Second._ Wagner sees in the drama the highest form of art--one that
unites in itself the expressive potentiality of each of the elements
employed in it, raised to a still higher potency through the merit of
their co-operation.
_Third._ Wagner believes, like the Greek tragedians, that the fittest
subjects for dramatic treatment are to be found in legends and
mythologies.
_Fourth._ Wagner believes that the elements of the lyric drama ought to
be adapted to the peculiarities, and to encourage the national feeling
of the people for whom it is created.
This last point is of such vast significance to the question of the
degree of appreciation which Wagner's art ought to receive, and also
to an understanding of his attitude towards Italian music, that I wish
to emphasize it before proceeding further. Wagner is as distinctively
a German dramatist as Æschylus was a Greek or Shakespeare an English.
In his poetry, in his music, in the moral and physical character of his
dramatic personages--in brief, in the matter and the essence of his
dramas--the world must recognize the Teuton. As their spirit roots in
the German heart, so their form roots in the German language. One of
Wagner's most persistent aims was to reanimate a national art-spirit in
Germany. The rest of the world he omitted from his consideration. Those
of his dramas in which he carried out his principles in their fulness
are scarcely conceivable in any other language than the German, and
complete or ideal appreciation of them is possible only to persons who
sympathize deeply with German feelings. His whole system, of dramatic
declamation rests on the genius of the German tongue. He protests
against the attempt to use the _bel canto_ of the Italians in German
opera, because the German language is too harsh for florid music, and
German throats are not flexible enough to execute agile and mellifluous
melodies. In the structure of his system there is everywhere
discernible a recognition of the characteristics, physiological as
well as psychological, which have always marked Teutonic races. Look
at Wagner in the conduct of his polemical battle; in the vehemence
of his sincerity, and the rude, sledge-hammer vigor of his manner,
he is as distinctively a national type as Luther. Aside from all
other considerations, such a man cannot conceive music to be mere
"lascivious pleasings." To the Northern mind there has always seemed to
be something vicious in the influence of Southern art and manners. It
seems to feel instinctively that its vigor is preserved by periodical
rebellion against Roman things, and it points as a reason and a warning
example to the physical and moral degeneracy of those Goths and Franks
who lost their rugged virtues by too long dalliance with the Roman
colonists. "Strength before Beauty," "Truth before Convention"--these
are German ideals in art as well as in morals.[C]
It is only to recognize a truth, which Wagner himself freely confessed,
to say that arts and manners based on such ideals do not always appear
pleasing--that, in fact, they sometimes, at first blush, at least,
appear uncouth and unamiable. But that fact need not long give us
pause. We have simply to recognize that beauty, like everything else
so far as we are concerned, is subject to change, and that a new order
of beauty, which may be called characteristic beauty, has come to
the fore with a claim for recognition as a fit element in dramatic
representation. Are we bound to accept as infallible the popular maxim
that no matter what the state of affairs on the stage, the accompanying
music must delight the ear? Suppose that a composer, utilizing the ear
simply as one of the gate-ways to the higher faculties, and aiming to
quicken the imagination and stir the emotions, should find a means
for doing this without pleasing the ear--would his art be bad for
that reason? Was the agony on the faces of the Laocoön put there by
the sculptor for the purpose of pleasing the eye? Does it please the
eye, or does it fascinate with a horrible fascination, and achieve the
artist's real purpose by appealing through the eye to the imagination
and emotions?
These questions are in the nature of argument and foreign to my
immediate purpose; in the way of contrast, however, the thoughts
to which they give rise will help us to appreciate one phase of
the Teutonism which Wagner has impressed upon his dramas which is
altogether lovely. We will look at it in both of its expositions,
musical and literary, for thus we shall learn something of his
constructive methods as well as his poetical impulses. I refer to
the ethical idea pervading those of his dramas which, like the Greek
tragedies, are based on legendary or mythical tales. The idea is that
_salvation comes to humanity through the self-sacrificing love of
woman_. This idea is at the bottom of the great poems and dramas of
Germany; it is the main-spring of "The Flying Dutchman," "Tannhäuser,"
and "The Niblung's Ring;" the _chorus mysticus_ which ends Goethe's
"Faust" proclaims it oracularly:
"All things transitory
But as symbols are sent.
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to event.
The Indescribable,
Here it is done.
The Woman-Soul leadeth us
Upward and on!"
In the creations of Wagner, by a singular coincidence, this beautiful
idea is born simultaneously with the fundamental principle of his
constructive scheme--the use of melodic phrases as symbols of the
persons, passions, and principles concerned in the play. His first
drama based on a legendary story is "The Flying Dutchman." The infinite
longing for rest of the Wandering Jew of the sea, and the infinite pity
and wondrous love of the woman who, through sacrifice of her own life,
achieved for the wanderer surcease of suffering--these are the two
fundamental passions of the play. The legend of the Dutchman and his
doom is told in a ballad which the heroine sings in the second act of
the opera; and this ballad, Wagner tells us himself, he set to music
first, even before he had completed the book. It is an epitome of the
drama, ethically and musically, having two significant musical themes
corresponding to the longing of the Dutchman and the redeeming love of
Senta. The first of these musical themes is this:
[Illustration: score]
The second is this:
[Illustration: score]
Having invented these two phrases for use simply in the ballad, Wagner
tells us how he proceeded with his work:
"I had merely to develop according to their respective tendencies the
various thematic germs comprised in the ballad to have, as a matter
of course, the principal mental moods in definite thematic shapes
before me. When a mental mood returned, its thematic expression
also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been
arbitrary and capricious to have sought another _motivo_ so long as
the object was an intelligible representation of the subject, and not
a conglomeration of operatic pieces." This is Wagner's account of the
genesis of the "leading motives," or, as I think they would better be
called, "typical phrases," and it directs attention to a misconception
of their nature and purpose which is pretty general even among the
admirers of his works. They were not invented to announce the entrance
of persons of the play on their stage; their duties are not those of
footmen or ushers. Nor are they labels. Neither can they rightly be
likened, as a German critic has declared, to the lettered ribbons
issuing from the mouths of figures in mediæval pictures. They stand
for deeper things--for the attributes of the play's personages; for
the instruments, spiritual as well as material, used in developing the
plot; for the fundamental passions of the story. If they were labels,
they could only accompany the characters with which they had been
associated at the outset, and this we know is not the case; in fact, in
some very significant instances, they enter the score long before the
characters with whom they are associated have been heard of or their
existence is surmised. They are symbols, and hence arbitrary signs, but
not more arbitrary than words. All language is arbitrary convention.
Only the emotional elements at the bottom of it are real, absolute,
universal. It would be just as easy to build up a language of musical
tones capable of expressing ideas as it was to build up a language of
words. In fact, though we seldom think of it, the rudiments of such a
language exist. We are all familiar with some of them, or we should
not involuntarily associate certain rhythms with the dance, and others
with the march. A drone-bass under an oboe melody in 6-8 time would not
suggest a pastoral; trumpets and drums, war; French-horn harmonies, a
hunting scene; and so on. More than this, the Chinese have retained in
their language a relic of the time when music was an integral element
of all speech, not only of solemn and artistic speech, as we see it in
the beginnings of the drama in India, Greece, and China. The meaning
of many words in the monosyllabic Chinese language depends upon the
musical inflection given to them in utterance. In a sense, a phrase
of melody, or a chord, or a succession of chords, of harmony, is a
"bow-wow word," the only kind of word universally intelligible. A great
deal of music is direct in its influence upon the emotions, but it is
chiefly by association of ideas that we recognize its expressiveness
or significance. Sometimes hearing a melody or harmony arouses an
emotion like that aroused by the contemplation of a thing. Minor
harmonies, slow movements, dark tonal colorings, combine directly to
put a musically susceptible person in a mood congenial to thoughts
of sorrow and death; and, inversely, the experience of sorrow, or
the contemplation of death, creates affinity for minor harmonies,
slow movements, and dark tonal colorings. Or we recognize attributes
in music possessed also by things, and we consort the music and the
things, external attributes bringing descriptive music into play which
excites the fancy, internal attributes calling for an exercise of the
loftier faculty, imagination, to discern their meaning. A few examples
in both classes will help to make my meaning plain, and I begin with
the second class as the nobler of the two.
In Wagner's Niblung tragedy two of the musical phrases associated
with Wotan may be taken as symbols of contrasted attributes of the
god. Throughout the tragedy of which he is the hero, Wotan figures,
by virtue of his supremacy among the gods, as Lord of Valhalla, and
consequently as the manifest embodiment of law.
In music the first manifestation of law is in form.
It is impossible to conceive of a combination of the integral
elements of music--rhythm, melody, and harmony--in a beautiful manner
without some kind of form. Form means measure, order, symmetry. In
music more than in any art it is essential to the existence of the
loftiest attribute of beauty, which is repose--an attribute whose
divine character Ruskin proclaimed when he defined it as "the 'I am'
contradistinguished from the 'I become;' the sign alike of the supreme
knowledge which is incapable of surprise, the supreme power which is
incapable of labor, the supreme volition which is incapable of change."
Now what are the musical qualities of which Wagner makes use in order
to symbolize the wielder of supreme power? Here is the phrase whose
innate nobility and beauty appear to best advantage at the opening of
the second scene in "Das Rheingold:"
[Illustration: score]
The melody is built out of the intervals of the common chord--the
triad--the starting-point of harmony, its first and most pervasive law.
This chord, too, supplies the harmonic structure. Its instrumentation
(for four tubas with peculiarly orotund voices, specially constructed
for Wagner) is unvarying, calm, stately, majestic, dignified,
reposeful. Thus does Wagner symbolize musically the chief deity and
chief personage of his tragedy in his character as Lord of Valhalla.
But through the operation of the curse to which he became subject when
he took the baneful ring, another character than that of a supreme god
is forced upon Wotan. He has plotted to regain the ring, and restore it
to the original owners of the magic gold. He has begotten a new race,
the Volsungs, to execute a purpose which, as the representative of law,
he is restrained himself from executing. He becomes a wanderer over the
face of the earth, a mere spectator of the development of his foolish
plot. How is this new character symbolized? Note the music which
accompanies Wotan when, disguised as the Wanderer, he enters Mime's
cavern smithy in the second scene of "Siegfried:"
[Illustration: score]
The fundamental harmonies are retained. The solemn instrumental color
is held fast. The dignity of the chord progressions is still there.
What, then, is gone? _The element of repose._ The harmonies are still
triads, but tonality, with its benison of restfulness, has been
sacrificed. The phrase is in no key, or rather it is in as many keys
as there are chords. There is another beautiful instance in which, by
the same means, a deprivation which one of the personages of the play
undergoes is made plain to the listener. Note the descending series of
chords which follows Wotan's kiss depriving Brünnhilde of her divinity,
just after he has spoken his pathetic farewell, and just before the
orchestra begins its lullaby, in the final scene of "Die Walküre." Here
the loss of divine attributes in the disobedient goddess is published
by absence of fixed tonality in the chords which accompany the visible
signs of her punishment.
In the last two examples we have been called on to observe how changes
in character and loss of attributes are delineated by departure of
tonality. I will now cite a case in which not the attributes of a
personage, but the property of a thing, is the composer's objective
point. The case is a striking one, for it is a supernatural property
which is to be brought to the notice of the listener, the power of the
_Tarnhelm_ (the familiar cap of darkness of folk-lore) to render its
wearer invisible. The musical symbol of this magical apparatus in the
Niblung tragedy is this:
[Illustration: score]
This phrase is not often used, but whenever it occurs in the music
its mysteriousness arrests attention. What is the source of that
mysteriousness? Nothing else than indefiniteness, vagueness of mode.
The closing harmony is an empty fifth; we do not know whether it is
major or minor, because the determining interval is lacking. Supply a
major third and it is major, a minor third and it is minor; in either
case, however, the mystical property of the phrase, the element which
establishes its propriety, vanishes.
There are many of these typical phrases primarily associated with
personages, whose delineation goes to moods and moral traits. There
are others that are frankly delineative of externals. The giants
in "Das Rheingold" are the representatives of brute force. They
are heavy-witted as well as heavy-footed, and their stupidity and
clumsiness are aptly characterized in their melody:
[Illustration: score (_Fasolt and Fafner, of gigantic stature, armed
with strong staves, enter._)]
The Niblungs are the antipodes in character of the giants--cunning,
resourceful, industrious. Intellectually they are schemers and
tricksters; by occupation they are smiths. Wagner delineates these
activities, the mental as well as the manual, in the orchestral
introduction to "Siegfried." A descending figure (_a_), (two thirds at
the interval of a seventh) characterizes the brooding thoughtfulness,
the cogitation of Mime; the fact that the dwarf is a Niblung Wagner
publishes by means of a rhythmical phrase like the pounding of hammers
(_b_):
[Illustration: score (_a_)]
[Illustration: score (_b_)]
Sometimes Wagner becomes frankly delineative or descriptive, utilizing
imitation of nature where it will be effective, as in the phrases
associated with the Rhine and its denizens--the nixies whom he calls
Daughters of the Rhine. The slow undulation of water in its depths, the
flux and reflux of the element, the ripples on its surface, the motions
of the swimmers, are all pictured to the ear (if I may be permitted
to say so) in the melodies of the Rhine and the nixies whose home the
river is, and the changes of time and treatment to which those melodies
are subjected. The fitful, flickering, crackling crepitation of fire
furnishes a suggestion for the phrase which is typical of Loge, the
fire-god, whether he appears in his elemental form, as in the finale of
"Die Walküre," or bodily as the incarnation of the spirit of mischief
in "Das Rheingold:"
[Illustration: score]
In describing how he proceeded in the composition of "The Flying
Dutchman," Wagner says that when a mental mood recurred for which he
had once found thematic expression, that expression was repeated. He
speaks here only of moods, but he extended the principle involved to
the whole apparatus of the drama--its secret impulses as well as its
external agencies. These agencies, in their physical manifestation,
moreover, are sometimes anticipated by the appearance in the music
of the melodic phrases which typify them; but this never happens
unless they are spiritually present in the drama. This is what I have
called the use of the themes for prophecy, and to me it seems one of
the most beautiful features of Wagner's constructive scheme. Let me
illustrate: the sword, which is the instrument designed by Wotan for
the working-out of his plot for the return of the baneful ring to its
original owners, for itself and as a symbol of the race of demi-gods
who were to be endowed with it; Siegfried, the hero who is to be the
vessel chosen, not by Wotan but by fate in the prevision of Brünnhilde,
to execute the purposes of the god; Brünnhilde herself, not as a
goddess but in the character of loving woman willing and able to make
the redeeming sacrifice; all these are prefigured in the drama by the
entrance of their typical phrases long before the action permits their
physical appearance. They are seen by the prophetic vision of certain
personages of the play and manifested to us through the music. Thus:
the sword phrase appears in the orchestral postlude of "Das Rheingold"
at the moment when Wotan, crossing the Rainbow-bridge with the members
of his divine household, stops in thought and conceives the plot which
is worked out in the tragedy proper; the phrase typical of the heroic
character of Siegfried accompanies Brünnhilde's prediction to Sieglinde
that she shall give birth to "the loftiest hero in the world," in the
drama "Die Walküre;" in giving voice to her gratitude, Sieglinde, in
turn, hails Brünnhilde as the representative of the redeeming principle
of the tragedy, Goethe's "Ewig-Weibliche," by using a melody which
examination shows to be an augmentation of the melodic symbol of
Brünnhilde when she appears as mere woman in the last drama of the
trilogy.
Let this suffice as an exhibition of Wagner's method of inventing and
introducing the melodic material out of which he weaves his fabric,
while we look at some of the principles applied in its use. His system
rests upon the development of these themes, not according to the laws
of the symphony, but in harmony with the dramatic spirit of the text.
The orchestra is the vehicle of this development. It is pre-eminently
the expositor of the drama. It has acquired some of the functions of
the Greek chorus, in that it takes part in the action to publish that
which is beyond the capacity of the personages alone to utter. The
music of the instruments is the voice of the fate, the conscience,
and the will concerned in the drama. To those who wish to listen,
it unfolds, unerringly, the thoughts, motives, and purpose of the
personages, and lays bare the mysteries of the plot and counter-plot.
As the passions and purposes of the drama grow complex, the musical
texture, into which the themes which typify those passions and purposes
enter, grows complex and heterogeneous. The most obvious factors in
this development are changes of mode, harmony, rhythm, time, and
orchestration. A single illustration must here suffice. By applying the
principle of augmentation to a phrase, in the three phases of melodic,
harmonic, and instrumental structure, Wagner illustrates the tragic
growth of Siegfried in the Niblung tragedy. When the hero is merely
a high-spirited lad, roaming through the forest and associating with
its denizens, the phrase appears as the call which he blows upon his
hunting-horn:
[Illustration: score]
When he has entered upon man's estate, has awakened Brünnhilde from her
long sleep, learned wisdom from her teaching, donned her armor, and is
about to set out in quest of adventure, the typical phrase which greets
him has taken on this form:
[Illustration: score]
Finally, the phrase is metamorphosed into that thrilling pæan at the
climax of the Death March, to indicate which is impossible by means of
pianoforte transcription:
[Illustration: score]
IV.
From the beginning of his career Wagner wrote his own librettos; but
it is only in "Tristan und Isolde," "Die Meistersinger," "Der Ring des
Nibelungen," and "Parsifal" that he realized his conception of what
the poet-composer should be. The starting-point of his reformatory
ideas was that music had usurped a place which does not belong to it
in the lyric drama. It should be a means, and had become the aim. As
an æsthetic principle, he contended that it lies in the nature of
music to be not the end, but a medium, of dramatic expression. He
therefore reversed the old relations of librettist and composer,
and made music, which can only address itself to the emotions and
imagination, dependent for form, spirit, and character on the poetry,
which appeals to reason. Each art when isolated has a restricted range
of expression; but in the Wagnerian drama each contributes a complement
and helps it to convey all its meanings and intentions without the help
of a frequently untrustworthy imagination. In elaborating his theory,
Wagner held that as a poetical form of expression rhyme is useless in
music, because it not only implies identity of vowel-sounds, but also
of the succeeding consonants, which are lost by the singer's need of
dwelling on the vowels. The initial consonant, however, cannot be lost
in song, because it is that which stamps its physiognomy on the word,
and repetition creating a sort of musical cadence which is agreeable to
the ear, Wagner desired alliteration to be substituted for rhyme in the
chief parts of his verse. From the verse-melody thus obtained he wished
the musical melody to spring, words and music becoming lovingly merged
in each other, each sacrificing enough of selfishness to make the union
possible. To what I have already said about the nature of the typical
phrases I wish to add this as a résumé of their purpose: In every drama
there are employed certain dramatic and ethical principles as well as
agencies. The development of these principles in the conduct and words
of the personages, the employment of the agencies, give us the action
and significance of the play. For these principles and agents Wagner
provides musical symbols. The nature of the principles, the character
of the agents, explain the form and spirit of the symbols; the symbols,
in turn, sometimes help us to understand the real nature of the things
symbolized. If we have grasped the fundamental ideas of a drama,
therefore, and appreciated the fitness of their symbols, we shall have
penetrated near to the heart of the Art-work. But it cannot be too
forcibly urged that if we confine our study of Wagner to the forms and
names of the phrases out of which he constructs his musical fabric, we
shall at the last have enriched our minds with a thematic catalogue
and--nothing else. We shall remain guiltless of knowledge unless we
learn something of the nature of those phrases by noting the attributes
which lend them propriety and fitness, and can recognize, measurably
at least, the reasons for their introduction and development. Those
attributes give character and mood to the music constructed out of
the phrases. If we are able to feel the mood we need not care how the
phrases which produce it have been labelled. If we do not feel the
mood we may memorize the whole thematic catalogue of Wolzogen and have
our labor for our pains. It would be better to know nothing about the
phrases and content one's self with simple sensuous enjoyment than to
spend one's time answering the baldest of all the riddles of Wagner's
orchestra: "What am I playing now?"
The ultimate question concerning the correctness or effectiveness of
Wagner's system of composition must, of course, be answered along with
the question, "Does the composition, as a whole, touch the emotions,
quicken the fancy, fire the imagination?" If it does these things, we
may, to a great extent, if we wish, get along without the intellectual
processes of reflection and comparison, which are conditioned upon a
recognition of the themes and their uses. But if we put aside this
intellectual activity, we shall deprive ourselves, among other things,
of the pleasure which it is the province of memory to give; and the
exercise of memory is called for by music much more urgently than
by any other art, because of its volatile nature and the role which
repetition plays in it.
Nothing could have demonstrated more perfectly the righteousness
of Wagner's claim to the title of poet than his acceptance of the
Greek theory that the legends and myths of a people are the fittest
subjects for dramatic treatment, unless it be the manner in which he
has reshaped his material in order to infuse it with that deep ethical
principle to which reference has several times been made. In "The
Flying Dutchman," "The Niblung's Ring," and "Tannhäuser," the idea
is practically his creation. In the last of these three dramas it is
evolved out of the simple episode in the parent-legend of the death
of Lisaura, whose heart broke when her knight went to kiss the Queen
of Love and Beauty. The dissolute knight of the old story Wagner in
turn metamorphoses into a type of manhood "in its passionate desires
and ideal aspirations"--like the Faust of Goethe. All the magnificent
energy of an ideal man is brought forward in the poet's conception, but
it is an energy which is shattered in its fluctuation between sensual
delights and ideal aspirations, respectively typified in the Venus and
the Elizabeth of the play. Here is the contradiction against which he
was shattered as the heroes of Greek tragedy were shattered on the rock
of implacable Fate. But the transcendent beauty of the modern drama is
lent by the ethical idea of salvation through the love of pure woman--a
salvation touching which no one can be in doubt when Tannhäuser sinks
lifeless beside the bier of the atoning saint, and Venus's cries of woe
are swallowed up by the pious canticle of the returning pilgrims.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] For popular purposes there is no harm in letting this statement
stand as made. Of course the reference goes only to the Greek theatre
in its latest form, the evolution of which is indicated, perhaps, in
the comparative weakness of the bond which unites the chorus to the
action in Euripides. The orchestra was, in fact, the centre around
which all the rest, the _theatron_ and the _skēnē_, were gradually
grouped. In the antique festal plays the principal feature was the
dance in a circle around the _thymele_, or altar of Dionysus. It
was only by a slow process that the actor came to be thought of as
anywise distinguished from his companions. As generally in ancient art
priority was indicated by height, there is here a reason for the tragic
_cothurnus_, which might be said to be an inexplicable deformity on any
other theory; for it was only by putting them on stilts, so to speak,
that it was possible to indicate the participants in the dialogue as
apart from the general rout of dancing worshippers. Even in the time
of the three great dramatic writers, it seems probable, disturbing as
such an idea may be to popular impressions, that some, if not all,
plays were performed without any stage. The word _skēnē_ (tent) points
to a temporary structure, used in the first place, perhaps, as a shrine
for the symbols and properties of the god (like the Tabernacle of the
Israelites), then as the dressing-room of the actors; it was succeeded
by the temple when the place had become consecrated to the worship of
Dionysus, then by the structures suited to a given play, and finally
by a permanent stage, which gradually encroached on the space that had
once belonged to the orchestra. These conclusions, at least, seem to be
borne out by the discoveries and arguments of Dörpfeld.
[B] Naumann's _History of Music_, vol. i., p. 524.
[C] _Mephist._ Du weisst wohl nicht, mein Freund, wie grob du bist?
_Bac._ Im Deutschen lügt man wenn man höflich ist.
GOETHE. "Faust," Part II., Act 2, Sc. 1.
CHAPTER II.
"TRISTAN UND ISOLDE."
A vassal is sent to woo a beauteous princess for his lord. While he
is bringing her home the two, by accident, drink a love-potion, and
ever thereafter their hearts are fettered together. In the mid-day of
delirious joy, in the midnight of deepest woe, and through all the
emotional hours between, their thoughts are only of each other, for
each other. Meanwhile the princess has become the vassal's queen. Then
the wicked love of the pair is discovered, and the knight is obliged to
seek safety in a foreign land. There (strange note this to our ears)
he marries another princess whose name is like that of his love, save
for the addition "With the White Hand;" but when wounded unto death
he sends across the water for her who is still his true love, that
she come and be his healer. The ship which is sent to bring her is to
bear white sails on its return if successful in the mission; black, if
not. Day after day the knight waits for the coming of his love--while
the lamp of his life burns lower and lower. At length the sails of the
ship appear on the distant horizon. The knight is now too weak himself
to look. "White or black?" he asks of his wife. "Black," replies she,
jealousy prompting the falsehood; and the knight's heart-strings snap
in twain just as his love steps over the threshold of his chamber. Oh,
the pity of it! for with the lady is her lord, who, having learned the
story of the fateful potion, has come to unite the lovers. Then the
queen, too, dies, and the remorseful king buries the lovers in a common
grave, from whose caressing sod spring a rose-bush and a vine, and
intertwine so curiously that none may separate them.
Here, in its simple forms, is the tale which half a millennium of
poets have celebrated as the High Song of Love, the canticle of all
canticles which hymn the universal passion. British bards, French
_trouvères_, and German _Minnesinger_, while they sang of the joys
and sorrows of humanity, united in holding up Sir Tristram and La
beale Isoud as the supreme type of lovers. To-day our poets, writing
under the influence of social and moral systems, radically different
from those which surrounded the original singers, send back the
perennial note with fervor. But the moralist shakes his head, sinks
into perplexed brooding, or launches the thunders of his righteous
wrath against the storied lovers and their sin. We wish to study the
manner in which a great dramatic poet of our day has presented this
profoundly tragical yet universally fascinating tale. Must we confront
the problem and seek to reconcile the paradox created by the attitudes
of poet and moralist? Or may we put aside the phenomenon as one whose
interpretation is to be left to each individual's notions of the True,
the Beautiful, and the Good, and address ourselves directly to a
study of the drama as a work of art regardless of its ethical phases?
Eventually, I am inclined to believe, we shall be obliged to do the
latter; but as appreciation of what the poet-composer has done depends
upon an understanding of his purposes, and this again upon a discovery
of the elements of the legend which seemed to him potential, we are
compelled to make at least a cursory survey of some of the phases
through which the story has gone in the progress of time; for each
poet, passing the original metal through the fires of his imagination,
brought it forth changed in color and enriched with new designs. In the
new color and adornments we study something of the social institutions
and moral and intellectual habits of the poet's time, these being
superimposed on the original idea embodied in the fundamental story.
In one of the beautiful tales of Northern mythology (a tale in which
I am tempted to think a relic of the primitive Tristram myth may one
day be found) we are told how Skirnir cunningly stole the reflection
of Frey's sunny face from the surface of a brook, and imprisoned it
in his drinking-horn that he might pour it out into Gerd's cup, and
by its beauty win the heart of the giantess for the lord for whom,
like Tristan, he had gone a-wooing. A legend which lives to be
retold often, is like the reflection of Frey's face in this beautiful
allegory; each poet who uses it spreads it upon a mirror which not only
reflects the original picture, but also the environment of the relator.
It will be necessary to remember this when we attempt an inquiry into
the morals of Wagner's drama.
I.
To readers of English literature opportunities to acquaint themselves
with the legend which is the basis of Wagner's drama have been given
by Sir Thomas Malory, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Swinburne, to say
nothing of critics and commentators. The story is of Keltic origin, and
is supposed to have got into the mouths of the German _Minnesinger_ by
way of France. The most admirable as well as complete version extant is
the epic poem of Gottfried von Strassburg, written in the thirteenth
century. Sir Walter Scott, who was deeply interested in the literary
history of the tale, in 1804 edited a metrical version of it from a
manuscript said to be the production of Thomas the Rhymer, who lived
about a century after Gottfried, if, indeed, he lived at all. From this
manuscript Scott argued in favor of a Welsh source for the romance
instead of a Norman, as was then generally accepted. The author of
the German epic followed a French version, as was customary with the
_Minnesinger_ of his period. Tennyson's share in the exposition is
exceedingly scant and wholly valueless. It is found in the poem, "The
Last Tournament," one of the "Idyls of the King." Arnold's is much more
interesting. He treats directly of the outcome of the tragedy in his
poem "Tristram and Iseult," and indirectly relates nearly all that is
essential to an understanding of the story. His poem presents the death
scene of Tristram in Brittany, with the fanciful imaginings of the
dying man while waiting for the coming of Iseult, who has been summoned
from Tintagel. The whole tale is related by Swinburne in his "Tristram
of Lyonesse."
The names of the chief personages in the romance vary slightly in the
different German and English versions, but the variations need lead no
one astray. Wagner's Tristan is otherwise known as Sir Tristrem and
Tristram. All derive the name from the French word _triste_, and find
in it a premonition of his fate. Thus Arnold:
"Son," she said, "thy name shall be of sorrow;
Tristram art thou called for my death's sake."
The poet speaks of the hero's dying mother. So also Swinburne:
"The name his mother, dying as he was born,
Made out of sorrow in very sorrow's scorn,
And set it on him smiling in her sight,
Tristram."
Isolde is variously Iseult, Ysolt, Isoud, and Ysonde; Brangäne is
Brangwain and Brenqwain; Kurwenal, Gouvernayle. The changes in
orthographical physiognomy are trifling and easily recognized.
It cannot be amiss to call attention to several deviations in Wagner's
drama from the legend as it has been handed down by the poets. The
majority of these deviations will be found to be full of significance.
At the outset we are confronted with the chief of these. In all the
other versions the love-potion is drunk by Tristan and Isolde by
mistake. In Mr. Swinburne's poem Tristram toils at the oars,
"More mightily than any wearier three,"
and when he rests, calls for a drink,
"Saying: 'Iseult, for all dear love's labor's sake,
Give me to drink, and give me for a pledge
The touch of four lips on the beaker's edge'."
Iseult's maid, Brangwain, is asleep, and the Princess, not wishing to
awake her, herself looks for wine and finds a curious cup hid in the
maid's bosom. She thinks its contents wine and drinks, and hands it to
Tristram to drink. It is the love-draught prepared by Queen Iseult and
intrusted to Brangwain, to be by her sacredly guarded and given to Mark
and Iseult on their wedding night. Mr. Arnold also has these lovers
drink unwittingly
"----that spiced magic draught
Which since then forever rolls
Through their blood and binds their souls,
Working love, but working teen."
In this respect both English poets follow the German epic of Gottfried
von Strassburg. The dramatic significance of Wagner's variation can
be reserved for discussion hereafter. Its value as intensifying the
character of Isolde is obvious at a glance.
Tennyson omits all mention of the love-potion, and permits us to
imagine Tristram and Iseult as a couple of ordinary sinners, the
former's doctrines on the subject being published in lines like these:
"Free love--free field--we love but while we may;
The woods are hush'd, their music is no more:
The leaf is dead, the yearning passed away:
New leaf, new life--the days of frost are o'er:
New life, new love to suit the newer day:
New loves are sweet as those that went before;
Free love--free field--we love but while we may."
The next important variation (I do not speak of omissions which are
inevitable in throwing an epic into dramatic form) is in the scene
which follows the discovery of the lovers by King Marke. To discuss
this in all its bearings would require more space than I shall care
to employ for the purpose, but it is well to know it. The wronged
Marke of Wagner, some will say as many have said, is not wronged at
all since he chooses to remain inactive, whereas the popular impulse
is illustrated in Tennyson's version, where Mark cleaves Tristram to
the brain on discovering his treachery. But the Marke of Gottfried and
the Mark of Swinburne are scarcely more comprehensible in their conduct
than Wagner's Marke. In Gottfried's epic, after the king has repeatedly
sent the lovers away and taken them back again, he is finally convinced
of their guilt. But before he takes action against Tristan, the latter
escapes. In Swinburne, Tristram is taken and led towards the chapel for
trial. On the road he wrenches a sword from Moraunt's hands, kills him
and ten knights more, leaps into the sea from a cliff, and escapes,
aided by Gouvernayle.
In his last act, Wagner has proceeded with the utmost freedom, as in
all respects he had a right to do, since no authentic version of the
close of the legend has been preserved. Karl Simrock, following the old
English "Sir Tristrem," appended to his translation into modern German
of Gottfried's epic the episode of Tristan's life in Brittany with a
second Isolt, called Isolt of the White Hand. Being low with a wound
received in combat, Tristan sends for the first Isolt, cautioning his
brother-in-law (as Ægeus cautioned Theseus in Greek story), who goes
on the mission, to hoist white sails on returning if successful, black
if not. Isolt of the White Hand, who is watching for the return of
the ship, moved by jealousy, announces that the sails are black, and
Tristan dies just as Isolt enters the chamber. This version Swinburne
follows, but Arnold adds a beautiful touch to the old legend by making
the second Iseult tend her husband with unflinching love and unfailing
fidelity, even while she awaits the coming of her rival. Arnold gives
Tristram and the second Iseult a family of children; Swinburne keeps
the latter a "maiden wife." Bayard Taylor, in writing about Gottfried's
epic, almost angrily refuses to believe that Iseult of the White Hand
killed her knight by the falsehood about the sails. Wagner saves
himself this embarrassment, and ennobles his hero by omitting the
second Isolde from the play altogether, a proceeding which not only
brings the tale into greater sympathy with modern ideas of love, but
also serves marvellously to exalt the passion of the lovers.
II.
Wagner tells the story of the tragedy in three acts. Few dramas have
so little to offer in the way of action, if by action we are to
understand incident and diversity of situation. At Bayreuth, in the
summer of 1886, Mr. Seidl characterized it very aptly as consisting in
each of its three acts as merely preparation, expectation and meeting
of the ill-starred lovers. Yet I doubt not that many will agree with
me, that the effect of the tragedy upon a listener is that of a play
surcharged with significant occurrence. The explanation of this is to
be found in the fact that music which has a high degree of emotional
expressiveness makes us forget the paucity of external incident, by
diverting interest from externals to the play of passion going on in
the hearts of the personages. This play is presented to us freed from
every vestige of spectacular integument in the instrumental prelude to
the drama. I want to lay stress on this statement. It is the passion
of the lovers to which the composer wishes to direct our attention at
the outset, and to do this most effectively he constructs his musical
"argument of the play" out of melodic phrases which have purely a
psychological significance. There is considerable music of the kind
that I will call scenic in the score of "Tristan und Isolde," but none
of it is introduced in the prelude, which for that reason appeals much
more directly to the emotions and the lofty faculty of imagination than
it does to the fancy. It is true that this makes the task of analytical
study more difficult, but for this there is compensation in the fact
that enjoyment of its beauties and apprehension of its purposes do
not require the intellectual activity conditioned by a following of
its typical phrases through the web and woof of the composition. This
is characteristic of the entire score of the drama. More than any
other of the dramas of Wagner, with the possible exception of "Die
Meistersinger," it shows the spontaneity in artistic creation, without
which a real art-work cannot come into existence. Wagner himself
expressed a preference for "Tristan" over others of his works, and
based it on the solid ground that in the composition of its score he
had proceeded without thought of his own theories; in other words, he
worked spontaneously and not reflectively. The result is strikingly
noticeable in the fact that, though there are comparatively few typical
melodies in the score, one is much less inclined to dissect it for the
pleasure which such a process brings than any other of his scores. The
direct, sensuous, and emotional appeal is sufficient. Yet we know that
it is a perfect and complete exemplification of his theories.
To come back to the prelude:
An ardent longing for the unattainable; a consuming hunger
"----which doth make
The meat it feeds on;"
a desire that cannot be quenched, yet will not despair; finally, at the
lowest ebb of the sweet agony, the promise of an end of suffering, in
self-forgetfulness, oblivion, annihilation of individual identity, and
hence in a blending or union of identity--these, according to Wagner's
exposition and the play itself, are the elements which are prefigured
in the instrumental introduction. What are their musical symbols?
The fundamental theme of the drama, the kernel of its musical
development, is the phrase which we hear at the beginning of the
prelude:
[Illustration: score]
Brief as this is, it illustrates one step in the melodic development,
in respect of which "Tristan und Isolde" is Wagner's most marvellous
achievement. It is a unit, in so far as it stands for the passion
of the pair, in both its aspects of blissful longing and infinite
suffering, but it is nevertheless already complex. It is two-voiced.
One voice descends chromatically, the other (beginning with the third
measure) ascends by similar degrees. A figure like that used in music
to indicate a _crescendo_,
[Illustration]
presents a symbol of duality in unity for the eye like that of this
phrase for the ear. How simple yet profound is the idea that all the
conflicting passions of the drama are one in origin and in nature.
Am I becoming fantastical in thinking that Wagner purposed that this
philosophical concept should be stated in the basic material of his
music? I think not; but if there is a haunting fear that way it may be
dissipated by looking a little further into the prelude. After a brief
development of this first musical thought by means of repetition on
various degrees of the scale and changes of instrumental color, two new
phrases are reached. The first:
[Illustration: score]
followed immediately by:
[Illustration: score]
Now, let us stop to note some resemblances, and from significant
portions of the play derive a meaning for our symbols. In this we
cannot be helped, as we sometimes are, by natural likenesses. These
melodies are not imitative or delineative of external things; they
are the result of efforts to give expression to soul-states. At the
beginning of Scene 5, Act I., the entrance of Tristan is proclaimed in
a manner that leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the first of the two
phrases now under investigation. The melody there appears extended,
in augmentation, as the musicians say. It stands for the hero of the
tragedy. The genesis of the love of Tristan and Isolde must next be
studied. That love antedated the beginning of our tragedy. Isolde
relates the story of its beginning to her maid. Disguised as a harper,
Tristan had come to Ireland to be healed of a wound received in battle
with Isolde's betrothed, whom he had killed. Isolde nursed him, but
before he was completely restored to health she discovered that the
edge of his sword was broken, and that a splinter of steel taken from
the head of her dead lover fitted into the nick. The slayer of her
betrothed lay before her. She raised the sword to avenge his death,
but as she was about to strike, Tristan turned his glance upon her. He
looked not at the threatening sword, but into her eyes, and in a moment
her heart was empty of anger. Hatred had given place to love. Note here
that while Wagner uses that silly apparatus of mediæval romance, the
philter, it is not as the creator or provoker of love; that is born
without the aid of magic other than Nature's. "He looked into my eyes,"
says Isolde, and immediately the tender second phrase is uttered by the
orchestra. It is thus that this phrase is identified with the glance
which aroused Isolde's love.
The material which has now been marshalled is practically all that
is contained in the prelude; but there are two modifications of the
fundamental phrase which ought to be noticed. One of these, frequently
treated responsively by the instruments to build up a climax,
[Illustration: score]
seems to depict the gradual recognition by the lovers of the state into
which the potion has plunged them. The other is a harmonized inversion
of the same figure,
[Illustration: score]
to which an added character is given by the jubilant ascent of
thirty-second notes, and which, from several climactic portions of the
drama, we discover to be significant of the lovers' joyful defiance of
death--a sentiment which will be better understood after the philosophy
of the tragedy has been studied.
Wagner has himself given us an exposition of this prelude. In one of
his writings, after rehearsing the legend down to the drinking of the
fateful potion, he says:
"Now there is no end to the yearning, the longing, the delight, and
the misery of love. World, might, fame, splendor, honor, knighthood,
truth, and friendship all vanish like a baseless dream. Only one thing
survives: desire, desire unquenchable, and ever freshly manifested
longing--thirst and yearning. One only redemption: death, the sinking
into oblivion, the sleep from which there is no awaking!
"The musician who chose this theme for the prelude to his love-drama,
as he felt that he was here in the boundless realm of the very element
of music, could only have one care: how he should set bounds to his
fancy; for the exhaustion of the theme was impossible. Thus he took
once for all this insatiable desire; in long-drawn accents it surges
up, from its first timid confession, its softest attraction, through
throbbing sighs, hope and pain, laments and wishes, delight and
torment, up to the mightiest onslaught, the most powerful endeavor to
find the breach which shall open to the heart the path to the ocean of
the endless joy of love. In vain! Its power spent, the heart sinks back
to thirst with desire, with desire unfulfilled, as each fruition only
brings forth seeds of fresh desire, till, at last, in the depth of its
exhaustion, the starting eye sees the glimmering of the highest bliss
of attainment. It is the ecstasy of dying, of the surrender of being,
of the final redemption into that wondrous realm from which we wander
farthest when we strive to take it by force. Shall we call this Death?
Is it not rather the wonder-world of Night, out of which, so says the
story, the ivy and the vine sprang forth in tight embrace o'er the tomb
of Tristan and Isolde?"
III.
We are on board a mediæval ship within a few hours' voyage of Cornwall,
whither Tristan, knight and vassal, is bearing Isolde as bride of King
Marke. Isolde is an Irish princess, daughter of a queen of like name
with herself. The first scene discloses her to be a woman of most
tumultuous passion. Hearing the cheery song of a sailor, she bursts
forth like a tempest and declares to her maid, Brangäne, that she will
never set foot on Cornwall's shore. She deplores the degeneracy of
her mother's sorcery, which can only brew balsamic potions instead of
commanding the elements; and she wildly invokes wind and waves to dash
the ship to pieces. Brangäne pleads to know the cause of her mistress's
disquiet--what I have already related of the previous meeting between
the princess and King Marke's ambassador.
After telling this tale to Brangäne, Isolde sends the maid to summon
Tristan to her presence, but the knight refuses to leave the helm
until he has brought the ship into harbor, and his squire, Kurwenal,
incensed at the tone addressed by the princess to one who in his eyes
is the greatest of heroes, as answer to the summons sings a stave of a
popular ballad which recounts the killing of Morold and the liberation
of Cornwall by his master. The refusal completes the desperation of
Isolde. Outraged love, injured personal and national pride (for she
imagines that he who had relieved Cornwall from tribute to Ireland
was now gratifying his ambition by bringing her as Ireland's tribute
to Cornwall), detestation of a loveless marriage to "Cornwall's weary
king," a thousand fierce but indefinable emotions are seething in her
heart. She resolves to die, and to drag Tristan down to death with her.
Brangäne unwittingly shows the way. She tries to quiet her mistress's
fears of the dangers of a loveless marriage by telling her of a magic
potion brewed by the queen-mother with which she will firmly attach
Marke to his bride. Thus innocently she takes the first step towards
precipitating the catastrophe. Isolde demands to see the casket of
magical philters, and finds that it also contains a deadly poison.
Kurwenal enters to announce that the ship is in harbor, and Tristan
desires her to prepare for the landing. Isolde sends back greetings
and a message that before she will permit the knight to escort her
before the king he must obtain from her forgiveness for unforgiven
guilt. Tristan obeys this second summons, and in justification of his
conduct in keeping himself aloof during the voyage he, with great
dignity, pleads his duty towards good morals, custom, and his king.
Isolde reminds him of the wrong done her in the slaying of her lover
and her right to the vengeance which once she had renounced. Tristan
yields the right, and offers her his sword and breast, but Isolde
replies that she cannot appear before King Marke as the slayer of his
foremost knight, and proposes that he drink a cup of reconciliation.
Tristan sees one-half her purpose, and chivalrously consents to pledge
her in what he knows to be poison. Isolde calls for the cup which she
had commanded Brangäne to prepare, and when Tristan has drunk part of
its contents she wrenches it from his hand and drains it to the bottom.
Thus they meet their doom, which is not death and surcease of sorrow,
but life and misery, for Brangäne had disobeyed her mistress out of her
love and mixed a love-potion instead of a death draught. A moment of
bewilderment, and the two fated ones are in each other's arms, pouring
out an ecstasy of passion; then the maids of honor robe Isolde to
receive King Marke, who is coming on board to greet his bride.
These are the dramatic contents of the first act, whose musical
investiture is now to be looked at a little analytically. At the outset
there is an example of the skill with which Wagner employs the charm of
contrast. I have said that the music of the prelude is not scenic--it
aims at moods and passions, not at pictures. The drama opens with music
of the other kind. As the curtain is withdrawn we see within the tent
erected for Isolde on the deck of the ship. Hangings conceal all else
from view; but the first music which we hear is the voice of an unseen
sailor at the mast-head, who sings to the winds that are blowing him
away from his wild Irish sweetheart. The melody has a most insinuating
charm, especially its principal phrase:
[Illustration: score]
There is something of the buoyant roll of the ship and the freshness of
sea-breezes about it. It plunges us at once into the scenic situation,
puts us on shipboard, and helps us to share in the pleasurable
sensations of the voyage to Cornwall, especially when, a moment later,
it accompanies and amplifies Brangäne's account of the happy progress
of the voyage. Scarcely have we surrendered ourselves to this pleasure,
however, before Isolde's outburst of rage turns our attention from
the scenes to the personages of the play. What was innocent delight
to the singer and to us (who are now playing sympathetically along in
the drama) has somehow loosened an emotional tempest in the heart of
the passenger most concerned in that voyage. Suddenly, as we listen
to her imprecations, the whole past of the heroine is revealed--she
stands before us, not the inexperienced, unconcerned princess of the
other poems, but a fully developed woman, a furious woman, a tragic
heroine ripe for destruction. It is a favorite device of poets and
musicians--of all creative artists, indeed--to invite Nature to take
part in the play of their creations. We think a thunder-storm the
proper accompaniment of a murder, and balmy sunshine of a wedding. Here
the breezy sea-music has provoked a storm of passion, and the composer
permits the enraged princess to lash it into a fury. To suit her mood
he invokes dark clouds to obscure the sunshine of its tonality, sends
harsh harmonies hurtling among the simple chords that sounded its
original innocency, and stirs up a whirlwind out of its first quiet
movement. But when, a few moments later, Isolde has checked her wild
passion, the music settles back into its original quietude, and in
time with its measured pulsations we see the sailors pulling upon the
ship's tackle. Now it sings its "Yo-heave-ho!" as decorously as any
shanty-song.
I have referred to the duality in unity of the fundamental idea in
the music of the drama. A study of the scene in which Isolde resolves
upon the double crime of murder and suicide will disclose how relation
in thought, emotion, and dramatic motive is expressed by relation in
musical symbol. The symbol of longing contained in the fundamental
phrase shows ascent in chromatic degrees. Observe, now, that in Act I.,
Scene 3, the sufferings of the wounded Tristan are depicted in a theme
composed wholly of descending half-steps,
[Illustration: score]
and note, too, that the closing cadence of the short phrase which
stands for the love-glance is a downward leap of seven degrees.
In this phrase, as we first hear it, there is much tenderness and
gentle happiness; but in the glance there was the phantom of that
Life-in-Death who won Coleridge's Ancient Mariner from the grisly
skeleton in their awful game of dice. Though we do not suspect it, at
first, that downward leap of a seventh is an ominous symbol--the symbol
of Fate, which might have been heard under the yearning voices of the
prelude, and is now proclaimed by the gloomy basses in the scene
wherein Isolde selects the poison from the casket of philters which her
mother had given in charge of Brangäne:
[Illustration: score]
There is another phrase of tragic puissance with which we must now
get acquainted. At the first glance which Isolde throws upon Tristan,
motionless at the helm of the ship, when the curtains are parted to
permit the maid to summon the knight into the presence of the princess,
this phrase publishes her dreadful determination to seek revenge for
outraged love in murder and suicide. It is the symbol of death, whose
relationship to the symbol of fate will easily be recognized:
[Illustration: score]
Death... de - vot - ed head!
Its ominous expressiveness, apart from instrumental color, which cannot
be reproduced on the pianoforte, comes from the sudden and unprepared
change of key from A-flat to A.
The culminating scene in the drama is that which brings the first act
to a close--the meeting of Tristan and Isolde, and the drinking of the
potion. In this scene the device of introducing cheerful and exciting
sailors' music to heighten the intensity of a dramatic climax is used
with peculiarly startling effect. It produces a marvellous illusion by
the suddenness of its entrance, its sharp interruption of the tragic
music expressive of the soul-torments of the principal personages,
and the unprepared transition from the spectacle of doomed humanity
to the joy-inspiring aspect of nature. An almost equally noteworthy
effect is the orchestral proclamation of Tristan in his character as
a fully-developed tragic hero. Observe how, by augmenting the simple
phrase, the orchestra increases the stature of the knight; but note
also how, though he looms up in Isolde's door-way like a demi-god clad
in steel and brass, a knight capable of overthrowing the choicest
spirits of Arthur's Round Table, and scattering thirty of King Marke's
knights, the fateful harmonies in their chromatic descent (which have
their model in the melody of the wounded Tristan) publish his doom with
a prophetic forcefulness that cannot be misunderstood.
There is in this scene, also, a peculiarly eloquent example of the
manner in which Wagner permits the music to publish hidden meanings in
the text. While Brangäne, obeying her mistress's behest, is preparing
the fatal draught, the gladsome noise of the sailors is heard from
without. The ship is entering the harbor. Tristan, who is brooding over
Isolde's demand that he drink a drink of expiation for the slaying of
Morold, suddenly arouses himself. "Where are we?" he asks. "Near the
goal," answers Isolde. What goal does she mean? Cornwall, the goal
of the voyage? Ah, no! The music tells us; the words are sung to the
death-phrase.
IV.
Wagner's skill in plunging his listeners into the mood essential to
the proper reception of his drama has no brighter illustration than
"Tristan und Isolde." The passionate stress and profound melancholy
which mark all that really belongs to the story are prefigured for
us in the prelude. That story is more than nine-tenths told in the
first act. The music that is introduced to give relief to the mind,
and also to heighten the tragic effect by means of contrast, is the
music that is related to the scene which is the theatre of the outward
action, or to the personages of the play who bear no part in the real
tragedy which, as I have already intimated, plays on the stage of the
lovers' hearts. These comparatively inactive persons who serve as
foils are the young seaman who sings at the mast-head, the sailors,
the shepherd who enters in the last act, and Kurwenal, the squire.
Kurwenal, rugged yet tender, amiable and picturesque, gentle as a
woman at core, shares in the bright, flowing, rhythmically vigorous
music which tells of unfettered breezes, heaving billows, and popular
pride; while to Tristan and Isolde is given the music made out of
the few phrases which, as they unfold themselves over and over again
in an infinite variety of combinations and with continually changing
instrumental color, bring to our consciousness in a wonderfully vivid
manner the torments which are consuming them. In the introduction to
the second act we have another mood picture--a picture of the longing
and impatience of the lovers; but this idea is presented with such
peculiar eloquence and beauty in the first scene that I prefer to pass
over the instrumental introduction with this bare reference. I am not
attempting a dissection of every scene; my purpose will be attained
if I can suggest the things which best indicate the mood in which it
is well to listen, and give starting-points to the imagination. The
second act differs from the first in that it is all but actionless.
In it, however, is presented the catastrophe of the tragedy--the
discovery of the guilt of the ill-starred lovers by King Marke. The
scene is a garden before Queen Isolde's chamber; the time, a lovely
night in summer. A torch burns in a ring beside the door leading from
the chamber into the garden. The King has gone a-hunting, and as the
curtain rises the tones of the hunting horns dying away in the distance
blend entrancingly with an instrumental song from the orchestra, which
seems a musical sublimation of night and nature in their tenderest
moods. Isolde appears with Brangäne, and pleads with her to extinguish
the torch and thus give a signal to Tristan, who is waiting in
concealment. But Brangäne suspects treachery on the part of Melot, a
knight who is jealous of Tristan and himself enamoured of Isolde, and
who had planned the nocturnal hunt. She warns her mistress and begs her
to wait. In their dialogue there is lovely fencing with the incident
of the vanishing sounds of the hunt like Shakespeare's dalliance with
nightingale and lark, in "Romeo and Juliet." Beauty rests upon this
scene like a benediction. To Isolde the horns are but the rustling of
the forest leaves as they are caressed by the wind, or the purling
and laughing of the brook. Longing has eaten up all patience, all
discretion, all fear. She extinguishes the torch in spite of Brangäne's
pleadings, and with wildly waving scarf beckons on her hurrying lover.
Beneath the foliage they sing their love through all the gamut of
hope and despair. The text of their duet consists largely of detached
ejaculations and verbal plays, each paraphrasing and varying or giving
a new turn to the outpouring of the other, the whole permeated with
the symbolism of pessimistic philosophy, in which night and death and
oblivion (which have their symbols in the music) are glorified, and
day and life (which also have their symbols) and memory are contemned.
There is transporting music in the duet, and many evidences that in
it Wagner wrote and composed with tremendous enthusiasm, veritably
with a pen of fire. In the dialogue of this scene lies the key of the
entire philosophy of the tragedy. We ought to know this, but we do
not need to justify it. If I were to indulge in the unnecessary luxury
of criticism, I should suggest that pessimistic philosophy transmitted
through verbal plays which are carried far beyond the limits of reason,
if not to the verge of childishness, is not good dramatic matter, and
half an hour of it is too much. Swinburne, who repeatedly makes use of
metaphors and thoughts which tempt one to believe that he made a study
of Wagner's drama, also attempts a dalliance with the images of night
and day which fill so many of Wagner's pages, but with a difference,
and his Iseult, unlike the German Isolde, checks Tristram's song
wherein he asks:
"Love, is it day that makes thee thy delight,
Or thou that seest day made out of thy light?"
by calmly observing,
"I have heard men sing of love a simpler way
Than these wrought riddles made of night and day."
I have said that we ought to know something of the philosophy of
the tragedy. In Wagner's exposition of the prelude he wishes us to
observe the "one glimmering of the highest bliss of attainment" in the
surrender of being, the "final redemption into that wondrous realm
from which we wander farthest when we try to take it by force." For
this wondrous realm he chooses death and night as symbols, but what he
means to imply is the Nirvana of Buddhistic philosophy, the "final
deliverance of the soul from transmigration." Nirvana is the antithesis
of Sansâra. Sansâra, the world, means turmoil and variety, and each new
transmigration means another relapse into the miseries of existence.
The love of Tristan and Isolde presents itself to Wagner as ceaseless
struggle and endless contradiction, and for such a problem there is
but one solution--total oblivion. Nirvana is the only conception which
offers a happy outcome to such love; it means quietude and identity.
The duet is rudely interrupted in its moment of supremest ecstasy by
a warning cry from Brangäne. Kurwenal dashes in with a sword and a
shout: "Save thyself, Tristan!" King Marke, Melot, and courtiers at
his heels. Day, the symbol of all that is fatal to their love, has
dawned. Tristan is silent, though King Marke, in a long speech, bewails
the treachery of his nephew and friend. Much ridicule has been poured
out on this scene, which the ordinary theatre-goer finds dramatically
disappointing. There can be no question that the popular sentiment is
better expressed by Tennyson, in the corresponding scene in his poem,
"The Last Tournament:"
"But while he bow'd to kiss the jewell'd throat,
Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch'd,
Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek--
'Mark's way,' said Mark, and clove him thro' the brain."
One need not be an advocate to say that though Marke's sermonizing may
be theatrically disappointing, it offers in itself a complete defence
of its propriety. From the words of the heart-torn king we learn that
he had been forced into the marriage by the disturbed state of his
kingdom, and that he had not consented to it until Tristan (whose
purpose it was to quiet the jealous anger of the barons) had threatened
to depart from Cornwall unless the King revoked his decision to make
him his successor. Tristan's answer to the sorrowful upbraidings
of Marke is to obtain a promise from Isolde to follow him into the
"wondrous realm of Night;" then (note this as bearing on the ethics of
the drama), seeing that Marke did not wield the sword of retribution,
he makes a feint of attacking Melot, but permits the treacherous friend
to reach him with his sword. He falls wounded unto death.
V.
The dignified, reserved knight of the first act, the impassioned lover
of the second, is now a dream-haunted, longing, despairing, dying
man, lying under a lime-tree in the yard of his ancestral castle in
Brittany, wasting his last bit of strength in feverish fancies and
ardent longings touching Isolde. Kurwenal has sent for her. Will she
come? A shepherd tells of vain watches for the sight of a sail by
playing a mournful melody on his pipe. What a vast expanse of empty sea
is opened to our view by the ascending passages in long-drawn thirds!
How vividly we are made to realize the ebbing away of Tristan's vital
powers!
In the music of this act, if anywhere in the creations of Wagner, we
are lifted above the necessity of seeking significances. Even the
pianoforte can speak the language of this act. There is not one measure
in it which does not tell its story in a manner which puts mere words
to shame. Oh, the heart-hunger of the hero! The longing! Will she
never come? The fever is consuming him, and his heated brain breeds
fancies which one moment lift him above all memories of pain, and the
next bring him to the verge of madness. Cooling breezes waft him again
towards Ireland, whose princess healed the wound struck by Morold, then
ripped it up again with the avenging sword with its telltale nick. From
her hands he took the drink whose poison sears his heart. Accursed
the cup and accursed the hand that brewed it! Will the shepherd never
change his doleful strain? Ah, Isolde, how beautiful you are! The ship,
the ship! It must be in sight! Kurwenal, have you no eyes? Isolde's
ship! A merry tune bursts from the shepherd's pipe. It is caught up by
the orchestra and whirled away on an ocean of excited sound. It is the
ship! What flag flies at the peak? The flag of "All's well!" Now the
ship disappears behind a cliff. There the breakers are treacherous.
Who is at the helm? Friend or foe? Melot's accomplice? Are you, too, a
traitor, Kurwenal?
Tristan's strength is unequal to the excitement of the moment. His
mind becomes dazed. He hears Isolde's voice, and his wandering fancy
transforms it into the torch whose extinction once summoned him to
her side: "Do I hear the light?" He staggers to his feet and tears
the bandages from his wound. "Ha, my blood, flow merrily now! She who
opened the wound is here to heal it!" Life endures but for one embrace,
one glance, one word--"Isolde!"--which is borne to her ears by the
sadly sweet phrase, typical of the first glance of love--the word and
tones which first he had uttered after the potion had made him forget
all but his love.
While Isolde lies mortally stricken upon Tristan's corpse, Marke and
his train arrive upon a second ship. Brangäne has told the secret of
the love-draught, and the king has come to unite the lovers. But his
purpose is not known, and faithful Kurwenal receives his death-blow
while trying to hold the castle against Marke's men. He dies at
Tristan's side. Isolde, unconscious of all these happenings, sings out
her broken heart and expires.
"And ere her ear might hear, her heart had heard,
Nor sought she sign for witness of the word;
But came and stood above him, newly dead,
And felt his death upon her: and her head,
Bowed, as to reach the spring that slakes all drouth;
And their four lips became one silent mouth."
VI.
The story of Tristan and Isolde, as it was sung by the minstrel knights
of the Middle Ages, is a picture of chivalry in its palmy days. We need
to bear this in mind when we approach the ethical side of Wagner's
version. In the music of the love duet and Isolde's death lies,
perhaps, the most powerful plea ever made for the guilty lovers. No
one will stray far from the judgment which the future will pronounce
on Wagner's creations, I imagine, who sets down Isolde's swan's song
as the choicest flower of Wagner's creative faculty, the culmination
of his powers as a composer. I do not believe that the purifying and
ennobling capacity of music was ever before or since demonstrated as it
is here. While listening to this tonal beatification, it is difficult
to hear the voice of reason pronouncing the judgment of outraged law.
Yet it is right that that voice should be heard. It is due to the
poet-composer that it should be heard. Wagner's attitude towards the
old legend differs vastly from that of the poets who preceded him in
treating it.
In the days of chivalry depicted by Gottfried von Strassburg and the
other mediæval poets who have sung the passion of these lovers, the
odor which assails our moral sense as the odor of death and decay was
esteemed the sweetest incense that arose from a poet's censer. Read
the _Wachtlieder_ of the German _Minnesinger_. The German _Wachtlied_,
the Provençal _alba_, is the song sung by the squire or friend watching
without, warning the lovers to separate. Brangäne's song in the second
act is such a _Wachtlied_. Read the decisions of the Courts of Love,
which governed the actions of chivalrous knighthood when chivalry was
at its zenith. Again and again was it proclaimed by these tribunals
that conjugal duty shut out the possibility of love between husband
and wife. In the economy of feudal castle life there was no provision
for women. The place was the domicile of warriors. Daughters of the
lord of the castle were married off in childhood. Who, then, could
be the object of knightly love? The answer is not far to seek. The
service of woman to which mediæval knighthood was devoted, the service
which is celebrated in words which we can scarcely accept, except as
wildest hyperbole, was the service paid to another man's wife. And
the fact that the knight himself had a wife was not a hinderance but
an incentive to the service which was the occupation of his life. Now
think for a moment on Wagner's modification of the Tristram legend.
From it he eliminates the second Iseult. His hero cannot contract a
loveless marriage, and at one stroke one element in the attitude of the
sexes which appears strange, unnatural, and shocking to us, is wiped
from the story.
The versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne,
Tennyson, and Wagner present three points of view from which the love
of the tragic pair must be studied. With the first three the drinking
is purely accidental, and the passion which leads to the destruction
of the lovers is something for which they are in no wise responsible.
With Tennyson there is no philter, and the passion is all guilty.
With Wagner the love exists before the dreadful drinking, and the
potion is less a maker of uncontrollable passion than a drink which
causes the lovers to forget duty, honor, and the respect due to the
laws of society. It is a favorite idea of Wagner's that the hero of
tragedy should be a type of humanity freed from all the bonds of
conventionality. It is unquestionable in my mind that in his scheme we
are to accept the love-potion as merely the agency with which Wagner
struck from his hero the shackles of convention.
Unquestionably, as Bayard Taylor argued, the love-draught is the Fate
of the Tristan drama, and this brings into notice the significance of
Wagner's chief variation. It is an old theory, too often overlooked
now, that there must be at least a taint of guilt in the conduct of a
tragic hero in order that the feeling of pity excited by his sufferings
may not overcome the idea of justice in the catastrophe. This theory
was plainly an outgrowth of the deep religious purpose of the Greek
tragedy. Wagner puts antecedent and conscious guilt at the door of
both his heroic characters. They love before the philter, and do not
pay the reverence to the passion which, in the highest conception, it
commands. Tristan is carried away by love of power and glory before
men, and himself suggests and compels by his threats Marke's marriage,
which is a crime against the love which he bears Isolde and she bears
him. There is guilt enough in Isolde's determination and effort to
commit murder and suicide. Thus Wagner presents us the idea of Fate
in the latest and highest aspect that it assumed in the minds of
the Greek poets, and he arouses our pity and our horror, not only
by the sufferings of the principals, but also by making an innocent
and amiable prompting to underlie the action which brings down the
catastrophe. It is Brangäne's love for her mistress that persuades
her to shield her from the crime of murder and protect her life. From
whatever point of view the question is treated, it seems to me that
Wagner's variation is an improvement on the old legend, and that the
objection, which German critics have urged, that the love of the pair
is merely a chemical product, and so, outside of human sympathy, falls
to the ground.
CHAPTER III.
"DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG."
Once upon a time--if I were disposed to be circumstantial I would
say in the early summer of the year of our Lord 1560, for it was the
year of Hans Sachs' widowerhood--Veit Pogner, desiring to honor the
craft of the master-singers in Nuremberg, to whose guild he belonged,
offered a rare prize as the reward of the victor in a singing contest
to be held on St. John's Day. Pogner was a rich silversmith who had
travelled much, who had loved the arts of song and song-making, and
whose pride had been hurt by the discovery that the gentry and nobility
of the German nation affected to despise the humble burgher for his
too great devotion to money-getting, unmindful of the fact, which
Pogner knew full well, that what there was of art-love and devotion and
talent was possessed and encouraged by the common people. It was for
this reason that he resolved to stimulate a supreme effort in the form
of art which most interested him, and the prize which he offered was
nothing less than his only child Eva in marriage, with all his great
wealth as a dowry. But Eva, dutiful in the main if rather forward and
self-willed, was little inclined to be bestowed as a prize unless she
had the picking of the winner. The fact is, she had lost her heart to
a handsome young knight from Franconia--in the course of a flirtation
carried on during divine service, I regret to say--and had told him
so in a somewhat impetuous manner, scarcely consistent with modern
notions on the subject of young women's behavior. She had not thought
it necessary to take her father into her confidence, and so the young
Franconian knight, who had come to Nuremberg to repair his fortunes,
was reduced to the extremity of entering the Guild of master-singers,
so that he might be qualified to go into the competition on the morrow.
A trial of candidates for admission to the guild had been announced for
that very day after divine service, and Walther von Stolzing (that was
the young knight's name) entered the lists. But, alas! he knew nothing
of the code of laws which governed the structure of master-songs and
prescribed the thirty-two offences which must not be committed. Nor did
he count on the fact that the adjudicator who would keep tally of his
violations of those laws would be Sixtus Beckmesser, the town-clerk,
whose longing glances were also turned in Eva's direction--or, at
least, towards her father's gold. He went into the contest trusting
to the inspiration of his love and his memory of the spirit which
breathes through the songs of that ardent old nature-lover, Walther von
der Vogelweide, whom the master-singers counted among the founders
of their guild, to carry him through. When the time came for him to
improvise a song which was to determine whether or not he was fit to
be a master-singer, he sang: now pouring out an ecstasy of feeling,
and anon scorching with scornful allusions the jealous pedant behind
the judge's curtain. In a burst of enthusiasm he rose from the chair
in which the code required the singer to sit, and this completed his
discomfiture. Hans Sachs, who, as he used to say, was "shoemaker and
poet, too," indeed had recognized evidences of genius in the song, and
its newness of style and indifference to ancient formula seemed to him
to weigh little as against its freshness and eloquence and ardor. But
Sachs could not prevent judgment going against the singer. That night
the young couple resolved to elope and seek their happiness outside
the code of laws of the Master-singers, but were interrupted by the
circumstance that Sachs, haunted by the song of the knight whose cause
he had espoused, was unable to sleep, and had resolved to finish a pair
of shoes ordered by Beckmesser. Sachs was kindly disposed towards the
lovers, but he had a strong sense of the duty due to parents. He saw
the pair in the shadow of a tree while he was musing on the occurrences
of the day, and suspected their purpose, as, indeed, he well might, for
Eva had changed her head-dress for that of her maid, Magdalena. As if
without special purpose, he drew his bench to the door, and threw a
ray of light across the street, through which they would be obliged to
pass. In another moment the malicious town-clerk appeared on the scene
with a lute. He had come to serenade Eva, in the hope of making an
impression which would be useful to him on the morrow, for it had been
stipulated that though the winner of the prize must be a master-singer,
yet Eva was to have a voice in the decision. While Magdalena took
her place at the window to delude Beckmesser with the belief that
his serenade was being listened to by its object, Sachs interrupted
the malicious clown by lustily shouting a song as he cobbled at the
bench, pleading in extenuation, when Beckmesser remonstrated with
him, that he must finish the shoes, for want of which Beckmesser had
twitted him at the meeting in St. Catherine's Church a few hours
before. Finally, having reduced the boor to the verge of distraction,
Sachs agreed to listen to his serenade, provided he were allowed the
privilege of playing adjudicator and marking the errors of composition
by striking his lapstone. The errors were not few, and, as you may
imagine, each critical tap threw Beckmesser into more of a rage, until
he lost his head altogether, and Sachs beat such a tattoo on his
lapstone that he had finished his work when Beckmesser came to the
end of his song, which, we may believe, was comical enough. And now,
to complete Beckmesser's misery, David, an apprentice of Sachs' and
Magdalena's sweetheart, thinking that the serenade had been intended
for her, began to belabor the singer with a club; the hubbub called the
neighbors into the street, and, as many of them bore little grudges
against each other, they took occasion to feed them all fat. A right
merry brawl was in progress when the watchman's horn was heard. Quick
as a flash the brawlers disappeared, and when the sleepy old watchman
entered the street none of the peace disturbers was to be seen; the
old Dogberry stared about him in amazement, rubbed his eyes, sang the
monotonous chant which told the hour and cautioned the burghers against
spooks, and walked off in the peaceful moonlight.
Next morning Walther, who had been taken in by Sachs, sang the recital
of a dream which had enriched his sleep. It was as beautiful in the
telling as in the experience, and Sachs transcribed it, punctuating
the pauses with bits of advice which enabled Walther easily to throw
it into the form of a master-song which would pass the muster even of
the pedantic code, though a few liberties were taken in the matter
of melody. While Sachs was absent from his shop to don clothes meet
for the coming festivities, Beckmesser came in and found the song,
which he conveyed to his own pocket. Sachs, returning, discovered
the theft, and gave the song to the thief, who, knowing Sachs' great
talent in composition, secured a promise from him not to claim it as
his own, and to permit him to sing it at the contest. This suited
Sachs' purposes admirably. A few hours later all the good people of
Nuremberg were gathered on the meadow just outside the walls, which
was their customary place of merrymaking. The guilds were there--the
cobblers and tailors and bakers and toy-makers--God bless 'em!--with
trumpeters and drummers and pipers, and hundreds of spruce apprentices;
and the master-singers with their banner and insignia, headed by Sachs.
Beckmesser was there, too, with the words of Walther's song whirling
in a hopeless maze in his addled pate. He tried to sing it, but made
a monstrously stupid parody, and when the populace hooted and railed
and jeered at him for presuming to aspire to the hand of the beauteous
Eva he flew into a rage, charged the authorship of the song which had
caused his downfall on Sachs, and left the field to his rival Walther,
who, to vindicate Sachs' statement that the song was a good one when
well sung, presently burdened the air with its loveliness, adding, in
his enthusiasm, an improvised apostrophe to Eva and the Parnassus of
poetry. Master-singers, people--and Eva--were agreed that the gallant
knight had won the prize, and Sachs gently compelled him, in spite
of his protest, to take the master-singer's medallion along with the
bride, and charged him never more to affect to despise the German
masters of song, whose works shall live though the Holy Roman Empire go
up in smoke.
I.
The story of "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" furnishes more food for
reflection than one might think at first blush, and opens a channel
of thought not commonly used when Wagner is in mind. It is a comedy,
and it is easiest to think of Wagner as a tragedian. Yet it is not the
smallest of his achievements that, more thoroughly and consistently
than any dramatist of our time, he has in his works restored the
boundary line which in the classic world separated comedy from
tragedy. In "Tannhäuser," "Tristan und Isolde," and "The Niblung's
Ring" are found examples of the old tragedy type. They deal with grand
passions, and their heroes are gods or god-like men who are shattered
against Fate. His only essay in the field of comedy was made in "Die
Meistersinger," and this is as faithful to the old conception of
comedy as the other dramas are to the classic ideals of tragedy. It
deals with the manners and follies and vices of the common people, and
exemplifies the purpose of comedy as it was set down in one of the
truest and best definitions ever written. It aims to chastise manners
with a smile. There are two ways of looking at "Die Meistersinger." It
can be weighted with a symbolical character, or it can be taken as an
example of pure comedy, with no deeper significance than lies on the
easily-reached surface of its lines, action, and music. There is no
doubt that Wagner conceived it as a satire, and it is even possible
(although I can recall no direct statement of his to that effect) that
he intended to chastise with it the spirit of conservatism and pedantry
which was for so long a time a stumbling-block in the way of his
system. Telling of his first draft of the comedy in 1845, immediately
after the completion of "Tannhäuser," he said that he had planned it
as a satyr-play after the tragedy, and, conceiving Hans Sachs as the
last example of the artistically productive Folk-spirit, had placed
him in opposition to the master-singer burgherdom, to whose droll and
rule-of-thumb pedantry he gave individual expression in the character
of the adjudicator, or _Merker_. This statement, although it was made
nearly a generation before the comedy was written, justifies the
assumption that it was his purpose in it to celebrate the triumph of
the natural poetic impulse, stimulated by communion with nature, over
pedantic formulas. But a word of caution should be uttered against the
autobiographic stamp which some extremists have wanted to impress upon
it. The comedy is not rendered more interesting or its satire more
admirable by thinking of Walther as the prototype of Wagner himself,
of Beckmesser as Wagner's opponents, and of Hans Sachs as King Ludwig,
embodying in himself, furthermore, the symbol of enlightened public
opinion, which neither despises rules nor is willing to be ridden
by them. Such an exposition of its symbolism lies near enough in
its broad lines, but there is danger in carrying it through all the
details of the plot. When it is too far pushed, critics will ask in
the future, as they have asked in the past, how this can be accepted
as the satirical motive of the comedy when the hero who triumphs over
the supposed evil principle in the drama does so, not to advance the
virtue which stands in opposition to that evil principle, but simply
to win a bride--a purpose that is purely selfish, however amiable and
commendable it may be. Walther does, indeed, discover himself as the
champion of spontaneous, vital art, and the antagonist of the pedantry
represented by the master-singers; but this is not until after he
has learned that he can only win the young lady by himself becoming
a member of the guild, and defeating all comers at the tournament of
song. Knowing none of the rules, he boldly relies on the potency of
the inspiration begotten by his love, and does his best under the
circumstances; that he ultimately succeeds he owes to the help of
Sachs, and the fact that his rival defeats himself by resorting to foul
means. Besides, to justify fully this dramatic scheme, Beckmesser ought
not to have been made the blundering idiot and foolish knave that he
appears to be in the stage versions, but at the worst a short-sighted,
narrow-minded, and perhaps malicious pedant. As he stands in the stage
representations Beckmesser is an ill-natured and wicked buffoon, a
caricature of a peculiarly gross kind, and only an infinitesimally
tiny corrective idea lies in the fact that a manly young knight who
loves a pretty young woman should have saved her from falling into such
a rival's hands by marrying her himself. He would have had the vote of
the public on his side if he had sung like a crow and Beckmesser like
Anacreon.
II.
If we will look upon the contest symbolized in the comedy, not as
that between Wagner and his contemporaries, but as between the two
elements in art whose opposition stimulates life, and whose union,
perfect, peaceful, mutually supplemental, is found in every really
great art-work, I think we shall come pretty near the truth. At least,
we will have an interesting point of view from which to study its
musical and literary structure. Simply for convenience sake let us
call these two principles Romanticism and Classicism. The terms are a
little vague, entirely arbitrary, and if we were seeking scientific
exactness we should be obliged to condemn their use. Popularly, they
are conceived as antithetical in the critical history of literature as
well as music. It is in this sense (with a difference) that I wish to
use them.
If the history of music be looked at with a view to discovering
the spirit which animates its products rather than observing their
integument, it will be found that from the beginning two forces have
been in operation, and by their antagonism have done the work of
progressive creation. In the religious chant, with its restrictive
clog (the fruit of superstitious veneration and fear) we find that
manifestation of the spirit of antique music which was chiefly
instrumental in its establishment and regulation. To that spirit
tribute above its meed is paid in the hand-books which begin the
history of modern music with the chants of the Christian Church. The
other spirit, having been cultivated outside the church, has had
fewer historians to do it reverence. It is the free, untrammelled
impulse which rests on the law of nature and refuses the domination
of formal rule and restrictive principle. On the love-song, war-song,
and hunting-song of early man, on the cradle-song crooned by early
woman, there rested not the weight of superstitious fear and hope which
fettered the religious chant. They were individual manifestations of
feeling, and in them the fancy was free to discover and use all the
tonal and rhythmical combinations which might be helpful in giving
voice to emotion. The mission of this spirit (which I will call
Romanticism to distinguish it from the conservative, and regulative
spirit which I will call Classicism) was fulfilled, during the
artificiality and all-pervading scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by
the _Minnesinger_ and _trouvère_; and though the death of chivalry
ended that peculiar ministry, the spirit continued to live as it had
lived from the beginning, as it still lives and will live _in sæcula
sæculorum_, in the people's songs and dances. When the composers of
two hundred and fifty years ago began to develop instrumental music
they found the germ of the sonata form--the form that made Beethoven's
symphonies possible--in the homely dance tunes of the people which till
then had been looked upon as vulgar things, wholly outside the domain
of polite art. The genius of the masters of the last century moulded
this form of plebeian ancestry into a vessel of wonderful beauty; but
by the time this had been done the capacity of music as an emotional
language had been greatly increased, and the same Romantic spirit
which had originally created the dance forms that they might embody
the artistic impulses of that early time, suggested the filling of the
vessel with the new contents. When the vessel would not hold these new
contents it had to be widened. New bottles for new wine. That is the
whole mystery of what conservative critics decry as the destruction of
form in music. It is not destruction, but change. When you destroy form
you destroy music, for the musical essence can manifest itself only
through form.
As a perfectly natural result of the development of this beautiful and
efficient vessel called the Sonata form, a love of symmetry and order,
of correct logic and beautiful sequence, came to dominate composers,
and it is a relic of this love, a love which we must not despise in
such masters as Haydn and Mozart, which led them to fill so many of
their compositions with repetitions of parts and conventional passages
that appear meaningless and wearisome to us. They were written in
compliance with the demands of form.
III.
For the purposes of our exposition of the symbolism of Wagner's comedy,
of the meaning of its satire, we shall have to look upon classical
composers as those who developed music chiefly on its formal side and
conserved the laws which enabled them to reach one ideal of beauty.
The Romantic composers will then be those who sought their ideals in
other regions than the formal, and strove to give them expression
irrespective--or, if necessary, in defiance--of the conventions of law.
Romanticism will appear to us as the creative principle, and hence we
shall find it in Wagner's comedy associated with Youth, its passions
and enthusiasms; with Love, and heedless, reckless daring; with Spring
and blooming time; with the singing of birds and the perfume of
flowers; with assertion of the right of unfettered utterance and denial
of the wisdom or justice of reflection and moderation.
Do not visions corresponding with these attributes rise up out of the
incidents of the play? The lovers, with their impetuous love-making
and reckless resolve which sapient Sachs frustrates; Walther's songs
in the first act, telling of Spring releasing Nature from her icy
shackles and winning her smiles, while sunlight and birds and meadow
flowers, and the old poet who sang the praises of them and was named
after the mead he loved, united in teaching him the art of song; the
bold defiance of the master-singers and their code; the rejection of
the medal when it had been won. Classicism, in turn, will appear as
the regulative and conservative principle, and its association in the
play will be with maturity of age and moderation in thought and action;
with personages in whom the creative impulse is not an elemental force,
but a pleasure or a duty which waits upon the judgment; also, for
satirical purposes, with a guild of handicraftsmen and tradespeople
who enforce an apprenticeship in art as they do in trade; who think
that by adherence to rule artworks may be created as shoes are made
over a last; who are pompous in their pedantry and amiable only in
the holy simplicity of their earnestness, their vanity, and their
complacency. Such are the associations which arise when the pictures of
the comedy are passed in hasty review; and they have been grievously
incomplete. They have omitted the real hero of the play, the poet
who belongs to the guild and upholds its laws while battling for the
spirit represented by him who falls under the condemnation of those
very laws. Where is Hans Sachs? Search him out. You will find him
in the midst of the combatants fighting valiantly _on both sides_;
representing a principle at once creative and conservative, standing,
in the history of artistic development, for those true geniuses who
breathe the breath of life into the body, not for the purpose of
destruction, but that the spirit may become manifest in the flesh.
It is contest which brings life. All the great classical composers from
Brahms back to Bach have had their moments of Romantic feeling; it is
never absent from the truly creative artist; but its most eloquent
expression was reserved for our century. You recognize it in the whole
body of instrumental music, beginning with Beethoven; you yield to its
influence when you hear the operas of Gluck, Mozart, and Weber. The
musicians whose influence was strongest when Wagner began his reforms
were frank in their protestations of allegiance to this conception of
Romanticism: "The Spirit builds the forms, or finds them ready-built,
and refashions them according to its needs and desires," said Marx.
"If you wish to adopt art as a profession you cannot accustom yourself
early enough to consider the contents of an art-work as more important
and serious a matter than its structure," said Mendelssohn, the
greatest master of form that the century has known. "That would be a
trivial art which would have only sounds but no language or signs for
the conditions of the soul," said Schumann.
Wagner was too thorough an artist, too profound a musician, not to
recognize the value of constructive law. He would have been false
to his principles and false to his practice had he written a comedy
for the purpose of glorifying mere lawlessness. Had this been his
purpose he would not have told us as he has that it was Sachs whom he
intended to oppose to the spirit of pedantry and formalism personified
in Beckmesser. Sachs has no condemnation to pronounce on the laws of
the guild of which he was the brightest ornament. On the contrary, he
upholds them even against Walther, and persuades him to adopt them in
the composition of his prize song, just as after the victory is won he
admonishes him to give the reverence due to the masters. What he learns
from Walther, and impresses on his colleagues, is the need of adapting
form to spirit, and the mental conflict which brings him to this
conviction is a reflection of that creative activity which looks to the
short-sighted like destructive war, but is exemplified in the works of
the great masters as the highest peace. We can gain an insight into the
musical structure of the comedy, and find proofs for our contention at
the same time, if we observe Sachs under the influence of this seeming
contradiction.
It is evening, and the poet has returned to his cobbler's bench. The
scent of the elder-tree, the charm of the summer night, will not
permit him to work; they turn his thoughts to poetry; but memories of
Walther's song come over him, and under their influence he can neither
work nor compose. There was an inexplicable charm in the song. No rule
would fit it, yet it was faultless. It was new and strange, yet sounded
old and familiar, like the carolling of birds in May-time. To try to
imitate it would result in shame and contumely. That he knew. Where lay
the mystery? At last he discovers it. The song was the voice of Spring,
of the heyday of the singer's life and passion. The need of utterance
brought with it the capacity and the privilege. All this we may learn
from the words of Sachs, while the music tells us of what is passing
through his mind in the intervals of his soliloquizing. This music is
built up out of a very short phrase, but it is the phrase which may be
set down as the chief musical symbol of the spirit which I have called
Romanticism:
[Illustration: score]
To learn why this phrase should haunt the mind of Sachs its genesis
must be traced. It is found first to enter the score of the drama
(after the prelude) to accompany a tender but urgent glance of inquiry
which Walther bestows on Eva in the first scene between the lines of
the _chorale_ sung by the congregation:
[Illustration: score]
Next, when Eva shyly rebukes his ardor with a glance, but quickly
returns it with emotion:
[Illustration: score]
When the congregation breaks up, Walther, gazing intently on Eva, from
whom he had received a look which confessed her love (accompanied by
a phrase which afterwards plays an important role in his prize song),
hurries to address her; his eagerness is published by the orchestra in
this variation of the phrase:
[Illustration: score]
A threefold augmentation of the phrase is shown in these examples,
which suffice to identify it with one of the fundamental feelings
concerned in the play. It depicts or typifies the youthful impetuosity
of the lovers, the ardor of their passion before it had been confessed
in words. Is not its fitness for such a mission obvious? Observe the
eagerness which the triplet injects into its rhythm, the ebulliency
expressed by the tendency of its melody to ascend ever higher and
higher in the regions of tonality. Poetical association consorts
analogous attributes with Love and Youth and Spring-time; and it is in
the song which Walther sings in praise of Spring and Love--his trial
song in the first act--that the phrase receives its most eloquent
treatment. Note the irrepressible enthusiasm of its proclamation in
this song (_Fanget an!_); how, after a peaceful announcement, it
surges upward and ever upward in the accompaniment, until the voice
can no longer hold out against but is borne up on it, until left by a
scintillant explosion which seems to be the only means at hand to bring
the jubilant phrase back into control. This is the Romantic expression
which haunted the mind of Sachs when, after the stormy meeting in St.
Catherine's Church, he thought to work in the perfumed quiet of the
evening.
IV.
In broad lines the prelude to "Die Meistersinger" not only serves to
delineate the characteristic traits of the personages concerned in
the comedy, but also exhibits Wagner's method of musical exposition,
and teaches the lesson which is at the bottom of the satire--the
lesson, namely, that it is through the union of the two principles,
which until the close of the play appear in conflict, that a genuine
work of art is quickened. The prelude contains the whole symbolism
of the comedy in a nutshell. In form it is unique, but in so far as
it employs only melodies drawn from the play it may not incorrectly
be classed with the medley overtures which composers used to throw
together for ante-curtain music. It is the manner in which Wagner
has treated his melodies, and the delineative capacity with which he
has endowed them, that render the prelude a capital exemplification
of the theory advanced by Gluck, when, in his preface to "Alceste,"
he said, "I imagined that the overture ought to prepare the audience
for the action of the piece, and serve as a kind of argument to it."
Wagner follows this precept and the example set by Beethoven in the
"Leonore" overtures, and indicates the elements of the plot, their
progress in its development, and finally the outcome, in his symphonic
introduction. The melodies which are its constructive material are
of two classes, broadly distinguished in external physiognomy and
emotional essence. They are presented first consecutively, then as in
conflict (first one, then another, pushing forward for expression),
finally in harmonious and contented union. It should always be borne in
mind that no matter how numerous the hand-books--which a witty German
critic called "musical Baedeckers"--if one wishes to know Wagner's
purpose in the use of a typical phrase or melody, he need take no one's
word for it except Wagner's. He can turn to the score and trace it out
himself, learning its meaning from the words and situations with which
it is associated. If this plan be followed, it will be seen that the
master-singers are throughout the comedy characterized by two melodies,
[Illustration: score]
and
[Illustration: score]
Note that as the master-singers belonged to the solid burghers of
old Nuremberg--a little vain, as was to be expected in the upholders
of an institution of great antiquity and glorious traditions; staid,
dignified, and complacent, as became the free citizens of a free
imperial city, whose stout walls sheltered the best in art and
science that Germany could boast--so these two melodies are strong,
simple tunes; sequences of the intervals of the simple diatonic
scale; strongly and simply harmonized; square-cut in rhythm; firm
and dignified, if a trifle pompous, in their stride. The three
melodies belonging to the class presented in opposition to the spirit
represented by the master-singers are disclosed by a study of the
comedy to be associated with the passion of the young lovers, Walther
and Eva, and those influences in nature which are the inspiration
of romantic utterance--spring-time, the birds, and flowers. They
differ in every respect--melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, as well as in
treatment--from the melodies which stand for the old master-singers and
their notions. They are chromatic; their rhythms are less regular and
more eager (through the agency of syncopation); they are harmonized
with greater warmth, and set for the instruments with greater passion.
The first,
[Illustration: score]
most surely tells us of the incipiency of the lovers' passion, for it
is the subject of the interludes between the lines of the _chorale_
which accompany the flirtation in the church scene. The second,
[Illustration: score]
is again concerned with the passion, showing it in the phase of ardent
longing. Another is the melody to which Walther sings the last stanza
of his prize song. I have already quoted and described it as the
phrase to which Eva confesses her love by a gesture of the eyes in the
church scene. Lest the significance of that telltale glance should
not be recognized, observe that both lovers use the melody in their
protestations of devotion to each other at parting:
[Illustration: score]
The fourth is the impatiently aspiring phrase described in the analysis
of Sachs' monologue.
There is another theme which is of less importance, seemingly, in the
score, but which plays a happy part in the comedy as it is prefigured
in the prelude. It is the rhythmically strongly-marked phrase with
which the populace jeers at Beckmesser, and effects his discomfiture in
the final scene of the play.
[Illustration: score]
This little phrase it is which performs the duty of musical satirist
in the middle part of the prelude, where the grotesque elements in the
character of Beckmesser are pictured. It is a _scherzando_ movement,
the master-singers' march melody being presented in diminution by the
choir of wood-wind instruments, which persist stubbornly in their
fussy cackling, in spite of the fact that the strings take every
opportunity to send some of the passionate, pushing, pulsating love
music surging through the desiccated mass of tones. Here it is that
Wagner chastises the foolish manners of the master-singers, as he does
later in the actual representation. The jeering phrase, started by the
middle strings, eventually cuts through the mass of tones, and when
the caricature of the broad melody, typical of the master-singers,
has been laughed out of court, the music which exemplifies the
freshness and vigor of Youth and Spring and Love, and their right
to free and spontaneous proclamation, masters the orchestra and
conquers recognition, and even celebration, from the representatives
of conservatism and pedantry. In the musical contest it is only the
perverted idea of Classicism which is treated with contumely and
routed; the glorification of the triumph of Romanticism is found in the
stupendously pompous and brilliant setting given to the master-singers'
music at the end.
You see already in this prelude that Wagner is a true comedian. He
administers chastisement with a smile (_ridendo castigat mores_), and
chooses for its subject only things which are temporary aberrations
from the good. What is strong and true and pure and wholesome in the
art of the master-singers he permits to pass through his satirical
fires unscathed. Classicism in its original sense, as the conservator
of that which is highest and best in art, he leaves unharmed,
presenting her after her trial, as Tennyson presents his Princess, at
the close of his corrective poem, when
"All
Her falser self slipt from her like a robe,
And left her woman, lovelier in her mood
Than in her mould that other, when she came
From barren deeps to conquer all with love."
V.
The third act of the comedy is preceded by a prelude which, rightly
understood, reflects the cobbler-poet whom I have chosen to think the
real hero of the play, in the light in which he appears in the history
of German civilization and culture. Twice before, in the comedy, a
glimpse of him in that character had been given--in the summer evening,
after the meeting, when he could not work because he was haunted by the
memory of Walther's song, and again when, having found the solution
of the problem raised by that song, he drove away all the phantoms of
melancholy by his lusty cobbling song. Apparently that song is all
carelessness and contentment, but in reality it tells of the lofty
thinker and his melancholy, bred of his contemplation of the vanities
of the things with which he finds himself surrounded.
This is the last stanza:
"O Eve, my sore complaints attend,
My needs and dire distresses,
For underfoot mankind the cobbler's work of art oppresses.
If I'd no angel knew
What 'tis to make a shoe,
I'd leave this cobbling in a trice.
But when I go to his retreat,
I leave the world beneath my feet,
Myself I view, Hans Sachs a shoemaker and song-master too!"
In the accompaniment to this stanza a phrase appears in the orchestra
(it is not in the simplified pianoforte scores) in which, as Wagner
himself puts it, there is "the bitter cry of resignation of the man
who shows to the world a cheerful and energetic mien." It is the
solemn phrase which gives character and color to Sachs' monologue in
the third act, when he contemplates the follies and petty passions of
humanity (_Wahn! Wahn! überall Wahn!_). It symbolizes for us Sachs,
the philosopher. To appreciate the full significance of the Nuremberg
cobbler as poet and thinker, a glance must be thrown upon a highly
important phase in the history of German culture. A new melody had
been put into that voice by the Reformation. Luther lived to be hailed
by it as "the Nightingale of Wittenberg" in a poem whose opening lines
Wagner ingeniously uses as a tribute to Sachs in the third act of the
comedy. It is the chorale, _Wach auf! Es nahet gen dem Tag._
The Reformation had revived interest in the old art of master-song
which had sunk into decadence under the edict of the Romish Church
prohibiting the reading of the Bible by the common people. The greatest
of the Nuremberg school of master-singers was inspired by the new dawn,
and Luther and Melanchthon looked up from the pages of Homer, Virgil,
and Horace to listen to the strange new melody which felt and sang with
and for the people. This character of Sachs, in all the details that I
have pointed out, is delineated in the prelude to the third act, whose
melodic contents are thus summarized: First, the contemplative phrase,
_Wahn! Wahn!_ next the Lutheran chorale, _Wach auf!_ a portion of the
cobbling song ("as if the man had turned his gaze from his handiwork
heavenwards, and was lost in tender musing," says Wagner); then the
chorale again, with increased sonority, and eventually the opening
phrase attuned to cheerfulness and resignation.
VI.
Wagner's "Meistersinger von Nürnberg" is a comedy, and by that token is
more difficult of understanding and appreciation by persons unfamiliar
with the German tongue, history, and social customs than any of his
tragedies. In considering the latter, it is only the elements of
expression that need give us pause. In their essence, being true
tragedies, they are as much the property of one race as another.
This is not the case with comedies. They do not deal with the great
fundamental passions of humanity, but with the petty foibles and
follies and vices of a people. Being such, they vary with peoples and
with times, and their representation compels the use of historical
backgrounds, the application of local color. "Die Meistersinger" is
a capital illustration of this principle of dramatic poetry. As a
picture of the social life of a German city three hundred years ago
its vividness and truthfulness are beyond praise; it has no equal in
operatic literature, and few peers in the literature of the spoken
drama. It is absolutely photographic in its accuracy. To appreciate
this fact fully one must have visited Nuremberg, gone through its
museum, and turned over the records. With such assistance it is easy
to call up in fancy such a vision of its social life in the middle of
the sixteenth century as will form a most harmonious setting for the
series of pictures which Wagner created. It is still the quaintest
city in Germany, and full of relics of its old glory. Of these relics,
however, fewer belong to the time of the master-singers than an
investigator would be likely to imagine. In the Germanic Museum may
be found remains of many of the old guilds of the town, but none of
the Master-singers' Guild, except a tablet which once hung on the
walls of St. Catherine's Church and has been removed to the museum for
safe-keeping. The church, indeed, is still in existence, but its use
by the master-singers never brought it fame until after Wagner's comic
opera had been written, and now I doubt whether a hundred residents
of Nuremberg, aside from those who live in the immediate vicinity,
could even tell a visitor where to find it. For more than a century
it has been put to secular uses, and nothing of the interior remains
to indicate what it looked like in the time of Hans Sachs except the
walls. All the furniture and decorations were long ago removed, for
it has been a painters' academy, drawing-school, military hospital,
warehouse, public hall, and perhaps a dozen other things since it
ceased to be a place of public worship. Just now it is the paint-shop
of the Municipal Theatre. It is a small, unpretentious building,
absolutely innocent of architectural beauty, hidden away in the middle
of a block of lowly buildings used as dwellings, carpenter-shops,
and the like. I got the keys from a sort of police supervisor of
the district and inspected the interior in 1886. The janitor knew
nothing about its history beyond his own memory, and that compassed
only a portion of its career as a sort of municipal lumber-room. It
was built in the last half-decade of the thirteenth century, and on
its water-stained walls can be seen faint bits of the frescos which
once adorned it and were painted in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries; but they are ruined beyond recognition or hope of
restoration. I went to the director of the Germanic Museum to learn
what had become of the old church furniture. He did not know.
"Have you seen the tablet of the master-singers which we have
up-stairs?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Well, that is all that we have in the way of master-singer relics. If
you have seen that and the church, you have seen all, and will have to
compose the rest of the picture--draw on your imagination, or hire an
artist to do it for you."
The tablet is really a more interesting relic than the church. It is a
small affair of wood, with two doors, and was painted by a Franz Hein
in 1581. On the doors are portraits of four distinguished members of
the guild. Two pictures occupy the middle panel, the upper, with a
charmingly naïve disregard of chronology, showing King David praying
before a crucifix; the lower, a meeting of master-singers with a
singer perched in a box-like pulpit. Over the heads of the assemblage
is a representation of the chain and medallion with which the victor
in a singing contest used to be decorated. Sachs gave one of these
ornaments to the guild, and it was used for a hundred years. By that
time, however, it had become so worn that Johann Christoph Wagenseil, a
professor of Oriental languages at the University of Altdorf (to whose
book, entitled _De Sacri Rom. Imperii Libera Civitate Noribergensi
Commentatio_, printed in 1697, we owe the greater part of our knowledge
of the art and customs of the _Meistersinger_), replaced it with
another. The tablet might offer suggestions to the theatrical costumer
touching the dress of the master-singers, and also the picture of David
and his harp which ornamented their banner; but old Nuremberg costumes
are familiar enough, and can be studied to better purpose elsewhere.
Only one feature suggests itself as worthy of special notice. On the
tablet the master-singers all appear wearing the immense neck-ruff of
the Elizabethan period. As for the architectural settings of the stage
in the first act (which plays in the Church of St. Catherine), so far
as I know no attempt at correctness has been made by scene-painters;
nor would it be possible to reproduce a picture of the church and still
follow Wagner's stage directions. Evidently the poet-composer never
took the trouble to visit the Church of St. Catherine.
[Illustration: WOODEN TABLET OF THE MASTERSINGERS OF NUREMBERG.]
I have said that, barring the church and tablet, there are no relics
of the old guild to be found in the Nuremberg of to-day. Until
lately it was supposed that the Municipal Library contained a number
of autographic manuscripts by Hans Sachs, but when I asked for them,
they were produced with the statement that they were no longer looked
upon as genuine. It did not require much investigation to convince
me that the claim long maintained that they were autographs of the
cobbler-poet rested wholly on presumption. Sachs autographs are
extremely scarce. The Royal Library at Berlin possesses a volume of
master-songs known to be in the handwriting of Sachs (among them is one
by Beckmesser), but when I was in the Prussian capital this treasure
was in Dresden, whither it had been sent to enable a literary student
to utilize it in the preparation of a book on Sachs. A Berlin scholar,
whom I found at work in the Nuremberg Library gathering material
for a new biography of Sachs, informed me that the greatest number
of Sachs autographs, and they not many, had been found in Zwickau,
whither they had been brought by some member of the Sachs family many
years ago. There are, then, no manuscript relics of him who was the
chief glory of the Nuremberg guild in the old town. You may drink a
glass of wine at the street-corner where tradition says the old poet
cobbled and composed, but the house is a modern one. Of his companions
in the guild I found no manuscripts in the library, and not one of
them left his mark in any way on the town. But I did find a number of
old manuscript volumes dating back two hundred years or more, which
served to vitalize in a peculiarly interesting manner the record which
the learned old Wagenseil left behind him, and some of the personages
of Wagner's comedy. Those who have taken the trouble to investigate
the source to which Wagner went for the people and customs introduced
in his "Meistersinger von Nürnberg" (Wagenseil's book) know that the
names of the master-singers who figure in the comedy once belonged to
veritable members of the Nuremberg guild. Wagenseil mentions them as
singers whose memories were cherished in his day, and some of them
were also mentioned by an older author, whose book, devoted chiefly
to the Strassburg guild, which at one time was even more famous than
that of Nuremberg, is referred to by Wagenseil. The book of the
Strassburg writer, singularly enough, was known to Wagenseil only as a
manuscript, and such it remained until two or three decades ago, when
it was printed by a literary society at Stuttgart. In Wagenseil's day
it was valued so highly that it was kept wrapped in silk, like the
sacred scrolls of the Jews, a circumstance that enabled the pedantic
Orientalist to air his learning on the subject for many pages in his
wofully discursive but extremely interesting book. But if Wagenseil
had not given his testimony, I could now bear witness to the fact that
Conrad Nachtigal, Hans Schwartz, Conrad Vogelgesang, Sixtus Beckmesser,
Hans Folz, Fritz Kothner, Balthasar Zorn, and Veit Pogner once lived
as well as Hans Sachs. I have read some of their poems and copied some
of the melodies invented by them and utilized by their successors in
the guild. The volumes containing these curiosities of literature have
been in the Municipal Library over one hundred years. In the catalogue
of the Bibliotheca Norica Williana, printed one hundred and sixteen
years ago, they are mentioned as having been purchased from an old
master-singer. Five of them are small oblong books of music paper,
upon which some old masters or apprentices in the art of master-song
have copied melodies which were much used at the meetings in St.
Catherine's Church. It was the custom of the members of the guild
to compose poems to fit these melodies. In the second scene of his
opera Wagner mentions a great many of the singular titles by which
these melodies or modes were designated. He got them from Wagenseil.
Besides these books, there are two immense manuscript volumes, in
which some industrious old lover of the poetical art transcribed songs
which he evidently thought admirable. They are each almost as large
as Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and must represent months, if not
years, of labor. One is devoted wholly to German paraphrases of Ovid's
"Metamorphoses," set to a great variety of melodies. The author is M.
Ambrosius Metzger, who was one of the few members of the guild who were
scholars. He wrote the poems in 1625. The other volume contains songs
by a great number of master-singers, though Hans Sachs is the principal
contributor. The plan of the volume indicates that it was a collection
of admired poems. It begins with paraphrases from the Pentateuch.
Some early pages are missing, the first poem preserved dealing with
the sixth chapter of Genesis. Chronological order is maintained up to
chapter twenty-eight of the same book. Then follow songs dealing with
the Gospels and Epistles. The Book of Job is not forgotten. Finally,
there are a number of secular poems, many recounting Æsop's fables and
anecdotes drawn from old writers. Songs of this character were composed
by the master-singers for diversion at their informal gatherings. At
the meetings in the Church of St. Catherine only sacred subjects were
allowed. It is for this reason that Wagner's Kothner asks Walther in
the opera whether he had chosen sacred matter (_ein heil'gen Stoff_)
for his trial song, which provokes the reply from the ardent young
knight that he would sing of love, a subject sacred to him. Whether
sacred or secular, however, the form and style of the songs are
alike. Nothing could more completely illustrate the absurdity of the
fundamental theory of the foolish old pedants that poetry might be
written by rule of thumb than the publication of a few of the songs in
this old book. The nature of the poetical frenzy which fills them can,
perhaps, be guessed if I record the fact that the majority of them, I
think, begin with a citation of chapter and verse, or some statement
equally matter of fact, as thus:
"The twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis records," or "Diogenes, the wise
master," or "Strabo writes of the customs," or "Moses, the eleventh,
reports," or "The Lesser Book of Truth doth tell," etc.
The last of these lines is the beginning of a master-song which has
a twofold interest. In the first place, it is a secular poem by Hans
Sachs which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been printed or
written about. In the second place, it is set to a melody by the
veritable Pogner who, in Wagner's comedy, offers his daughter and his
fortune to the winner in the singing contest which makes up Wagner's
last act. The poem is so amusing that I would like to give it entire
in English, but its irregularity of accent and peculiarities of
rhyme do not lend themselves willingly to translation. Of musical
accent the master-singers, who followed the rhyming rules of those
marvellously ingenious rhymesters the _Minnesinger_, had not the
slightest idea. Wagner knew that. Sachs' first critical tap on his
lapstone in Beckmesser's serenade is evoked by a blunder in accent
which the veritable Sachs would have passed unnoticed, though, being a
real poet, his sins in this respect were not as numerous as those of
his colleagues and predecessors. I content myself, therefore, with the
first _Stollen_, or stanza, and its _Abgesang_, or burden, which the
curious student will find to be composed in strict accordance with the
rules which, in the opera, Kothner reads from the blackboard. These
_Leges Tabulaturæ_, by-the-way, are almost a literal transcription from
the original laws preserved in Wagenseil's book. The matter of the song
is this: A boor falls ill. Finding that his appetite is wholly gone,
he calls in a physician, who informs him (in a drastic fashion) that
the trouble is caused by an accumulation of slime in the stomach. He
administers a purgative, but without result. The sickness increases,
and the boor upbraids the doctor, who retorts that his patient will
be a dead man within an hour unless he consent to having his stomach
taken out and scoured with chalk. The boor consents, the physician
performs the operation, cutting the man open with a pair of shears,
brushes out the offending organ with a wisp, and hangs it on the fence
to dry. What the farmer does meanwhile is not recorded; but before
the physician could replace his stomach a raven carried it off to the
woods and ate it. In this dilemma the physician disclosed himself as
a worthy progenitor of the modern race of surgeons. He was terribly
frightened, but didn't let any one see it. By stealth he procured a
sow's stomach, introduced it into the farmer's body, and quickly sewed
up the aperture. The farmer got well, and paid eight florins for the
job. But heavens, what an appetite was that which he developed! To
satisfy him now was utterly impossible, for which reason, concludes the
moralist, an insatiable eater is nowadays said to be a hog (literally
"to have a sow's stomach"), who devours more than he produces, as many
women lament:
"Darum spricht man noch von ein Man,
Den man gar nicht erfuellen kan,
Wie er hab einen Sawmagen;
Verthut mehr denn er gewinnen kan,
Hoert man vil Frawen klagen."
FIRST _STOLLEN_.
[Illustration: score]
The Less - er Book of Truth doth tell,
How ill - ness on a boor once fell,
Taste for all food de - stroy - ing;
A - gainst all drugs it did re - bel,
His pleas - ures all al - loy - ing.......
One day there came a doc - tor wise,
Who glanced him o'er with search - ing eyes,
Found out what caused his ail - ing.
His learn - ing proof a - gainst sur - prise,
Made work like that plain sail - ing.......
THE _ABGESANG_.
[Illustration: score]
"Far - mer, of all your pains... the cause,
Is slime with - in your stom - ach wide dis - tend - ing."
The far - mer heard with gap - - ing jaws,
For gnaw - ing pains in - side his paunch were rend - ing.
The tale is an old one, popular in one form or another in the Middle
Ages. A variant of it is to be found in the _Gesta Romanorum_, to which
extraordinary collection of moral tales it is possible that Sachs
had reference when he spoke of the _Buch der Kleinen Wahrheit_, or
Lesser Book of Truth, as I have rendered it. In the _Gesta_, however,
the physician substitutes a goat's eye, and subjects his patient to
an extraordinary strabismus. Hans Sachs's variation is eminently
characteristic of the man and the people for whom he wrote.
CHAPTER IV.
"DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN."
The common error of looking upon the outward covering of things for the
things themselves has led to the real plot of Wagner's tetralogical
drama "The Niblung's Ring" being overlooked by the majority of persons
who have written about it. Especially has the significance of the
prologue to the tragedy failed of appreciation. I shall try to tell
what I conceive to be the true story of the tragedy, and at least hint
at the meaning which that story had when it came into the mind of the
sagaman and myth-maker ages ago, which meaning, moreover, Richard
Wagner, unlike his modern predecessors among the poets who have treated
the subject, apprehended and conserved.
It is a pretty solemn fact that unless this tragedy in four parts be
approached with other aims than mere diversion, much will be found
in it that appears ridiculous to the judgment, no matter how it
affects the senses. To some it may seem a fatal confession to say
that sincere and sufficient enjoyment of "The Niblung's Ring" is only
to be had by persons willing to let critical judgment wait upon the
imagination; yet I am willing to make that confession, and even to
augment it by the statement that there are scenes in the tragedy when
even this unfettered faculty must needs be as ingenuous as the "raised
imagination" of Charles Lamb at his first play, which transformed
the glistering substance on the pillars of Old Drury into "glorified
sugar-candy." Yet I do not believe that thereby the potential beauty,
impressiveness, and significance of the tragedy are brought into
question. Is it not easy to conceive of a mental condition which would
accept such a childlike receptivity as the only mood in which an
art-work designed to appeal to emotions which the humdrum routine of
modern life leaves untouched ought to be approached? Wagner's "Ring des
Nibelungen" is not an idle fairy-tale, the offspring of a mind working
with fanciful material amid the environment of the nineteenth century.
It is a tragedy Hellenic in its scope and proportions, dealing with one
of the great problems of human existence, reflecting the operations of
the quickened mind and conscience of humanity in its impressionable
childhood.
"Das Rheingold" is the prologue to a tragedy which has not only the
dimensions, but also the aim, of a Greek trilogy. This conception of
its dignity greatly widens the significance of its few incidents. Of
necessity? Yes. Observe the manner in which Wagner approaches his
subject. The hero of the mediæval epic popularly called "The Lay of
the Niblung" is Siegfried; and this story of Siegfried is mixed with
considerable historical alloy. The character of Gunther, which figures
in the story, is Gundikar, founder of the Burgundian monarchy, who was
slain by Attila, A.D. 450. Attila himself is one of the personages of
the poem, the scene of which plays largely at Worms.
It was Wagner's aim to illustrate a profound truth of universal
bearing, and in harmony with his belief that such truths are
best taught by presenting pictures of humanity stripped of all
conventionality, he went back to the earliest forms of the tale which
the mediæval poet wove into the "Lay of the Niblung." By this means
he purified it of its historical dross; but also came in contact with
the creations of the myth-maker. The period into which he moved his
drama was the period reflected by our Northern ancestors when they
were striving by an exercise of a vivid imagination and unyielding
logic to answer the questions raised by a primitive religious instinct.
Whether we want to or not, we must look upon "The Niblung's Ring" as a
religious play which, by means of the symbols created by the Northern
myth-maker, teaches a lesson universal and eternal in its application.
I.
No legend dealing with the deep passions of human nature, and
reflecting the tragic struggle between the human and the divine, which
has been playing on the stage of the human heart since the race began,
is restricted by the circumstances of time, place, or people. If it
is really beautiful and moving it is a bit of universal property, and
in one form or another phases of it will be found in the mythology
or folk-lore of all civilized peoples. Not only the foundation
principles of such a legend, but even its theatre and apparatus may be
discovered. Parallels in religious mythologies will readily occur, but
perhaps not so readily parallels in those heroic tales which reflect
the national characteristics of peoples. Yet they are not the less
numerous. The grotto of Venus, in which Tannhäuser steeps himself
with sensuality, is but a German form of the Garden of Delight, in
which the heroes of classic antiquity met their fair enslavers. It is
Ogygia, the Delightful Island, where Ulysses met Calypso. It is that
Avalon in which King Arthur was healed of his wounds by his fairy
sister Morgain. The staff which bursts into green in the hands of
Pope Urban in token of Tannhäuser's forgiveness has prototypes in the
lances which, when planted in the ground by Charlemagne's warriors,
were transformed over night into a leafy forest; in the staff which
put on leaves in the hands of Joseph wherefore the Virgin Mary gave
herself to him in marriage; in the rod of Aaron, which, when laid
up among others in the tabernacle, "brought forth buds and bloomed
blossoms and yielded almonds." The _Tarnhelm_ which the cunning Mime
fashions at the command of Alberich, what else is it but the Mask of
Arthur, which had the power of rendering its wearer invisible, or the
Helmet of Pluto worn by Perseus in his battle with the Gorgon? The Holy
Grail, which Wagner has surrounded with such a refulgent halo, is not
merely a relic of Christ's suffering and death. Its power of supplying
food and sustaining life identifies it with an article common to the
mystical apparatus of many peoples. As Achilles was dipped into Styx
and rendered invulnerable, so Jason was smeared with Medea's ointment,
and Siegfried became covered with a horny armor when he bathed in the
dragon's blood; and as the magic wash was kept from Achilles's heel
by the hand of Thetis, so the falling of a leaf from a lime-tree on
the back of Siegfried caused the one unprotected spot through which a
weapon might reach his life. The sword of Wotan, thrust into the tree
so firmly and miraculously that none but a hero worthy to wield it and
inspired by the desperation of supremest need might draw it from its
mighty sheath, what else is it than the "fair sword" which stuck in the
marble stone in the church-yard against the high altar, which all the
barons assayed in vain to draw forth, but which young Arthur "lightly
and fiercely" pulled out of the stone, by which token he was recognized
as rightwise king of England? Or, going back further into story-land,
who does not see in it that bow of Ulysses which the wicked suitors
of Penelope vainly strove to bend, but which yielded to the hero
disguised as a beggar with such ease "as a harper in tuning of his harp
draws out a string?"
Horus, Apollo, and Baldur in Egypt, Greece, and the savage Northland
have represented the highest union of physical and moral excellencies
to millions of human beings; and when the Norse myth-maker, exercising
his imagination under the influence of that need and longing and hope
on which Plato based his argument in proof of the immortality of the
soul, drew his picture of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, the end
of the old regime of brute force, of gods and giants, and the return of
Baldur and his reign of peace, gentleness, and loveliness, he felt the
emotions with which the Christian of to-day looks forward to the second
coming of Christ the Redeemer.
So striking are the parallels between the heroic tales of the class to
which the story of Siegfried belongs, that it has been possible for
Dr. J. G. von Hahn, in his _Sagwissenschaftliche Studien_, to draw
up a formula according to which the families belonging to the Aryan
race have constructed their most admired tales. This formula, he says,
exists more or less perfect in the heroic literature of every known
Aryan people. Hellenic mythology produced no less than seven of these
stories, of which the most striking are those of Perseus, Theseus,
Œdipus, and Herakles; Roman mythological history, one--Romulus and
Remus; Teutonic sagas, two--Wittich-Siegfried and Wolfdietrich;
Iranian mythic history, two, and Hindu mythology, two, the most
striking parallelisms occurring in the story of Krishna. Of this story
Mr. Alfred Nutt has found eight variants in old Keltic literature,
among them the story of Perceval. According to this formula
I. The hero is born
(_a_) Out of wedlock.
(_b_) Posthumously.
(_c_) Supernaturally
(_d_) One of twins.
II. The mother is a princess residing in her own country.
III. The father is
(_a_) A god, or
} from afar.
(_b_) A hero
IV. There are tokens and warnings of the hero's future greatness;
V. In consequence of which he is driven from home.
VI. Is suckled by wild beasts.
VII. Is brought up by a childless couple, or shepherd, or widow.
VIII. Is of passionate and violent disposition.
IX. Seeks service in foreign lands.
(_a_) Attacks and slays monsters.
(_b_) Acquires supernatural knowledge through eating a fish or other
magic animal (the dragon's heart in the case of Sigurd, his
blood in the case of Siegfried).
X. Returns to his own country, retreats, and again returns.
XI. Overcomes his enemies, frees his mother, seats himself on a throne.
II.
We should accustom ourselves to look upon the plot of "The Niblung's
Ring" as more celestial than terrestrial; the essential things of
the tragedy are those which concern Wotan, who is its real hero. The
happenings among the personages whose conduct under varying trying
circumstances is brought to notice in the three dramas constituting
the trilogy are, in reality, but accidents. In this respect "The
Niblung's Ring" is in a different case with Homer's _Iliad_ which also
has a double plot, celestial and terrestrial. The cause of the contest
celebrated in the _Iliad_ originated on earth; the gods took part in
it simply to avenge slights which had been put upon them by one or
another of the contestants, or because they were the special protectors
of certain of those personages. In Wagner's tragedy the contest waged
by the demi-gods, giants, dwarfs, and men, is but the continuation
of one invited by the gods. It is the consequence of a sin committed
by the chief god and his efforts to repair it. That consequence, in
its last and chiefest estate, is the destruction of Wotan and all his
fellows; this is what it signifies to all those concerned in it, but
to us it means a destruction followed by a new creation. Wotan dies
like a tragic hero, and his heroic offspring--the bond connecting gods
and men--die one after another, all in consequence of his sin; but the
death of the last, being the expiatory self-sacrifice of loving woman,
removes the curse from the earth. "Old things are passed away; behold,
all things are become new." This is the kernel of the plot of the
tragedy, the beginning of which is exhibited in "The Rhinegold," and
the outcome prefigured. The progress is from the state of sinlessness,
through sin and its awful consequences, to expiation. For each of these
steps there are symbols in the pictures, poetry, and music of the
prologue.
The gods of our ancestors in the Northland were created in the image
of man. Originally the feeling of religion had been satisfied by the
conception of a dynasty of gods who, if they were made in the image
of man, were at least idealized; they had none of the passions of
men, none of their infirmities, none of their trials. When, in later
times, the impossibility of such a conception maintaining itself became
manifest, humanity among the rugged mountains and in the deep forests
of the North dreamed of a time that was past, before the reign of
primeval sinlessness and peacefulness had come to an end. That was the
Golden Age of the world. Wrong was unknown; the passions which wreck
men's lives and beget wrong were unknown; it was the state of Eden
before the advent of the tempter. The silence of peace rested upon
the waters. Gold was the symbol of radiant innocency; it was but the
plaything of the gods. As in Milton's Eden, flowers were of all hue,
"And without thorn the rose."
"----Airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on the eternal Spring."
Put aside the prosaic frame of mind into which the Wolzogen labels are
calculated to throw one, and look at the instrumental introduction
to the prologue as a symbol of this state of physical and moral
loveliness. Could the peacefulness and passionlessness of primeval
purity be better typified in music? There are three aspects in which
the introduction should be viewed. It is most significant in this study
of the tragedy as a type of the Golden Age in Northern mythology. Not
until the principle of evil enters the play (in the person of Alberich)
is the serenity of the music disturbed.
Next, it is interesting as scenic music. By ingenious use of gauze
screens, painted canvas, and light-effects, the stage is made to seem
filled with water from floor to flies. Strange plants creep up the
side, and gnarled roots project into the water. Below is the rocky bed
of the Rhine. Above, a faint light plays on the rippling surface.
The music has begun with a single deep tone, but gradually it grows
more animated; there is no change in melody, but the introduction of
instruments with lighter and lighter tone-color, the introduction and
carefully graduated augmentation of a wavy accompaniment, suggest to
the ear at once growth in the movement of the water and in the light
which shines from above. The music is now doubly delineative. While
its spirit reflects the sinless quietude of the Golden Age of the
world, its matter depicts, first, the slow movement of the water in its
depths, then the gentle undulations of its half-depths, finally the
ripples and dartings and flashings and eddyings of its surface.
The third aspect in which we may look at it is as a peculiarly
striking exemplification of Wagner's theories of composition carried
out to their most logical conclusion. That theory in its extremity
would demand that nothing be said when there is nothing to say--a
self-evident proposition much oftener honored in the breach than in
the observance. Remember that Wagner, in giving an account of the
genesis of his typical phrases cites his conduct in "Der Fliegende
Holländer," when, having found themes to stand for the mental states
described in the ballad, he resolved to repeat its thematic expression
every time a mental mood recurred. A necessary corollary of such a
logical proceeding would seem to be that until the play had introduced
something--a picture, a personage, an idea--there could be no room for
music. It is not necessary to go to this extremity; but if we want to
we will find that Wagner is true to himself even here. Only the mood of
the scene is delineated for us in the music of the introduction, and
his willingness to begin as near nothing as possible is shown by the
use at the outset of the single deep bass tone. The whole introduction
is built on this note and its simplest harmony, the development being
accomplished by the gradual changes of orchestration, the employment of
higher octaves, and the augmentation of the wavy accompaniment.
III.
It was an inevitable consequence of the structure of the Northern
mythological system that the gods should lose their primeval
sinlessness. Before the mind of the Northern myth-maker, as before
the minds of the Athenians, who erected the altar on Mars-hill "to
the Unknown God," there hovered a dim apprehension of a First Cause
of all being, older and more puissant than the gods whom he conceived
as reigning. As Zeus and his fellows reigned by reason of having
overthrown Cronos and the dynasty of the Titans, so Wotan and his
fellows reigned by reason of conquest and treaty. In consequence,
there was a perpetual struggle between the sky-dwellers, the
mountain-dwellers, and the earth-dwellers--the gods, giants, and
dwarfs--for dominion. This lust for power it was that caused the
downfall of the gods. Dormant within the radiant gold, buried in the
Rhine and guarded by the daughters of the Rhine, lay the secret of
universal dominion. In the Golden Age no one courted it because there
was no need. But when the greed of power and gain asserted itself, the
gold was a prize to be sought after and bought at any price. The first
change in the stage picture still leaves us the spirit of purity and
innocency undisturbed. The Rhine daughters, whose duty it is to guard
the magical gold, are careless creatures, as well they may be, for,
though warned, they have never seen danger approach their treasure.
Floating up and down, they sing and gambol with each other as they swim
around the jagged rock, their song being as undulating as the element
in which they live. They partake in their nature of that element, and
the melodies with which they are associated are imitative of watery
movements.
The beginning of the end of the Golden Age was dated by the old poets
from the time when three giantesses were admitted among the gods. They
were the Nornir, the Fates, whose deep thoughts were given respectively
to the past, present, and future. The entrance of a stranger into the
domains of the Rhine daughters is also the signal for the introduction
of evil into the drama. The representative of this evil principle
is Alberich, the Niblung--one of the race of dwarfs; musically his
mischievous character, his restless energy, and his strangeness to
the element in which he finds himself is told by the orchestra in
the abrupt, jerky music to which he enters, and which accompanies
his slipping and sliding on the slimy rocks of the river's bottom.
Alberich's aims were simply lust. To the nixies he is merely amusing.
They engage him in tormenting dalliance till he utters an imprecation
against them and shakes his fist. He forgets his anger at his pretty
tantalizers, however, when a new spectacle falls upon his sight. The
sunlight, piercing the water, has fallen upon the gold, which lies in
the cleft of a rock and now begins to glow. The increasing refulgence
is seen and heard simultaneously, for as the new light floods the
scene, singers and orchestra break out into a ravishing apostrophe to
the gold.
Now we reach the point where the ethical contest, at the bottom of the
entire tragedy, is first foreshadowed. The nixies, rendered careless
by the long uselessness of their watch, prattle away the secret that
universal power would be the reward of him who would seize the gold and
fashion it into a ring:
"The realm of the world
By him shall be won,
Who from the Rhine gold
Hath wrought the ring,
Imparting measureless might."
But the power to fashion the ring can only be obtained by one willing
to renounce the delight and happiness of love:
"Who the delight of Love forswears,
He who derides its ravishing joys,
He alone has the magic might
To shape the gold to a ring."
The issue is joined. Here Love and contentment in the Niblung's lot;
there the prospect of power universal and lovelessness. The dwarf does
not hesitate long. In the next scene the giants hesitate longer, and
Wotan ponders longer than either whether the gold is worth the price
demanded for it. But the Age of Innocency is past--all yield in turn
to the lust for power, the greed of gain, which the gold promises to
satisfy. The first step in the tragedy is taken. Alberich puts love
aside forever and curses it. Then, in spite of the shrieks of the
nixies, he seizes the gold and dives into the depths.
The light dies out of the scene. The bright song of the nixies runs
out into minor plaints, and the orchestra discourses mournfully of the
renunciation of love and the rape of the ring, until the scene changes
from depths of the Rhine to the heights where Valhalla, newly built,
stands in massive strength, gleaming in the morning sun.
We have witnessed the beginning of the struggle for dominion begun
cunningly by a dwarf. Not the race of the Niblungs, but the race of
giants had caused Wotan concern. Against them he thought to raise an
impregnable fortress, and the cunning Loge, the representative of the
evil principle in the celestial plot, had contrived to have the work
done by two giants, to whom Wotan, at Loge's instigation, promised the
goddess Freia as a reward, though Loge had privately assured him that
he would never be called on to meet the obligation. The whole tale is
borrowed by Wagner from Norse mythology.
Once upon a time, so runs the old story, an artisan came to the gods
and offered to build for them a fortress which would forever shield
them from the frost giants, if they would give him, in payment, Freya,
the goddess of youth, beauty, and love, besides the sun and the moon.
The gods agreed, provided he would do the work alone, and in the space
of a single winter. When summer was but three days distant the castle
was so nearly finished that the gods saw that the compact would be
kept by the strange artisan. The imminent loss of Freya frightened the
gods, and they threatened Loge with death if he did not prevent the
completion of the work within the period fixed. The artisan had the
help of a horse named Svadilfari, who drew the most enormous stones to
the castle at night. Loge the next night decoyed the horse Svadilfari
into the forest, so that the usual quota of work was not done. Then
the mysterious workman appeared before the gods in his real form as a
giant, and Thor killed him with a blow of his hammer. The Norse Freya
is the Teutonic Freia. In Wagner's poem Freia is the reward which
the giants Fafner and Fasolt expect for having built Valhalla in a
single night. Loge had instigated the compact, and promised to relieve
Wotan of the obligation of payment. But the giants carry Freia off
and restore her only after Wotan and Loge have given the Niblung's
hoard in exchange. To Freia, Wagner has given an attribute which, in
Scandinavian mythology, belongs to Iduna. She is the guardian of the
golden apples, the eating of which keeps the gods young. Iduna's apples
the student of comparative mythology will at once identify with the
golden apples which Hera received as a wedding-gift, and which were
guarded by the Hesperides and stolen by Hercules. In the Norse story
they are carried away by a winged giant named Thiassi, and brought
back by Loge, who had tempted Iduna out of her beautiful grove "Always
Young," in order that the giant might swoop down upon her and carry
the apples away. Wagner gives these apples to Freia for the sake of a
dramatic effect. The gods turn wrinkled and gray so soon as the giants
carry off the goddess of youth and beauty.
Wotan has his Valhalla, but the giants demand their reward. Loge
is summoned to extricate the god from the predicament in which his
lust after power has plunged him. The god of fire and the restless
representative of the destructive principle appears, and thereafter he
is never absent long from the action. He pervades every scene, his red
cloak fluttering, eyes, hands, feet, body moving synchronously with
that fitful chromatic phrase which crackles and flashes and flickers
through the orchestra whenever he takes part in the action. He has
searched through the world for a ransom for Freia, and found but one
creature who estimated anything higher than the beauty and worth of
woman. It is Alberich who, having wrought a ring out of the magic gold,
has bent the race of Niblungs to his will, and is now preparing to
conquer universal dominion for himself. Thus a new danger threatens the
race of gods. In this extremity Wotan listens to the advice of Loge and
decides to possess himself of the Niblung hoard, that with it he may
purchase the release of Freia, and "make assurance double sure." The
two descend to the abode of the dwarfs. In Nibelheim the rocky caverns
glow with the reflection of forge fires, and the ear is saluted with
the clang of hammers falling upon anvils. Loge cunningly tempts the
dwarf to exhibit the magical properties of the _Tarnhelm_ (the cap
of darkness), and when he assumes the shape of a toad the gods seize
and bind him. Under the walls of Valhalla they compel him to ransom
himself with gold for the giants and rob him of the ring. Then Alberich
burdens it with a curse, introducing into the tragedy the poison which
accomplishes the destruction of all its heroes, and remains a bane
upon the earth till restitution is made and expiation achieved by the
self-immolation of Brünnhilde.
The first fruits of the curse follow hard upon the heels of its
utterance. The giants, ravished by the tale of the wealth of the
Niblung treasure, exact it all as ransom for Freia. Wotan had aimed to
keep the ring as another hostage for the future--with ring and fortress
he would feel secure--but the giants demand, the runes upon his spear
contain the pledge, and Erda warns. The ring is grudgingly surrendered,
and at once its baneful effect is seen. The giants quarrel for its
possession, and Fafner kills Fasolt with blows of his staff. Not till
then does Wotan realize the deep significance of the warning words of
Erda. A solemn duty, an awful task devolves upon him. Murder as well as
theft lies at his door; with the ring a fearful curse has entered the
world as a consequence of his wrong-doing; henceforth he must devote
himself to the work of reparation. Mayhap the wrong may be righted by
a restoration of the ring to the original owners of the gold. His own
hands are bound, but he conceives a plan, of which the visible symbol
is the magic sword. A new race shall arise, the sword shall aid it in
obtaining the ring, and of its own will it shall return the circlet to
the element from which lust for power wrested it. It is this creative
thought which makes him pause with his foot upon the rainbow bridge,
across which the celestial household have passed into Valhalla. The
sword phrase flashes through the pompous music which is the postlude of
the prologue.
IV.
"Höre, höre, höre!
Alles was ist, endet.
Ein düst'rer Tag
Dämmert den Göttern.
Dir rath ich, meide den Ring!"
Thus does Erda warn Wotan. Of all the words of the prologue they are
biggest with significance for the tragedy as a whole. They foretell the
consequences of Wotan's sin. Erda is the Vala, the goddess of primeval
wisdom, "the pantheistic symbol of the universe, the timeless and
spaceless mother of gods and men," as Dr. Hueffer calls her. She is the
mother of the Nornir. Their phrase is an elemental one, like that of
the Rhine. Its ascending intervals suggest growth. The antithesis of
this concept is decay, destruction. The melody of the "Twilight of the
Gods" (_b_), in the prediction of Erda, appears as an inversion of the
elemental melody (_a_).
[Illustration: score (_a_)]
[Illustration: score (_b_)]
It is an awful consummation that is predicted by Erda and symbolized
in this descending phrase--the destruction of a world as the outcome
of that contest which since time began has been the basis of religions
and mythologies. No civilized people has escaped being confronted by
that problem, but all peoples have not solved it alike. In our own
religion the spectacle of its tragical consequences has held the world
in awe for nearly nineteen hundred years. Generally in the legends
which the human imagination, fired by religious instinct, has created
to symbolize the eternal conflict, the hero who goes to destruction is
an ideal man. Sometimes he is a god; but only the daring imagination
of the Northern myth-maker was equal to the task of making that hero
the chiefest of the gods, and connecting his downfall with the end of
the race to which he belongs. In this awful flight of the Northern
imagination, this sublime achievement of the Northern conscience, lies
the essential difference between the religious systems of the classic
Greeks and our savage ancestors. The Greeks, profoundly philosophical
as they were, would yet have shrunk back appalled from such a solution
of the great problem as the Teuton provided in his _Götterdämmerung_.
Logic might force them to recognize the necessity of it or something
like it, but they would not permit logic to compel them to contemplate
it. Once the stern mind of Æschylus seemed on the point of disclosing a
divine tragedy approximate in its proportions. Prometheus, chained to
the rock on Mount Caucasus, comforts himself in his bitter agony with
thoughts of the time when grim necessity shall force Zeus to right his
wrongs. But observe that the end of his sufferings is not to follow as
an act of retributive justice, but is to be purchased by a compromise.
The time will come when Zeus will need his help, for of all the gods
Prometheus alone knows how the plot will be laid and how Zeus can
escape it:
"I know that Zeus is hard,
And keeps the right supremely to himself;
But then, I know, he'll be
Full pliant in his will
When he is thus crushed down.
Then calming down his mood
Of hard and bitter wrath,
_He'll hasten unto me,
As I to him shall haste_,
For friendship and for peace."
This is the nearest approach that the Greeks came to a parallel
with the most tremendous conception of Northern mythology. Does it
strike you as strange? It need not. Remember, the loveliness of their
country and climate kept before the Greeks perpetually the benignant
aspect of their gods. It is true they found themselves as little able
as our ancestors later to maintain these embodiments of a primeval
conception of idealized humanity in a state of sinlessness; but
when brought face to face with the contradictions which followed,
they extricated themselves as best they might by the makeshift of a
compromising reconciliation, or flew to the extreme of unbelief. The
moral obliquity of the gods was recognized, but was not permitted to
throw a shadow over the radiant ones in the Olympian court. You may
observe an illustration of this mental trait in the unwillingness of
the Greeks to call unpleasant things by their right names. The Euxine,
or Hospitable Sea, was once righteously called by them the Axine, or
Inhospitable Sea. The dreadful Furies, with their heads covered with
writhing snakes, after they had scourged Orestes through the world,
were given a temple and worship at Athens as the Eumenides--the
kind or good-tempered ones. These Furies belonged to the class of
gloomy deities, which was the offspring of conscience and the sense
of moral responsibility. They were bound to present themselves to a
thinking people, but a people who basked always in Nature's smile were
equally bound to subordinate them to the gods of nature that were the
embodiment of cheerfulness and light. To contemplate the latter was
a delightful occupation; the former were viewed through a veil which
concealed their hideousness.
There was nothing in the surroundings of our ancestors to encourage
such a species of indirection. The natural powers which confronted
them oftenest were inimical. They did not live in the sunlight of
Nature's smile, but in the shadow of her frown. The simple right to
exist had daily to be conquered. The vague apprehensions of a sinless,
an absolute and omnipotent Deity, which flitted furtively across their
minds, took deeper and deeper root when the logic of necessity began to
taint their dynasty of gods with weakness and crimes. But, like the
Greeks, they could give such a conception neither form, habitation, nor
name. It remained hovering in the background. As their physical life
was a ceaseless struggle with Nature in her sternest aspects, and as
the more cruel of those aspects were connected with the phenomena of
winter, it was natural that when the conception of overshadowing Fate
had to be personified in the process of mythological construction, the
Nornir should have been imagined as daughters of the giants of the
North--harsh, cruel, vengeful, implacable. The terrible Fimbul winter
was to precede Ragnarök. All their training taught them to look the
actual in the face. They lived in war, and death possessed terror only
to those who could not die in battle. Destruction was a conception
with which they were familiar; destruction was the logical outcome of
all activities. So soon as they began to contemplate a race of gods
who were offenders against that moral law which was the outgrowth of
the primitive religious instinct, just so soon such a people had to
provide for a catastrophe which would resolve the discord. The Greek
tragedian made Prometheus the symbol of humanity and achieved his
aim by a reconciliation with offended Deity. The Norse myth-maker
chose the chief of the gods as his representative, raised the issue
between him and unpersonified moral law, and compelled the god to go
down to destruction with all his race to satisfy a vast and righteous
necessity. "If," says Felix Dahn, "a religion has become thoroughly
corrupt, then, unless the nation professing it is to be destroyed along
with its civilization, a new religion, satisfying to the needs of the
period, must either be introduced from without--as Christianity was
introduced in the Roman world in the first centuries of the Empire--or
the existing religion must be purified and reconstructed; as was the
case with Christianity in the sixteenth century through the Protestant
Reformation, and also, indeed, through the very material Catholic
improvements achieved by the Tridentine Council.
"But beside these two there is a third means of resolving the
difficulty; this third was seized upon by the Germanic consciousness.
_It is the tragical remedy._
"The Germanic gods, too, placed themselves in irreconcilable and
unendurable opposition to morality; and the Germanic conscience
condemned them every one to destruction--to death! _That is the
meaning of the Götterdämmerung_; it is a peerlessly great moral deed
of the Germanic race, and it stamps Germanic mythology with its tragic
character.
"Destruction because of an irreparable rupture with established and
peaceful order in Religion, Morality, or Law, is essentially tragical.
"The _Götterdämmerung_ a sacrifice? A stupendous deed of morality? Aye,
indeed, that it is!"[D]
V.
We are henceforth to observe Wotan in his conduct when brought face
to face with the consequences of his violations of moral law. That
conduct it is which reflects the real tragedy in "The Niblung's Ring."
Bound by the contract whose runes were cut in the haft of his spear,
the god could not again possess himself of the ring, which was now
become doubly a menace. If it were again to fall into the hands of
Alberich, whom he had so cruelly wronged, the desire for vengeance
would spur that mischievous Niblung to seize the dominion which had
been forfeited. To prevent such a catastrophe, Wotan would beget a new
race of beings and endow them with a magic sword. This was to be the
extent of his activity in the development of his plot. As a Volsung he
wandered through the forests with Siegmund, his son born of woman. At
an early age this son had lost his mother and been separated from his
twin-sister. Then his father left him mysteriously to be seasoned to
his task by hardships. At the climax of his distress, the culmination
of his need, he was to arm himself with the divine sword which the god
had thrust up to the hilt in a tree, around which was built the hut of
that very enemy of the Volsung race, who had carried off the sister
and married her against her will. The achievement of the sword was
to be the sign of Siegmund's fitness for the enterprise. Of his own
free-will the divinely-begotten hero was to acquire the ring, and rid
the world of the curse by restoring it to its rightful owners. How vain
a plot! The first step in its development shatters the whole elaborate
fabric! Both of the children forfeit their lives to outraged law; the
god is compelled to destroy the very agencies on which he had built his
hopes. The curse under whose fatal influence he had fallen because of
wrong-doing was not to be averted by so shallow a subterfuge; but even
if such an outcome had been possible, the plan would have split on the
rock of newly offended morality.
In this outline of the contents of "Die Walküre" I have but hinted at
its incidents, yet we have before us a whole vast act of the Wotan
tragedy, and one, too, that is pregnant with consequences to the
tragical scheme of the myth-maker. I do not ask that the occasional
interpretations of Wagner's music which I attempt be accepted as
literal expositions of the composer's purposes; but we can benefit
in our understanding of the scope and progress of his tragedy by
discovering symbols for its great philosophical moments in the musical
investiture. In this view of the case observe how appropriate is
the instrumental introduction to the first act. We have gone beyond
the hand-books in seeing a reflection of the purity and quietude of
the Golden Age in the introduction to the prologue. Its antithesis
is presented in the introduction to the first drama of the trilogy.
Again Wagner makes nature reflect the mental and moral states of his
personages. Again he presents a musical mood-picture. And again the
musician is invited to discover that, in spite of the contrast between
the objects of his musical delineation, the technical means resorted to
are the same. There the peacefully undulating _major_ harmonies over
a sustained bass note--a pedal-point, if you will--pictured the age
of sinlessness; the harmlessness of the untainted, uncoveted virgin
gold; the gentle flux and reflux of the element in which it was buried;
the careless innocency of its unsuspicious and playful guardians.
Here wildly flying _minor_ harmonies under a sustained note--again a
pedal-point--picture the storm which buffets the exhausted, unprotected
Siegmund, and impels him to seek refuge in Hunding's hut.
If this parallel is merely fanciful, it at least invites such an
exercise of the fancy in the listeners as will better help them to
appreciate the interdependence of the arts which Wagner consorts in
his dramas than any amount of structural dissection and analysis. If
you wish you may note that in addition to the music which aims merely
at imitative delineation of a thunder-storm (the rushing figure in the
basses, the incessant _staccato_ patter of the sustained note, the
attempts to suggest flashes of lightning in short and rapid figures
in the high register of the instruments, the crashing and rumbling of
thunder, and the howling of the wind in the chromatic passages), the
music also presents a pompous phrase with which, in the scene of the
prologue where Thor created the rainbow bridge, the Thunderer summoned
the elements to his aid, and at the close a heavy-footed phrase which
may be identified with the weary Siegmund.
If these two preludes be accepted as broadly and comprehensively
delineative of moods in the theatre and personages of the play,
another significant parallel will now present itself. It was to a
phrase which has the rhythm afterwards associated with the Niblungs in
their capacity as smiths (see Chapter I.)--the hammering rhythm--that
Alberich disclosed his wicked nature and resolve when he shook his
fist at the nixies. Observe how the element of danger to the Volsung
pair is introduced in the first scene of the tragedy. It enters
with the sinister Hunding, who, as the unconscious instrument of
Fate and Fricka's vengeance, brings death to Siegmund. In the music
which precedes Hunding's entrance there are only strains of pathetic
tenderness which invite sympathy for the unhappy children of Wotan,
and which we are asked by the analyst and commentator to associate
with the compassion which they feel for each other, and the growth of
that feeling into the more ardent emotion of love. The phrase which
ushers in Hunding is in sharp contrast; if is gloomy in harmony
and orchestration, and publishes the evil in his heart, not only by
its dark colors, but also by employing the threatening rhythm which
Alberich used against the Rhine daughters. The incidents which serve
to complete the first great step in the drama so far as Wotan, the
hero, is concerned, can now be hastily reviewed. Hunding discovers his
guest to be the enemy of his race; the laws of hospitality protect
him for the night, but he must fight on the morrow. Siegmund's need
has reached its climax. But Sieglinde, after putting Hunding to sleep
with a draught, returns to him and discloses the mystery of the sword.
Mutually they confess their love, and discover their relationship in
the moment when the magic sword is won. A new thought prevents that
terrible discovery from checking the progress of their passion. _The
race of the Volsungs must be perpetuated._ If you want to learn how
powerful an element this thought is in the old legend from which
Wagner borrowed the episode, you must study it in the Volsunga
Saga, where it is consorted with elements which largely atone for
the features so offensive and so much criticised in Wagner's drama.
There Signy (Wagner's Sieglinde) desiring to avenge herself on her
husband Siggeir (Hunding), who had murdered all the race but her and
Sigmund, and kept her in loveless wedlock, tried in vain to rear a
son of sufficient hardihood to perform the deed of vengeance. At
last, fearful that the Volsungs might become extinct, she changed
semblance with a witch-wife, and in this guise visited Sigmund at his
hiding-place in the woods. When their son grew to manhood he and his
father avenged Signy's wrongs. But when they offered her great honors
Signy told Sigmund: "I went into the woods to thee in witch-wife's
shape, and Sinfjötli (Siegfried) is the son of thee and me both; and
therefore has he this great hardihood and fierceness, because he is
the son of Välse's son and Välse's daughter. For naught else have I
so wrought that King Siggeir might get his bane at last; and merrily
now will I die with the King though I was naught merry to wed him;"[E]
and she entered the burning palace and died with the King and his
men. The motive here is the same as in the objectionable episode in
Wagner, but it is presented more forcibly and, at the same time, less
offensively--or, at least, with less show of moral depravity. But the
sin is speedily expiated. Fricka, the patron goddess of marriage,
demands that Siegmund shall become her victim; and Fricka's right
cannot be gainsaid by the representative of Law. Wotan pronounces the
oath that Fricka demands. The Volsung is doomed; the plan of the god
frustrated. The first act of the tragedy is complete; the second stage
of the development of Wotan's tragical character is entered upon. These
are the essential features of that stage:
In despair the god surrenders his plan, invokes the consequences of his
guilty deed, and pronounces a blessing on the inimical agency which has
been established for his punishment. He turns his longing gaze towards
that outcome of the terrible conflict in which he became involved
because of his greed of power, which his own wisdom, clarified by the
mystic words of Erda, recognizes as inevitable.
Unhappily for the popular understanding of the tragedy, the scene in
which this stupendously significant phase in the celestial action
of the drama is disclosed is one that is generally sacrificed to
theatrical exigencies. It is presented in the long address in which
Wotan countermands the order previously given for the death of Hunding,
and commands that the death-mark be placed on Siegmund. From this
recital we learn that the Valkyrior had been born to Wotan by Erda
as part of his scheme to perpetuate his dominion. They were to fill
Valhalla with heroes against the great battle which he knew would
come. We also learn that as Wotan had begotten a new race, in the hope
of preventing the baneful ring from falling again into the hands of
Alberich, so Alberich, in turn, had begotten a son to labor for its
return. But as Alberich had foresworn love, he wooed a woman with
gold. Again, here in the counter-plot, the greed of gold usurps the
place sanctified to love. Thus there are pitted against each other the
Volsungs, beloved progeny of the god, and Hagen (whom we shall meet
actively engaged in the contest later), the loveless offspring of the
Niblung. And the demi-god it is who is doomed. Wotan is called upon
to perform his act of renunciation. As things go in the theatre, his
recital is thought overlong and undramatic, and the thoughtless laugh
at the spectacle of a sad god. Can we forget that it is at this supreme
moment that the god embodies that which is at once the loftiest and
the most profoundly melancholy conception of the Germanic conscience?
He recognizes the necessity and the justice of the destruction of his
race. Listen to his words:
"Begone, then, and perish,
Thou gorgeous pomp,
Thou glittering disgrace
Of godhood's grandeur!
Asunder shall burst
The walls I built!
My work I abandon,
For one thing alone I wish--
The end--
The end--"
(_He pauses in thought._)
"And to the end
Alb'rich attends!
Now I perceive
The secret sense
Of the Vala's 'wildering words:
'When Love's ferocious foe
In rage begetteth a son,
The night of the gods
Draws near anon.'"[F]
And now observe how the logic of Wagner's constructive scheme marshals
the symbols of the chief things which are in Wotan's thoughts while
he contemplates past, present, and future--the wicked cause and the
terrible effect. The curse, with death in its train, confronts him:
[Illustration: score]
the Nomir and their all-wise mother revisit his fancy:
[Illustration: score]
the ceaseless, tireless energy of the Niblung, which will not cease
till the work of destruction be complete, pursues him with its
rhythmical scourge as the Furies pursued Orestes:
[Illustration: score]
and the image of Valhalla rises in his far-seeing mind, not as a castle
in its present grandeur (see Chapter I.), but in ruins; the rhythm
of the musical symbol is shattered; its solid, restful, simple major
harmony is destroyed:
[Illustration: score]
All this because of the accursed gold (closing cadence _a_).
The daughter to whom the god confides the whole depth of his misery is
of all his daughters the dearest. She has no higher ambition than to
be the embodiment of Wotan's will. Unconsciously to both, the god, in
his divine resignation, is merely prefiguring the sacrifice to which,
in the providence of a higher power than the Lord of Valhalla, that
daughter has been chosen. But the god has not yet learned the full
bitterness of his cup. He loves the Volsung, and is obliged to destroy
at a blow the object of his love and the agent of his plan. In doing
this the irresistible might of law bears down his will. That will is
known to Brünnhilde. In defiance of Wotan's commands she attempts
to shield the Volsung; and to bring the combat between Hunding and
Siegmund to the conclusion inexorably demanded by that law of purity
which the hero unwittingly violated, the god is himself compelled
to interfere, and to cause the sword, designed as the symbol of the
Volsung power, to be shattered on the spear with which Wotan exercises
dominion.
Love, for a second time, feels the weight of Alberich's curse. Now
the beloved daughter falls under the condemnation of the law. But the
god is becoming unconsciously an agent in a plan of redemption, which
belongs to a loftier ethical scheme than was possible before. Wotan
is about to disappear as an active agent from the scene. His plot is
wrecked. The representative of his will, the object of his tenderest
paternal affection, unknown to him, but inspired wholly by a love void
of all selfishness, is about to take up the task surrendered by the
god, and carry it out to a conclusion different from and yet like that
imagined by the god. Before the punishment is visited upon her, the
intensity of that love, turned through sympathy towards Sieglinde,
has for a moment endowed her with prophetic powers. She hails the
hero yet unborn, and persuades Sieglinde to save her own life for his
sake. Then she accepts her punishment. She is bereft of her divinity,
put into a magic sleep, and left by the way-side to be the prey of
the first passer-by. But the love of the father, awakened to tenfold
power by the bitterness of his own fate and the knowledge that his
child's disobedience was but the execution of his own will, shields her
from dishonor by surrounding her with a wall of fire, which none but
a freer hero than the god himself, and one for whom the divine spear
has no terrors, shall pass. The god's egotism is completely broken,
the reconciliation between his offended majesty and the offender
established. The punishment of Brünnhilde is but the chastisement of
love. Can there be any doubt of this after the musical proclamation
contained in the finale of "Die Walküre?"
VI.
I am presuming, to a great extent, upon the reader's familiarity with
the incidents of the dramas constituting the tragedy. It is the action
which takes place where we have not been in the habit of looking for
it that I am seeking to discover. "Siegfried," the second drama of
the trilogy, is almost wholly devoted to preparation for the fateful
outcome. To this fact is due much of its cheerfulness of tone. It is a
period of comparative rest. The celestial plot has entered upon a new
phase, and in this drama the new combination of characters is formed
for the development of that new phase. The ethical drama which the play
symbolizes might be described as follows:
The hero has been born and bred under circumstances which have
developed his freedom in every direction. The representative of
the evil principle seeks to direct his heroic powers towards an
advancement of the sinister side of the counter-plot; but in vain. By
his own efforts he endows himself with the magic sword, and in the
full consciousness of his free manhood he achieves for himself the
adventures and the happiness which were denied to the god. He gains the
ring and tastes the delight of love.
At first Siegfried appears simply as a wild forest lad, who has grown
up with no sympathetic acquaintance beyond the beasts and birds with
which he is wont to associate in their haunts. In this character the
composer pictures him musically by means of the merry hunting-call
which he is supposed to blow on his horn (see Chapter I.). Most of
the music which is associated with him in the first act of the drama,
in which this horn-call enters so largely, is markedly characteristic
of the impetuous nature of the forest lad, with his contempt for
dissimulation and his rough, straight-forward energy. But a different
side of his nature is disclosed when, having learned the story of his
birth and acquired possession of his father's sword, remade by himself,
he becomes a part of the sylvan picture of the second act, which lends
so much charm to the "Siegfried" drama. Here, again, is scenic music
of the kind which each of the dramas possesses, and which has so often
set us to wondering at Wagner's marvellous faculty for juggling with
the senses--making our ears to see and our eyes to hear. Siegfried has
been brought before the cave--where Fafner, in the form of a dragon,
is guarding the ring and the hoard--by Mime, who has planned that the
lad shall kill the dragon and then himself fall a victim to treachery.
Siegfried throws himself on a hillock at the foot of a tree and listens
to nature's music in the forest. And such music! Music redolent of that
sweet mystery which peopled the old poets' minds with the whole amiable
tribe of fays and dryads and wood-nymphs. The spirit which lurks under
gnarled roots and in tangled boughs, in hollow trees and haunted forest
caves, breathes through it. The youth is brooding over the mystery of
his childhood, and he utters his thoughts in tender phrases, while the
mellow wood-wind instruments in the orchestra identify his thoughts
with the dead parents whom he never knew. He wonders what his mother
looked like, and pathetically asks whether all human mothers die when
their children are born. Suddenly the sunlight begins to flicker along
the leafy canopy; a thousand indistinct voices join in that indefinable
hum, of which, when heard in reality and not in the musician's
creation, one is at a loss to tell how much is actual and how much the
product of imagination, both sense and fancy having been miraculously
quickened by the spirit which moves through the trees.
At last all is vocal, and Siegfried's ear is caught by the song of
the bird to which we too have been listening. In his longing for
companionship he wishes that he might understand and converse with his
feathered playmate. Might he not if he were able to whistle like the
bird? Now note the naïve touch of musical humor with which Wagner, the
tragedian, enlivens the scene. Siegfried cuts a reed growing beside a
rivulet and fashions a rude pipe out of it. He listens, and when the
bird quits singing he attempts to imitate its "wood-note wild." But
his pipe is too low in pitch and out of tune. He cuts it shorter and
raises its pitch half a tone. Again he cuts it, with the same result;
then squeezes it impatiently, and renders it still more "out of tune
and harsh." He throws it away, confesses his humiliation by the bird,
then reaches for his horn. With its merry call he wakes the echoes,
disturbs the sleep of the dragon, and precipitates the combat which
ends in his equipment with _Tarnhelm_ and ring, and his receipt of the
injunction from the bird (which now he understands through the magic of
the dragon's blood touching his lips) to slay Mime and waken Brünnhilde
on the burning mountain.
We now catch our last glimpse of Wotan as a personage in the play.
He has not been active in the plot since he was obliged to destroy
his own handiwork. Twice he appeared in the character of a seemingly
unconcerned spectator wandering over the face of the earth, and once he
even offered to help Alberich recover the ring from Fafner. He aroused
the dragon and suggested that Alberich warn him of threatened danger,
and ask the ring as a reward. His present concern is to learn whether
the danger threatening the gods is yet to be averted. By chanting of
powerful runes he summons Erda, of ancient wisdom. But she refuses to
speak. Now he tells her that he no longer grieves over the approaching
doom of the gods; his will, newly enlightened, has decreed that the
catastrophe shall overwhelm the gods, but also that the world, which in
his despair he had surrendered to the hate of the Niblung, shall become
instead the heritage of the Volsung who has won the ring. A single act
remains to be done: the free-agency of Siegfried must be tested. The
youth follows his feathered guide up the mountain to find the promised
bride. Wotan bars his way with his spear. Siegfried hews the shaft
through the middle. On the runes cut into that shaft rested Wotan's
dominion. They were the bond by which he governed. Its destruction
symbolizes the approaching end of the old order of things. The musical
phrase, typical of that compact, accompanies him, in broken rhythm,
as he gathers up the pieces of the spear and departs. Prophecy and
fulfilment are indicated by the recurrence of the phrase of Erda and
her daughters, the Nornir, and its inversion, which symbolizes the
twilight of the gods.
VII.
All the adventures of Siegfried in this part of the drama, from the
forging of the sword to the awaking of Brünnhilde, Wagner derived in
almost the exact shape in which he presents them from the Scandinavian
legends which tell of Sigurd. In the death-like sleep of Brünnhilde,
the stream of fire around her couch, the passage of that stream by
Siegfried, as later in the immolation of the heroine, there are so
many foreshadowings of the mystery of the Atonement that I scarcely
dare attempt a study of it. Let me but call attention to the fact that
the fiery wall in the old legends always denotes the funeral pyre;
that it was once customary to light the pyre with a thorn, and that
when the Eddas tell us that Odin put his child Brynhild to sleep by
pricking her in the temple with a sleep-thorn, the meaning is that
she died. I have said a foreshadowing of the Atonement because these
things are old Aryan possessions--much older than Christianity. The
infernal river of the Greeks, which Alkestis had to cross when she
went to the under-world on her mission of salvation, had a Greek name
(_Pyriphlegethon_), which meant "fire-blazing." It was not, however,
to lose myself in such speculations that I called up the old story,
but simply to show with what fine insight into dramatic possibilities
Wagner studied his sources. In the old Icelandic tale, some gossiping
eagles, whose language Sigurd had come to understand by drinking of
the blood of Regin and Fafnir, told him of a maiden who slumbered in
a hall on high Hindarfiall surrounded with fire. Thither Sigurd went,
penetrated the barrier of fire, found Brynhild, whom he thought to be
a knight until he had ripped up her coat of mail with his sword, and
awakened her. Learning the name of her deliverer, Brynhild cried out:
"Hail to thee, Day, come back!
Hail, sons of the Daylight!
Hail to thee, daughter of night!
Look with kindly eyes down
On us sitting here lonely,
And give us the gain that we long for."[G]
VIII.
We reach the last drama of the trilogy.
In the joy of his new-found love Siegfried forgets his mission.
Brünnhilde teaches him wisdom (recall how the ancient Teutons
reverenced the utterance of their women), and he gives her the baneful
circlet as the badge of his love. He goes out in search of adventure,
and, separated from the protecting influence of woman's love, he
falls a victim to the wiles of Hagen, the Niblung's son. Alberich had
warned Hagen that so great was Siegfried's love for Brünnhilde that
were she to ask it he would restore the ring to the Rhine nixies. This
must be prevented, and Hagen has a plan ready. With a magic drink he
robs Siegfried of all memory of Brünnhilde, and the hero, to gain a
new love, puts on his _Tarnhelm_ and rudely drags Brünnhilde from her
flame-encircled retreat.
To Wagner's skill in expressing the miraculous in music is due the
effectiveness of two scenes highly essential to the ethical scheme of
the tragedy and very difficult to present in a dramatic form. The music
accompanying the drink alone makes it possible to realize that the
fateful change has taken place in Siegfried. He looks into the horn and
pledges Brünnhilde:
"Were I to forget
All thou gav'st,
One lesson I'll never
Unlearn in my life.
This morning-drink,
In measureless love,
Brünnhild, I pledge to thee!"[H]
Niemann puts the horn from his lips, and we know that a change has
taken place in the man. It is the mystical property of that weird music
that brings us this consciousness. We could not believe it if acts or
words alone were relied on to make the publication.
Again has love been wronged. The guilt of a tragic hero may be
unconsciously committed; still he must yield to fate. Chance puts the
opportunity in the way of Siegfried to prevent the ring from falling
into the hands of the powers inimical to the gods; but he proudly puts
it aside because the demand of the Rhine daughters was coupled with a
threat. Brünnhilde had also spurned the opportunity, but in her case
the motive was her great love for Siegfried, which made her prize the
ring, as its visible sign, above the welfare of the gods. That love,
misguided, causes the death of the hero. Brünnhilde, learning of
Siegfried's unconscious treachery, gives her aid to the Niblung's son.
Only his death clears away the mystery. Then she expiates her crime and
his with her life, and from her ashes the Rhine daughters recover the
ring.
"The ultimate question concerning the correctness or effectiveness of
Wagner's system must be answered along with the question, Does the
music touch the emotions, quicken the fancy, fire the imagination? If
it does this we may, to a great extent, if we wish, get along without
the intellectual process of reflection and comparison conditioned upon
a recognition of his themes and their uses. But if we do this, we will
also lose the pleasure which it is the province of memory sometimes
to give;"[I] for a beautiful constructive use of the themes is for
reminiscence. The culminating scene of the tragedy furnishes us an
illustration of the twofold delight which Wagner's music can give: the
simply sensuous and the sensuous intensified by intellectual activity.
I refer to the death of Siegfried. As Siegfried, seated among Gunther's
men, who are resting from the chase, tells the story of his life, we
hear a recapitulation of the musical score of the second and third acts
of "Siegfried" the drama. He starts up in an outburst of enthusiasm as
he reaches the account of Brünnhilde's awaking, which is interrupted
by the flight of Wotan's ravens, who go to inform the god that the end
is nearing. He turns to look after the departing birds, when Hagen
plunges a spear into his back. The music to which the hero, regaining
his memory, breathes out his life, is that ecstasy in tones to which
Siegfried's kiss had inspired the orchestra in the last scene of the
preceding drama. Why is this? Because, as Siegfried's last thoughts
before taking the dreadful draught which robbed him of his memory
were of Brünnhilde, so his first thoughts were of her when his memory
was restored. Before his dying eyes there is only the picture of her
awaking, till the last ray of light bears to him Brünnhilde's greeting:
"Brünnhild!
Hallowed bride!
Awaken! Open thine eyes!
Who again has doomed thee
To dismal slumber?
Who binds thee in bonds of sleep?
The awakener came,
His kiss awoke thee;
Once more he broke
The bonds of his bride;
Then shared he Brünnhild's delight!
Ah! those eyes
Are open forever!
Ah! how sweet
Is her swelling breath!
Delicious destruction--
Ecstatic awe--
Brünnhild gives greeting--to me!"
This reminiscent love-music gives way to the Death March, which, from a
purely structural point of view, is an epitome of much that is salient
in the musical investiture of the entire tetralogy, yet in spirit is a
veritable apotheosis, a marvellously eloquent proclamation of antique
grief and heroic sorrow. This music loses nothing in being listened
to as absolute music. Never mind that in obedience to his system of
development Wagner has passed the life of Siegfried in review in
the score. The orchestra has a nobler mission here. It is to make a
proclamation which neither singers nor pantomimists nor stage mechanism
and pictures can make.
The hero is dead!
What does it mean to him?
Union with Brünnhilde--restoration to that love of which he had been
foully robbed.
What to his fellows in the play?
The end of a Teutonic hero of the olden kind. He is dead; they are
awed at the catastrophe and they grieve; but their grief is mixed with
thoughts of the prowess of the dead man and the exalted state into
which he has entered. A Valkyria has kissed his wounds, and Wotan has
made place for him at his board in Valhalla. There, surrounded by the
elect of Wotan's wishmaidens, he is drinking mead and singing songs of
mighty sonority--Viking songs like Ragnar Lodbrok's: "We smote with
swords."
Is there room here for modern mourning; for shrouding crape and
darkened rooms and sighs and tears and hopeless grief? No. The proper
expression is a hymn, a pæan, a musical apotheosis; and this is what
Wagner gives us until the funeral train enters Gutrune's house and the
expression of sorrow goes over to the deceived wife.
But what does this march mean to us who have been trying to study the
real meaning of the tragedy? The catastrophe which is to usher in
the new era of love. Search for a musical symbol for the redeeming
principle. It cannot appear in its fulness till the old order,
changing, gives place to the new; but still we may find it in the
prevision of a woman to whom the shadow of death gave mystical lore. A
new song was put into the mouth of Sieglinde when Brünnhilde acclaimed
her child, yet unborn, as destined to be the loftiest hero of earth.
She poured out her gratitude in a prophetic strain in which we may, if
we wish, hear the Valkyria celebrated as the loving, redeeming woman
of the last portion of the tragedy. Out of that melody, and out of a
phrase in the love duet in which Brünnhilde blesses the mother who
gave birth to the glorious hero, grew the phrase in which, in "Die
Götterdämmerung," Brünnhilde, Valkyria no longer, is symbolized in her
new character as loving woman. But when the flames from Siegfried's
funeral pile reach Valhalla, when by a stupendous achievement the
poet-composer recapitulates the incidents of the tragedy in his
orchestral postlude, while pompous brass and strident basses depict
the destruction of Valhalla, the end of the old world of greed of gold
and lust of power, this melody, the symbol of redeeming love, soars
high into ethereal regions on the wings of the violins, and its last
transfigured harmonies proclaim the advent of a new heaven and a new
earth under the dominion of love. 'Tis the "Woman's Soul" leading us
"upward and on:"
[Illustration: score]
FOOTNOTES:
[D] _Walhall. Germanische Götter und Heldensagen._ Felix Dahn and
Therese Dahn. Kreutznach, 1888.
[E] _Vide_ Magnusson and Morris.
[F] Professor Dippold's translation.
[G] Dippold. Wagner's poem, "The Ring of the Nibelung," p. 61.
[H] Professor Dippold's translation.
[I] See page 35.
CHAPTER V.
"PARSIFAL."
The last of Wagner's dramas is not only mystical in its subject,
but also in the manner in which it confronts the critical student.
In Bayreuth it exerts a most puissant influence upon the spectator
and listener; but when one has escaped the sweet thraldom of the
representation, and reflection takes the place of experience, there
arise a multitude of doubts touching the essential merit of the drama.
These doubts do not go to the effectiveness of "Parsifal" as an
artistic entertainment. If they did they would arise in the course of
the representation and hinder enjoyment. Against what, then, do they
direct themselves?
An answer to this question must precede our study of the drama.
I.
"Parsifal" is not a drama in the ordinary acceptation of the term;
yet it is a drama in the antique sense. It is a religious play; but,
again, not a religious play in the general sense in which Wagner's
mythological tetralogy may be said to be a religious play; it is
specifically a Christian play. It is contemplation of it in this
light which gives the student pause. There are indications in the
records of Wagner's intellectual activity that he wrote it to take
the place of two dramas which had occupied his mind many years before
"Parsifal" was written. The first of these dramas, which he sketched
in 1848, was a tragedy entitled "Jesus of Nazareth;" the second, which
he planned in 1856, was entitled "The Victors," and was based on a
Hindu legend. Its hero was to be Chaka-Munyi--the Buddha. In a manner,
it may be said, these two dramas were blended in "Parsifal," but,
strangely enough, that blending was accomplished so as to bring into
prominence a conception of religion more in harmony with the feeling of
Buddhistic, or mediæval asceticism than with the sentiments of modern
Christianity. Wagner's Jesus of Nazareth was a purely human philosopher
who preached the saving grace of love, and sought to redeem his time
from the domination of conventional law--the offspring of selfishness.
His philosophy was socialism imbued with love. Wagner's Buddha, on the
other hand, was the familiar apostle of abnegation and asceticism. The
heroism of the lovers Ananda and Prakriti was to have been displayed in
their voluntary renunciation of the union, towards which love impelled
them. They were to accept the teachings of the Buddha, take the vow of
chastity, and live thereafter in the holy community.
When Wagner came to write his Christian drama he put aside his human
Christ, accepted the doctrine of the Atonement with all its mystical
elements, but endowed his hero with scarcely another merit than that
which had become the ideal of monkish theologians under the influence
of fearful moral depravity and fanatical superstition, as far removed
from the teachings and example of his original hero as the heavens
are from the earth. After having eloquently proclaimed the ethical
idea which is at the basis of all the really beautiful mythologies
and religions of the world, and embodied it in "The Flying Dutchman,"
"Tannhäuser," and "The Niblung's Ring"--the idea that salvation
comes to humanity through the redeeming love of woman--he produced a
drama in which the central idea, so far as the dramatic spectacle is
concerned, is a glorification of a conception of sanctity which grew
out of a monstrous perversion of womanhood, and a wicked degradation of
womankind.
This, I say, is the case "so far as the dramatic spectacle is
concerned." Of course there is much more in "Parsifal" than a
celebration of the principal feature in mediæval asceticism, but I am
speaking now of the things which fill the vision during representation,
which inspire a feeling of awe at the time, but afterwards irritate and
confound the reflective faculty. So far as the spectacle is concerned,
the heroism of Parsifal is not that of the Divine Being, of whom Wagner
does not hesitate to make him a symbol, but that of a desert recluse.
This contradiction of the modern sense of propriety is accentuated by
the means resorted to by Wagner for the sake of identifying the hero
with his lofty prototype. In the third act, scenes are borrowed from
the life of Christ, and Parsifal is made to play in them as the central
figure; Kundry anoints the feet of the knight and dries them with
her hair; Parsifal baptizes Kundry and absolves her from sin. These
acts, and the resistance of Kundry's seductions in the Magic Garden,
make up, for the greater part, the sum of the acts of a hero in whom
the spectator wishes to see, on the one hand, some of the attributes
of the heroes of the profoundly poetical romances from which the
subject-matter of the drama was drawn, or, on the other, some evidences
of that nobility and that gentleness of conduct, and that fine sanity
of thought which marked the life of Him of whom it has been said that
he was
"The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him--
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed."
These things, taken in connection with the adoration of the Holy Grail,
which makes up so much of the action of the drama, and the worship of
the Sacred Lance, seem to us of the nineteenth century like little
else than relics of the monkish superstitions of the early Middle
Ages. Under them, it is true, there is much deep philosophy, and the
symbolism of the drama is surcharged with meaning; but a recognition
of the paradox is necessary, the better to appreciate the fact that
the essence of "Parsifal" lies less in what is seen on the stage than
in what the things seen stand for. To appreciate the work at its full
worth it must be accepted for the lesson which it inculcates, and
that lesson must be accepted in the spirit of the time which produced
the materials of the drama. The ethical idea of the drama is that it
is the enlightenment which comes through conscious pity that brings
salvation. The allusion is to the redemption of man by the sufferings
and compassionate death of Christ; and that stupendous tragedy is the
pre-figuration of the mimic tragedy which Wagner has constructed. The
spectacle to which he invites us, and with which he hopes to impress us
and move us to an acceptance of the lesson underlying his drama, is the
adoration of the Holy Grail, cast in the form of a mimicry of the Last
Supper, bedizened with some of the glittering pageantry of mediæval
knighthood and romance. The trial to which the hero is subjected is
that with which the folk-lore of all times and peoples, as well as
their monkish legends, have made us familiar: the hero proves his
fitness for his divine calling, and accomplishes it by withstanding the
temptations which Ulysses withstood on the Delightful Island where he
met Calypso, to which Tannhäuser succumbed in the grotto of Venus.
Though "Parsifal" endures a separation of its poetic, scenic, and
musical elements less graciously than any other drama of its creator,
it is the music which must be relied on to bring about a reconciliation
between modern thought and feeling, and the monkish theology and relic
worship which I have discussed. The music reflects the spirit of
that Divine Passion which is the kernel of theological Christianity.
There is extremely little music in the score, which is descriptive of
external things--less than in any other of Wagner's works except "Die
Meistersinger." It is like that of "Tristan und Isolde," which deals
much more with mental and psychic states than with the outward things
of nature. It is music for the imagination rather than the fancy. In
listening to it one can be helped by bearing in mind the distinction so
beautifully made by Ruskin:
"The fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of the
outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail.
"The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt,
but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its giving out of
outer detail.
"Fancy, as she stays at the externals, can never feel. She is one of
the hardest-hearted of the intellectual faculties, or, rather, one of
the most purely and simply intellectual. She cannot be made serious,
no edge-tool but she will play with; whereas the imagination is in all
things the reverse. She cannot be but serious; she sees too far, too
darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly ever to smile. There is something
in the heart of everything, if we can reach it, that we shall not be
inclined to laugh at.
"Now observe, while as it penetrates into the nature of things, the
imagination is pre-eminently a beholder of things as they are, it
is, in its creative function, an eminent beholder of things when and
where they are not; a seer, that is, in the prophetic sense, calling
the things that are not as though they were; and forever delighting
to dwell on that which is not tangibly present.... Fancy plays like
a squirrel in its circular prison and is happy; but imagination is a
pilgrim on the earth, and her home is in heaven."
The fundamental elements of the music of "Parsifal" are suffering and
aspiration. When they are apprehended the ethical purpose of the drama
becomes plain. But not till then.
II.
The investigations of scholars determined long ago that the legend
which is at the bottom of Wagner's drama is formed of two portions
which were once distinct. One of these portions is concerned with
the origin and wanderings of the Holy Grail prior to the time when it
became the object of the Quest which occupied so much of the attention
of the knights of King Arthur's Round Table; the second portion is
concerned with that Quest. The relative age of the two portions of the
legend and the genesis of each have caused much controversy, which has
thrown a great deal of light on mediæval civilization. We are little
concerned in that controversy, however, except so far as it enlightens
us as to the real nature of the legend, and helps us to understand how
the Grail became the loftiest symbol of Christian faith, and the Grail
Quest the highest duty of Christian knighthood.
Formerly it was believed that the Grail was the product of Christian
legends which had become grafted on the Arthurian romances. Now it
is asserted, and with much show of probability, that the Grail, like
those romances, is Celtic in origin, and became what it is represented
in the legend by being endowed with a symbolism which originally it
lacked. For our view of the case, since we are not concerned with
literary criticism, this, too, is a matter of indifference, except so
far as it helps us to understand a proposition much broader and more
significant. The Holy Grail and the Seeker after it are both relics
of what, long before Christianity was in existence, was a universal
possession among Aryan peoples. Each has a multitude of prototypes
among the mythological apparatus and personages of the peoples of
the Indo-European family. To the class of popular heroes which figure
in the tales whose essential elements Von Hahn has formulated in his
_Arische Aussetzung und Rückkehr Formel_ (see Chapter IV.), Parsifal
belongs as well as Siegfried. A parallel between the two might be
carried through many details of their early life and riper adventures.
Both are born to a mother, far from her home, of a father who is dead;
both are brought up in a wilderness; both are in youth passionate
and violent of disposition; both are thrown for companionship on the
animals of the forests in which they are reared. There are other
elements held in common by the tales of which Wagner makes no mention
in his version of the Percival legend. A significant one is the mending
of a broken sword, a talisman, which act in the old Percival legends,
as well as in the tale of Siegfried, is the sign of the hero's election
to a high mission; but this need not now detain us.
Wagner has been much criticized for changing the name of his hero
from Percival or Percivale, as we know it in English literature, and
Parzival, as he found it in the greatest of all the Grail epics, that
of Wolfram von Eschenbach, to Parsifal. Criticism of this kind is
often wasted. In making the change Wagner exercised a poet's privilege
for an obvious purpose--he made the name an index of his hero's moral
character. The suggestion came from Görres. According to this scholar,
whose derivation has long been set aside as fanciful, _Fal_ in the
Arabian tongue signifies "foolish," and _Parsi_ "pure one." By changing
the order of the words we obtain Parsi-fal--pure, or guileless, fool.
It is thus that Kundry expounds his name to the hero in Wagner's drama,
when she tells him the story of his birth. In Wolfram's poem he is also
called foolish because his mother dressed him in motley when he left
her, broken-hearted, to go out into the world in search of knighthood.
The French Perceval signifies simply one who goes "through the Valley."
A Welsh tale of at least equal antiquity with the preserved French
romances calls the hero Peredur, which has been interpreted into "the
seeker after the basin or the dish," this signification being again in
harmony with the principal incident of the French form of the legend,
_greal_ in old French meaning a dish. Wolfram, under the influence
of his model, claims nothing for the name of his hero except that
it means "right through the middle," but Meyer-Markau, who seems to
have accepted the theory that the tale is originally Keltic, strove
to give dramatic propriety to the name by pointing out that in Welsh,
Breton, and Cornish, _par_ signifies lad; _syw_, in Welsh, clad or
decorated, and _fall_, scantily, poorly, ill, foolishly, wretchedly.
Out of these words, then, he compounded _Par-syw-fall_, a lad who is
ill-clad. Plausibility, if nothing else, is lent to this derivation by
the circumstances under which the hero's mother sent him out into the
world. In the hope that the rude treatment which would be heaped upon
him would return him to her arms, she dressed him in fool's clothing:
"'Thorenkleider soll mein Kind
An seinem lichten Leibe tragen:
Schlägt und rauft man ihn darum,
So kommt er mir wohl wieder.'
Weh, was litt die Arme da!
Nun nahm sie grobes Sacktuch her
Und schnitt ihm Hemd und Hose draus
In einem Stück, das bis zum Knie
Des nackten Beins nur reichte.
Das war als Narrenkleid bekannt.
Oben sah man eine Kappe."[J]
III.
Interesting as this speculation is, however, we are now concerned only
with one element of it. Whatever his name may signify, it is obvious
that Parsifal was an innocent, a _simplex_, a fool. It is this trait
which enables us to identify him with his prototype in Aryan folk-lore.
He is the hero of what the English folk-lorists call "The Great Fool
Tales," and the Germans "_Dümmlingsmärchen_." In the following outline
of a very old poetic narrative of the Kelts, called by students "The
Lay of the Great Fool," may be found all that part of Parsifal's
youthful history which, in Wagner's drama, is learned either from his
own lips or those of Kundry:
Once there were two knightly brothers, of whom one was childless while
the other had two sons. A strife breaks out between them, and the
father is slain with his sons. The wicked knight then sends word to
the widow that if she should give birth to another son, he, too, must
be put to death. She does give birth to a son, and to save his life
sends him into the wilderness to be reared by a kitchen wench who has
a love-son. The lads grow up strong and hardy. One day the knightly
lad runs down a deer, kills it, and of its skin makes himself a motley
suit of clothes. He slays his foster-brother for laughing at him in
his strange dress, catches a wild horse, rides to his uncle's palace,
and though when asked his name he can only answer "Great Fool," he is
recognized. Thus his adventures begin. He avenges the wrongs of his
mother. This Great Fool is the original Seeker after the Grail.
IV.
Among the oldest manuscripts which contain the Quest story there are
two which make no mention of the Holy Grail as a Christian relic or
symbol. The most interesting of these is Welsh, and is known as
the Mabinogi (_i. e._, the Juvenile Tale) of "Peredur, the Son of
Evrawc." It is an Arthurian story, and the majority of its adventures
are identical with those of Percival. Its beginning is a parallel of
"The Lay of the Great Fool." The Holy Grail of the Percival romances
is replaced by a bleeding lance, a bloody head on a salver, and a
silver dish. These talismans are brought into the hall of a castle
belonging to a lame king, and are greeted with loud lamentations by the
assembled knights. In the French romances the talismans are the Holy
Grail and the bleeding lance, the latter being identified, as in Sir
Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," with the spear with which Longinus
opened the side of the crucified Christ. As Percival is condemned in
these romances for a long time to wander in fruitless search of this
castle, because having seen the wonders he did not ask their meaning,
so Peredur, in the Welsh romance, is cursed in the Court of King Arthur
for a similar neglect. Had he asked, the lame king would have got well
of his wound, and Peredur would have proved his fitness to avenge the
death of his cousin, who was the lame king's son, and had been killed
by the sorceresses of Gloucester. After many trials, tallying with
those of Percival in the French romances and Parzival in Wolfram's
poem, Peredur finds the castle again (where he had on his first visit
united the pieces of a broken sword and cut through an iron staple,
as Siegfried split the anvil), is recognized as the nephew of the
king, and avenges his cousin's death by leading Arthur and his knights
against the sorceresses of Gloucester. There are some allusions to the
Christian religion in the old tale, but essentially it is pagan. The
bloody head and bleeding lance are part of ancient British legendary
apparatus.
A bleeding lance, says Mr. Alfred Nutt,[K] is the bardic symbol of
undying hatred of the Saxon. Here it bled till the death of Peredur's
cousin was avenged. The bloody head was the head of that cousin.
V.
We find in Parsifal on his entrance only a thoughtless, impetuous
forest lad, unlearned in the affairs of life, utterly unconscious of
its conventions--in short, another young Siegfried. He is the hero of
the "Great Fool" stories, but in the process of Christianizing the
character a new meaning has been given to the epithet. He is a chosen
vessel for a divine deed, because he is a pure or guileless fool. In
this, though the suggestion was derived from the old Aryan folk-tales,
we are obliged to see a new, a Christian symbolism, the spirit of
which may be found in Christ's words, "Whosoever shall not receive the
kingdom of God as a _little child_ shall not enter it." In Wagner's
conception of the legend it was necessary that the hero be one as
guiltless of all knowledge of sin as he was of the necessity and nature
of salvation. Enlightenment was to come to him through compassion or
fellow-suffering, and this enlightenment was to enable him in turn
to resist temptation and bring surcease of suffering to Amfortas,
Kundry, and the community of Grail knights. In his musical phrase as
it enters the drama with him one may hear chiefly his youthful energy,
but also a certain innate dignity, a germ of nobility which contains
the possibility of the stupendous proclamation which greets him on
his entrance into the Castle of the Grail in the last act. But there
is another element in the typical music of "Parsifal" which chiefly
we recognize in its bright, assertive, militant rhythm. It is the
chivalric element which may also be noticed in the brilliant phrase
with which Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal, is greeted by the populace
in the earlier drama of Wagner's. This kinship need not be set down as
fanciful. There are few features of Wagnerian study more interesting
than the tracing of spiritual and material parallels between the
composer's own melodies. As a writer uses forms of expression which
resemble each other to express related ideas, so Wagner has frequently
recurred in his later works to melodic phrases and modulations which
he had used with like intent many years before. In two cases he made
a direct quotation. Hans Sachs's allusion to the story of Tristram
and Iseult in Act III. of "Die Meistersinger" is accompanied by the
fundamental melody of "Tristan und Isolde," and the swan which Parsifal
kills comes fluttering across the scene and dies to a reminiscence of
the swan harmonies in "Lohengrin."
In his character as the mystically chosen Agent of the Grail and the
instrument of salvation, Parsifal is also typified in the music by the
phrase to which the oracular promise which appeared on the Holy Vessel
is repeated in the first scene, and again with great solemnity in the
ceremony of the Adoration of the Grail.
VI.
Prototypes of the Quest of the Grail and of the Quester have been found
in popular tales which have nothing to do with Christianity. Until the
talisman became a symbol of religion, the object of the search for it
was simply the performance of a sacred duty by the hero to his family,
by avenging a death, healing the lingering illness of a relative, or
in some instances (which connect the Grail legends with stories of
the Barbarossa kind) to bring freedom to individuals whose lives have
been miraculously and burdensomely prolonged. The talisman itself is
to be found in a multitude of forms, from the dawn of literature down
to today. To recognize it we must study its properties rather than its
shape or material. In the legend of the Holy Grail it is the chalice
used by Christ
"At the last sad supper with his own,"
in which afterwards his blood was caught. In one form of the
legend--that which is most familiar, because of Tennyson's "Idyls of
the King"--this cup is carried to Great Britain by Joseph of Arimathea
and deposited at Glastonbury. In another form, which was that adopted
by Wagner, it is given into the keeping of Titurel, who builds a
sanctuary for it on Monsalvat (the Mountain of Salvation), where it is
guarded by a body of knights obviously organized on the model of the
Knights Templars of the Crusades. It is not always a cup. Wolfram von
Eschenbach describes it as a jewel. But whether stone or cup (and we
shall find prototypes of both forms) its miraculous properties are of
two kinds.
The first of these properties is purely physical: the talisman feeds
its possessor; the second is spiritual: the talisman is a touchstone,
an oracle. In the perfect form of the legend both these properties are
united, as we see in Wagner's drama: the Grail chooses those who are
to serve it, and nourishes them miraculously. It also predicts the
coming of Parsifal. This is the case, too, in Wolfram's poem, where
the names of the elect appear in glowing letters upon the jewel, and
its guardian knights, whom Wolfram calls _Templeisen_, are fed by it,
this miraculous power being refreshed every Friday by the coming of
a dove bringing the sacred host and placing it upon the jewel, which
Wolfram calls the "Graal," in defiance of the etymology which makes
the word mean dish. Wolfram calls it "_lapsit exillis_;" but Wolfram,
though he composed the grandest of all mediæval poems, could neither
read nor write, so his Latin has caused not a little brain-cudgelling
among the learned. A most ingenious guess is that of Professor Martin,
who thinks _lapsit exillis_ is a corruption of _lapsi de Cælis_--that
is, the stone of him who fell from heaven. In support of this there
is the poem about the contest of the minstrels in the Wartburg, which
describes the Grail as a jewel which fell from the crown of Lucifer
when the Archangel Michael tore it from his head. This origin of the
Grail connects it with the black stone in the Kaaba at Mecca, which was
originally white, but has been blackened by the sins of mankind. The
legend says that it was once the angel set as a guard over Adam. He was
cast down from heaven in the form of a stone for being derelict in duty.
The Grail's property of furnishing sustenance is the possession of so
many talismans of ancient story that it would be a waste of space to
enumerate them all. The most striking examples must suffice. A horn was
the earliest drinking-vessel. The horn which the nymph Amalthea gave to
Hercules, whose memory we still preserve in those pretty toys called
cornucopias--horns of plenty--is easily recalled in this connection.
The Grail is nothing else than the Philosopher's Stone which was to
transmute all baser metals into gold; it is the stone which Noah was
commanded to hang up in the Ark that it might give out light; it is
the goblet which Oberon gave to Huon of Bordeaux, which in the hands
of a good man became filled with wine; it is the golden cup which was
given to Hercules by the sun-god Helios; it is the cup of Hermes, which
played a part in the Eleusinian mysteries; it is the magic napkin or
table-cloth of Aryan fairy-lore which produced all manner of food
simply for the wishing; it has its fellows in three of the thirteen
Rarities of Kingly Regalia which were preserved in Arthur's Court at
Caerleon, viz., the horn of Bran the Hardy of the North--the drink
that might be desired of it would appear as soon as wished for; the
Budget or Basket of Gwyddno with the High Crown--provision for a single
person if put into it multiplied a hundredfold; the table-cloth (in one
manuscript it is called the dish) of Rhydderch the Scholar--whatever
victuals or drink were wished thereon were instantly obtained. It is
the stone in the serpent's tail told about in the old Welsh story of
Peredur, the virtue of which was that it would give as much gold to
the possessor as he might desire. It is the magic ring Draupnir of
Scandinavian mythology which every ninth night dropped eight other
rings of equal weight and fineness.
But of prototypes of this class the most striking in its relation to
the Holy Grail is found in the legendary lore of the primitive home of
the Aryan race. Long ago the Holy Grail was the Golden Cup of Jamshid,
King of the Genii in Persia, the power of which extended his career
over seven hundred years, and then left him to die because he failed
to look upon it for ten days. Here we have a parallel of the legend of
Joseph of Arimathea, of whom it is said that the Jews having thrown
him into a subterranean prison after he and Nicodemus had prepared
the body of Christ for burial, Christ appeared to him and brought the
chalice which he had used at the Last Supper, and in which Joseph had
caught the blood which flowed from his wounds. The sight of this dish
kept Joseph alive forty-two years, until he was released by the Emperor
Vespasian, who had been miraculously cured of leprosy in his youth by
a touch of the kerchief of Veronica with which Christ wiped his face
while on his way to Calvary. Like Joseph of Arimathea, Wagner's Titurel
lives in his grave, being sustained by the Grail until Amfortas refuses
longer to unveil it.
The second property of the Grail, its spiritual property, is also found
in the talismans of ancient folk-lore. It was possessed by the silver
cup which Joseph in Egypt had put into Benjamin's sack that he might
be brought back to him. "Up, follow after the men; and when thou dost
overtake them, say unto them, Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for
good? Is not this it in which my lord drinketh and whereby, indeed,
he divineth?"[L] There is a Hebrew legend (told in the _Clavicula
Salomonis_) to the effect that "the supernatural knowledge of Solomon
was recorded in a volume which Rehoboam inclosed in an ivory ewer and
deposited in his father's tomb. On repairing the sepulchre, some wise
men of Babylon discovered the cup, and having extracted the volume,
an angel revealed the key to its mysterious writing to one Troes, a
Greek, and hence the stream of occult science which has so beneficially
unfolded the destinies of the West."[M] There is a parallel story in
Greek literature telling how, warned by the Delphic oracle, Aristomenes
secreted an article while the Lacedemonians were storming the fortress
of Mount Ira. The article was to be a talisman for the future security
of the Messinians. When, later, the talisman was exhumed it was "found
to be a brazen ewer containing a roll of finely-beaten tin on which
were inscribed the mysteries of the great divinities."[N] The Holy
Grail is a divining-cup: it speaks oracularly, like its prototypes. It
was not only the chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper,
but also the dish which discovered Judas as the future betrayer of his
master: "He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall
betray me."[O]
VII.
The Grail romances, as we possess them, were written within the fifty
years compassing the last quarter of the twelfth and the first quarter
of the thirteenth centuries--that is to say, while the third and fourth
crusades were in progress, and the memory of the supposed discoveries
of the sacred cup and lance were still fresh in the minds of Europeans.
This fact furnishes ample suggestion as to how such talismans as I have
mentioned became transformed into the relics of Christ's passion. It
was by a literary process that has always been familiar to the world.
The species of belief or superstition which inspired the transformation
is not yet dead. If we are to believe Father Ignatius the miracle of
the Grail vision was repeated but recently at Llanthony Abbey in Wales,
where an Episcopal monk saw the chalice shining through the oaken doors
of the cabinet which enclosed it. That is a Christian form of the
belief; evidences of a pagan may be observed in nearly all civilized
communities almost any date. When you see a baby cutting its teeth upon
a red bit of bone, or ivory shaped like a branch of coral and tricked
out with bells, you see a relic of an unspeakably ancient superstition
closely allied to the belief in these miraculous talismans. When you
see a baby with a string of red coral beads around its neck you see
another. In Wagner, as in Tennyson, the Grail shines red:
"Fainter by day, but always in the night
Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken'd marsh
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain-top
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below
Blood-red."
Now note this truth of vast significance: the essential element in the
Grail, whether seen as a chalice or as a salver containing a head,
_is the blood_. The meaning of this need not be sought far. The human
imagination cannot be projected into the past sufficiently far to
picture the time when the awful idea of a bloody atonement did not
confront humanity. Hence it is that in pagan mythology blood is the
symbol of creative power, as the cups, horns, dishes, ewers, were
symbols of fecundity, abundance, and vivification. The essence of the
Grail myth is the reproductive power of the blood of a slain god. The
application which lies so near in a study of the Christian symbolism
of the Grail cannot fail. I omit it in order to trace the evolution
of the idea in a pagan talisman whose history the ingenuity of Dr.
Gustave Oppert, a German _savant_, has disclosed to us. When Perseus
cut off the head of the Medusa he placed the bleeding member on the
sward near the sea-coast. The blood transformed the grass that it dyed
into a red stone which was found to have marvellous healing power.
This belief is expressed in the poems descriptive of the virtues of
stones which are attributed to Orpheus. Dr. Oppert traces the record
touching the curative powers of coral into the book of a Christian
bishop of the twelfth century, and thence into a Latin work printed
in Strassburg in 1473, in which allusions to the Orphic songs and
the Christian religion are blended. Wolfram's alleged model, Kyot,
professes to have derived his account of the Grail from the book of a
pagan called Flegetanis, written in Arabic and deposited at Toledo.
Now, Dr. Oppert finds an Arabic physician and philosopher of the tenth
century who describes coral as having a strengthening and nourishing
influence upon the heart, which belief seems recognized again in a bit
of mediæval etymology which compounds the word of _cor_ and _alere_.
Mediæval Latin poems express the belief that peculiar properties of
sustenance are possessed by coral, and, finally, in a book entitled
_Musæum Metallicum_ it is defined as a memorial of the blood of Christ.
In its physical attributes coral and the Grail are now identical. Had
Dr. Oppert wished, he might have gone further and quoted Pliny's remark
that the Indian soothsayers and diviners "look upon coral as an amulet
endowed with sacred properties and a sure preservative against all
dangers; hence it is that they equally value it as an ornament and as
an object of devotion."[P] Here spiritual properties are attributed
to it; but also physical. Pliny says that calcined coral is used
as an ingredient for compositions for the eyes; that it makes flesh
(very significant this) in cavities left by ulcers. In his day it was
hung about the necks of infants to preserve them against danger. The
Romans thought that it preserved and fastened the teeth of children
when hung about their necks. Paracelsus prescribed coral necklaces as
preservatives "against fits, sorcery, charms, and poison," and an old
English writer makes it disclose the presence of sickness in a wearer
by turning pale and wan. Here it is a touchstone, and this superstition
has penetrated to the United States. In our day I have been told by
devoted mothers that coral beads strengthen the eyes. When the present
Crown-prince of Italy was born in Naples the municipality presented the
royal babe with a coral cradle.
Thus much for the genesis of the Grail, its Quest, and its Quester. We
have seen that they are all relics of a time antedating Christianity;
but that fact only adds interest to them, for even in their pagan
guises they show those potential attributes which adapted them to
receive the lofty symbolism which they acquired under the influence of
Christianity.
VIII.
It is in the prelude to the drama that the fundamental elements of
suffering and aspiration are most eloquently proclaimed. The visible
symbol of suffering among the personages of the play is Amfortas. He,
too, has come into the Christianized legend from the secular romances
and folk-tales. In the earlier forms he is simply the representative
of unsatisfied vengeance, symbolized in the bardic emblem of the
bleeding lance. In the French romances and Wolfram's poem he is a royal
fisherman--a singular fact, which critics with a taste for hidden
meanings have sought to explain by references to the circumstance
that in the early Church a fish was a symbol for Christ, the letters
composing its name in Greek, ICHTHYS, being the initial letters of the
brief but comprehensive creed, _Iesous Christos, Theou Yios, Soter_
(Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour). But always, even in the Welsh tale,
he is a sufferer whose healing depends on the asking of a question by
a predestined hero. In the Mabinogi of Peredur and the French romances
the question goes simply to the meaning of the talismans which are
solemnly displayed. Wolfram deepens the ethical significance of the
question immeasurably by changing it to "What ails thee, uncle?" It is
the sympathy thus manifested that brings the fisher-king's sufferings
to an end; and the failure to ask the question on the first visit,
through a too literal interpretation of the advice given while Parzival
was receiving his education in chivalry, is the cause of the long
wanderings and many trials which test and temper the religious nature
of Parzival. Wagner, by ignoring the question which plays so important
a role in all the other versions, and making the healing of Amfortas
depend upon a touch of the sacred lance, has gained a theatrical effect
at the expense of a profoundly beautiful ethical principle. He has also
laid himself open to a charge of inconsistency which, strangely enough,
seems to have escaped the attention of his many inimical critics in
Germany. The prohibited question is the dramatic _motif_ upon which the
story of Percival's son, Lohengrin, is reared:
"Nie sollst du mich befragen,
Noch Wissens Sorge tragen,
Woher ich kam der Fahrt,
Noch wie mein Nam' und Art!"
The reason of the prohibition may be learned from Wolfram von
Eschenbach. The sufferings of Amfortas having been needlessly prolonged
by Parzival's failure to ask the healing question, the Knights of the
Grail thereafter refused to permit themselves to be questioned:
"Als die Taufe nun geschen,
Fand am Grale man geschrieben:
'Welchen Templer Gottes Hand
Fremdem Volk zum Herren gäbe,
Fragen sollt' er widerraten
Nach seinem Namen und Geschlecht,
Und dann zum Recht ihm helfen.
Wird die Frage doch gethan,
So bleibt er ihnen länger nicht.'
Weil der gute Amfortas
So lang im bittern Schemerzen lag,
Und ihn die Frage lange mied,
Ist ihnen alles Fragen leid:
All des Grales Dienstgesellen
Wolln sich nicht mehr fragen lassen."[Q]
Wagner utilized the _motif_ in "Lohengrin," but ignored it in
"Parsifal."
The suffering of Amfortas, which came upon him because he, the King of
the Grail, fell from the estate of bodily purity enjoined by the rules
of the order, receives more eloquent expression than any of the other
feelings which enter the drama. In Wagner's philosophical scheme it,
as well as the tortures of conscience felt by Parsifal when Kundry's
impure kiss awakens him to consciousness of transgression, recalls the
vicarious suffering of Christ on the Cross. In the personal history of
Parsifal, furthermore, it is associated with the death-agonies of his
mother, who died because he left her to go in search of knighthood.
The name of this mother Wagner changes so that it becomes a symbol of
pain. It is Herzeleide--that is, Heart's-sorrow, or Heart's-suffering,
the antithesis of our sweet English word Heart's-ease. The phrases
which give the predominant mood of agony and pain to the music of the
drama, which, as I have already said, reflect the spirit of theological
Christianity, salvation through sacrifice, are these:
_First._ The melody to which in the ceremony of the Adoration of the
Grail the sacramental formula is pronounced: "Take ye My Body, take My
Blood, in token of our Love."
_Second._ The personal melody of Amfortas.
_Third._ The symbol of Herzeleide. Parsifal's mother, does not enter
the drama, but is only spoken of; yet a typical phrase is allotted to
her, and is introduced for the first time under circumstances that
are profoundly poetical and pathetic. Parsifal is being questioned by
Gurnemanz. To all interrogations save one he has the single answer, "I
do not know." Asked his name, he answers: "Once I had many, but now I
remember none." This answer is accompanied by the Herzeleide phrase. To
find the clue to this somewhat enigmatic proceeding resort must be had
to Wagner's model Wolfram, where it is said of the lad's mother that
"A thousand times she said tenderly:
'_Bon fils, cher fils, beau fils._'"
These were the names which Parsifal once knew but had forgotten. They
are associated in his mind with his mother, and therefore the allusion
is accompanied by the Herzeleide phrase.
_Fourth._ The phrase to which in the memorial ceremony of Christ's
suffering the words are sung:
"For a world that slumbered
With sorrows unnumbered
He once His own blood offered."
It is this phrase that lends such great poignancy to the music which
accompanies Parsifal and Gurnemanz as they walk towards the Castle of
the Grail.
In the prelude suffering has its expression in the first of these
phrases, whose concluding figure in the second part reaches an
expression of agony like the cry that rent the air of Calvary even
as the curtain of the temple was rent in twain: "_Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani?_" Aspiration is proclaimed by the symbol of the Grail
itself, the familiar Amen formula of the Dresden Court Church, an
ethereal phrase which soars ever upward towards the zenith of tonality.
The melody of Faith is marked by lofty firmness, and derives a peculiar
emphasis from successive repetition in remote keys.
For the prelude, whose melodic material has been thus marshalled, we
have Wagner's own poetic exposition:
"Strong and firm does Faith reveal itself, elevated and resolute even
in suffering. In answer to the renewed promise the voice of Faith
sounds softly from dimmest heights--as though borne on the wings of
the snow-white dove--slowly descending, embracing with ever-increasing
breadth and fulness the heart of man, filling the world and the whole
of nature with mightiest force; then, as though stilled to rest,
glancing upward again towards the light of heaven. Then once more
from the awe of solitude arises the lament of loving compassion, the
agony, the holy sweat of the Mount of Olives, the divine sufferings of
Golgotha; the body blanches, the blood streams forth and glows now with
the heavenly glow of blessing in the chalice, pouring forth on all that
lives and languishes the gracious gift of Redemption through Love. For
him we are prepared, for Amfortas, the sinful guardian of the shrine
who, with fearful rue for sin gnawing at his heart, must prostrate
himself before the chastisement of the vision of the Grail. Shall there
be redemption from the devouring torments of his soul? Yet once again
we hear the promise and--hope!"
IX.
The first act of the drama treats of the election of the hero, the
guileless simpleton of the talismanic oracle. In the second stage of
the action the hero is proved by temptation. All the elements here are
derived from legendary stories, but in their combination Wagner has
proceeded with remarkable dramatic power, freedom, and ingenuity. The
apparatus is magical. Klingsor, a pervasive personage in mediæval
sorcery; Kundry, the repulsive messenger of the Grail no longer, but a
supernaturally beautiful siren; a magic garden and castle, and a bevy
of maidens, whose office it is to stimulate the senses by suggesting an
appeal to all of them at once (they are half human, half floral)--these
are the agencies of Parsifal's temptation. The prototype of the scene
in old mythologies and folk-lore is a visit to a bespelled castle
where generally the hero succumbs to sensual weakness of some kind;
he eats of proffered food and loses his speech; or he asks a question
which is _tabu_; or he fails to ask a question which is commanded; or
falls asleep; or fails to bring away a talisman which has opened the
castle to him; or he falls as Tannhäuser fell. As a rule the castle
vanishes at the end of the adventure, as it does in "Parsifal," when
the hero resists Kundry's love-spell, seizes the lance which the
magician launches against him, and with it makes the sign of the
cross and pronounces a formula of exorcism. Often the purpose of the
visit is to release a damsel who is bespelled or imprisoned. Students
of comparative folk-lore have found the mythological essence of the
stories of this class to lie in a visit to the underworld. Siegfried
achieved an analogous adventure when he penetrated the wall of fire,
and awakened Brünnhilde from the spell of sleep in which she was held.
Klingsor is remotely connected with the history of two other dramas
of Wagner. In the poem describing the Contest of Minstrelsy held
in the Wartburg which Wagner blended with the legend of Tannhäuser,
Klingsor is a magician and minstrel of Hungary, and to him Heinrich von
Effterdingen, otherwise Tannhäuser, appeals when defeated by Wolfram
von Eschenbach, who is not only the author of the poem "Parzival," but
also the tuneful minstrel who sings a woful ballad to the evening star
in Wagner's opera. In his epic Wolfram makes Klingsor a nephew of the
renowned magician Virgilius of Naples.[R]
Cyriacus Spangenberg, who wrote a book on the Art of the Master-singers
in 1598, devotes several pages to Klingsor, describing him as the
greatest master-singer of his age, who met all comers in poetical
combat and overthrew them to the number of fifty-two. He was finally
confounded by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who discovered his dependence on
the Powers of Evil, and put both him and his familiar, a devil called
Nazian, to shame by singing the glories of the Son of God become Man.
"Kundry," says Mr. Alfred Nutt, "is Wagner's greatest contribution to
the legend. She is the Herodias whom Christ, for her laughter, doomed
to wander till He come again." The manner in which Wagner compounded
this, his most striking and original dramatic character, is the most
marvellous of his poetical achievements in the drama. Kundry draws her
elements from the Grail romances, from Christian legends, from fairy
tales, and from the profoundest depths of the poet's imagination. In
the Welsh tale her prototype is the hero's cousin, who is under a
spell, and in accordance with the popular tale formula appears as a
loathly damsel until her kinsman achieves the vengeance demanded by
family ties. Then she appears in her true form as a handsome youth.
In Wolfram, Kundrie la Sorcière is only the Grail Messenger, and as
such is hideous of appearance; the temptress of the Magic Garden is
a beauteous damsel named Orgeluse. Wagner united both attributes in
his creation. As a penitent, seeking atonement for sin committed, she
is a loathly damsel in the service of the Grail. As a siren she is a
tool of Klingsor, to whose power she is subject while asleep. She has
innumerable prototypes in fairy-lore, who are released from wicked
spells by the kisses of handsome princes, the fidelity of husbands, or
the granting of their wills, as in "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine." In
Wagner, the dissolution of the spell releases her from a double curse.
The suggestion to make use of the Herodias legend lies near enough
in both the Mabinogi of Peredur and Wolfram's epic. The Templeisen,
as Wolfram calls his Knights of the Grail, were an order obviously
patterned after the Knights Templars, who were accused among other
things of having secretly worshipped a head which they credited with
the virtues of the talismans that I have discussed. Their patron saint
was John the Baptist, and when the vessel of green glass, so long and
piously revered as the _santo catino_, was brought back by crusaders
seven hundred years ago, it was deposited in the Chapel of St. John
at Genoa. A relic of the John the Baptist cult has survived among
the Knights Templar, a branch of the Order of Free Masons, to this
day. That the talisman of a bloody head upon a salver in the Welsh
tale should have suggested the Herodias legend is obvious enough.
Wagner's transformation of the legend, accomplished for the purpose
of identifying his Kundry with Herodias, is extremely suggestive and
felicitous. According to the old tale, Herodias was in love with the
prophet of the New Dispensation. After the dance before Herod and its
awful consequences, she secretly crept to the head upon the salver
for the purpose of covering it with tears and kisses. At that moment
a blast issued from the dead lips which sent Herodias flying off into
space. Thus she is still driven forward, permitted to rest only from
midnight to dawn, when she sits cowering under willow and hazel copses,
and bemoans her fate. In Wagner she becomes a Wandering Jewess. She saw
Christ staggering under the burden of the Cross and laughed. His glance
fell upon her, and doomed her to wander ceaselessly without the sweet
refuge of tears, subject to the powers of evil, yet longing to make
atonement by deeds of virtue. These characteristics Wagner developed
with marvellous dramatic power in the music which he associates with
her, and which is equally wild and hysterical, whether it picture her
flying along on a horse doing errands in the service of the Grail,
or in one of those fits of mad laughter to which the curse makes her
subject.
Yet Kundry, to proceed with Mr. Nutt, "would find release and salvation
could a man resist her love spell. She knows this. The scene between
the unwilling temptress, whose success would but doom her afresh,
and the virgin Parsifal thus becomes tragic in the extreme. How does
this affect Amfortas and the Grail? In this way: Parsifal is the pure
fool, knowing naught of sin or suffering. It had been foretold of him
that he should become 'wise by fellow-suffering,' and so it proves.
The overmastering rush of desire unseals his eyes, clears his mind.
Heart-wounded by the shaft of passion, he feels Amfortas' torture
thrill through him. The pain of the physical wound is his, but far
more, the agony of the sinner who has been unworthy of his high trust,
and who, soiled by carnal sin, must yet daily come in contact with the
Grail, symbol of the highest purity and holiness. The strength of the
new-born knowledge enables him to resist sensual longing, and thereby
to release both Kundry and Amfortas."
X.
In spite of this, however, and more than this, in spite of all the
religious mysticism with which the work can be infused by the analyst
and interpreter, I cannot but question the right of "Parsifal" to
be considered as in any sense a reflex of the religious feeling of
to-day. It is beautiful in much of its symbolism, and it is profound;
but it is too persistently mediæval in its dramatic manifestations to
satisfy the intelligence of the nineteenth century. The adoration of
the relics of Christ's passion, and the idea that all human virtues are
summed up in celibate chastity, were products of an age whose theories
and practices as regards sex relationship can have no echo in modern
civilization. Wolfram von Eschenbach's married Parzival, who clings
with fond devotion to the memory of the wife from whose arms he had to
tear himself in order to undertake the quest, and who loses himself
in tender brooding for a long time when the sight of blood-spots on
the snow suggests to his fancy the red and white of his wife's cheeks,
seems to me to be a much more amiable and human hero than the young
ascetic of Wagner's drama.
FOOTNOTES:
[J] _Parzival, von Wolfram von Eschenbach._ Dr. Gotthold Bötticher.
Berlin, 1885.
[K] _Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail._ David Nutt. London, 1888.
[L] Genesis xliv., 4 and 5.
[M] Mr. Price's Preface in Warton's _History of English Poetry_, vol. i.
[N] Mr. Price's note in Warton, vol. i.
[O] Matthew xxvi., 23.
[P] Natural History, Book XXXII., chap. ii.
[Q] Bötticher's Translation Book XVI.
[R] The stories concerning Virgil and his connection with the Black Art
are admirably discussed in Mr. J. S. Tunison's study, _Master Virgil,
the Author of the Æneid as he seemed in the Middle Ages_. Second
Edition. Robert Clarke & Co. Cincinnati, 1890.
* * * * *
BY ANNA ALICE CHAPIN
WONDER TALES FROM WAGNER. Told for Young People. Illustrated.
Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1.25.
Miss Chapin's idea of reducing to a compact and readable form the
more or less involved stories of Wagner's operas is one that met with
pronounced success in her first book, "The Story of the Rhinegold."
Although announced as "for young people," it was received with marked
favor by older lovers of Wagner, who found in it an intelligent,
consecutive, and concise guide to the narrative covered by the
Nibelungen cycle. "Wonder Tales from Wagner" is planned upon much
the same lines, and forms an invaluable companion volume to its
predecessor. Told with singular simplicity and grace, these stories
of the old gods have all the charm of modern fairy-tales and are,
moreover, of great assistance in the study of Wagner and Wagner's
operas.
THE STORY OF THE RHINEGOLD. (Der Ring des Nibelungen.) Told for Young
People. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1.25.
The legend of the Rhinegold is both interesting and dramatic, and it
has lost nothing of either quality in the hands of Miss Chapin. It may
have been written with the hope of explaining the music of Wagner to
young folks, but we imagine that old people will find in it a great
deal of much-needed information.--_N. Y. Herald._
The stories on which Wagner founded his great operas are told in a
clear, beautiful, story-telling manner that claims and holds the
attention. The musical motif of each development of the stories is
given, and greatly adds to the value of the book.--_Outlook_, N. Y.
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
[Illustration] _Either of the above works will be sent by mail, postage
prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on
receipt of the price._
THE BROWNING LETTERS
THE LETTERS OF ROBERT BROWNING AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING,
1845-1846. Illustrated with Two Contemporary Portraits of the
Writers, and Two Facsimile Letters. With a Prefatory Note by
R. BARRETT BROWNING, and Notes, by F. G. KENYON, Explanatory of
the Greek Words, Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Deckel
Edges and Gilt Tops, $5.00; Half Morocco, $9.50.
Many good gifts have come to English literature from the two Brownings,
husband and wife, besides those poems, which are their greatest. The
gift of one's poems is the gift of one's self. But in a fuller sense
have this unique pair now given themselves by what we can but call the
gracious gift of these letters. As their union was unique, so is this
correspondence unique.... The letters are the most opulent in various
interest which have been published for many a day.--_Academy_, London.
We have read these letters with great care, with growing astonishment,
with immense respect; and the final result produced on our minds is
that these volumes contain one of the most precious contributions to
literary history which our time has seen.--_Saturday Review_, London.
We venture to think that no such remarkable and unbroken series of
intimate letters between two remarkable people has ever been given
to the world.... There is something extraordinarily touching in the
gradual unfolding of the romance in which two poets play the parts of
hero and heroine.--_Spectator_, London.
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
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