Wagner - free ebook by Ernest Newman

WAGNER AS MAN & ARTIST

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PREFACE

Some apology is perhaps needed from an author for writing three books on the same subject. I can only plead in extenuation that the subject of Wagner is inexhaustible; and I am defiant enough to refuse to pledge myself not to repeat the offence in another ten years or so. It is possible that readers who have done me the honour to make themselves familiar with my Study of Wagner (1899) may discover that in the present book I express myself differently upon one or two points. My defence is that ev

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INTRODUCTION

While there is at present no adequate Life of Wagner, there is probably more biographical material available in connection with him than with any other artist who has ever lived; and on the basis of this material it seems justifiable now to attempt—what was impossible until the publication of Mein Leben in 1911—a complete and impartial psychological estimate of him. There has probably never been a more complex artist, and certainly never anything like so complex a musician. A soul and a characte

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I

From the autobiography and the letters to Apel we can get an excellent idea of what he was in his boyhood. He came of a family of rather more than average ability. As a child he was nervous, excitable and imaginative, impatient of control either at home or in school, but quick enough to assimilate life and knowledge in his own way. It is clear, both from what he says in Mein Leben and from scattered hints in that book and in his letters, that he was occasionally a source of great anxiety to his

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II

The best picture of him in his adolescent years is given in the correspondence with Theodor Apel, the friend of 1832-1836. There we have in epitome the whole Wagner of the later years, with his imprudence in all the practical affairs of life, the irrepressible vitality that enabled him to recover so quickly after each of the many crises he went through, [46] his extravagance, his incurable tendency to run up debts with tradesmen and to borrow money from his friends, his Micawberish confidence in

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III

We can visualise him in these early years as a creature of the strangest contradictions—charming enough with those he liked, supercilious and insulting to people he disliked, and always liable to some fit of the nerves that would make him unaccountably irritable, perverse, tactless, and ready to wound even friends; generous with his help where his sympathies were engaged, and with a fine code of honour for many of the relationships of life, but a sad lack of delicacy and even of honour with rega

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IV

Of his irritability and tactlessness we have several instances, some of them given us by himself. Take, for example, Meissner's account of the supper that Wagner gave to Laube [59] after the performance at Dresden of the latter's play, the Karlsschüler . There were a number of people present, and the usual compliments passed. Meanwhile, however, "Wagner had been fidgeting about on his chair for some time, and finally he threw out the question: Whether, in order to put a Schiller into a play, one

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V

Minna has always been the subject of contumelious and sometimes venomous remarks from the simpler-minded Wagnerians, especially those who have apparently taken their cue from Villa Wahnfried. Their quick and easy way with the problem has been to assume, as usual, that Wagner was in all things the just man made perfect; his marriage with a woman who was his intellectual inferior was a mistake, but his conduct was always that of an affectionate husband and an honourable gentleman,—his patience and

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VI

The publication of Mein Leben , the Wesendonck letters, and the letters to Minna have made it possible to see both Wagner and Minna more in the round than we could do a few years ago. Not that any number of documents would ever bring reason into the writings of the more extreme Minnaphobes; their method in the future, as in the past, will no doubt be to insist that the composer was in every relation of his life as near impeccable as mortal man could be, and that Minna was very bad or very mad or

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VII

He was always much more fond of women than of men, having seemingly found the former more sympathetic not only to his art but to himself. His great desire, as a thousand passages in his letters and his prose works show, was for love that knew no bounds in the way of trust and self-surrender. In his immediate circle he probably had more experiences of this kind among the women than among the men; the women probably had a subconscious quasi-maternal sympathy for the sufferings of the little man, a

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VIII

That Minna was as much sinned against as sinning will hardly be disputed by any unprejudiced reader of Mein Leben and Wagner's correspondence. Let us throw as rapid a glance as possible over the various stages of their union. Wagner himself sings the praises of the earlier Minna frequently enough. The picture we first get of her is that of a pretty bourgeoise, of no great intellectual capacity, but modest, sensible and sympathetic. On the other hand, several of Wagner's self-revelations show him

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IX

In the end they marry. Wagner was twenty-three and a half, Minna twenty-seven. At the altar, he says, he had the clearest of visions of his life being dragged in different directions by two cross-currents; but he accounts for the levity with which he chased away these thoughts by the "really heart-felt affection" he had for this "truly exceptional girl," who "gave herself so unhesitatingly to a young man without any means of support." Almost immediately after the marriage, whatever little idyll

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X

It was not very long after he had been disappointed in Jessie Laussot, and at a time when Minna had ceased to minister to his mental life, that he made the acquaintance of Mathilde Wesendonck. They first met in February 1852. The young wife was fascinated by the man of genius, and woman-wise pitied his evidently forlorn state. He, for his part, found in her the mental and moral sunlight his work needed at the time. Their affection for each other deepened month by month. Writing to his sister Cla

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XI

Nothing shows more instructively the fundamental dualism of his nature than a comparison of these letters to Mathilde with those he was writing at the same time to Minna. Every thought of Mathilde is a dream, an intoxication; to Minna he is the practical man, discussing the ordinary little things of life in the most prosaic fashion. Their parting was not intended to be a permanent one: each of them was to "go his own way for a while in peace and reconciliation" in order to "win calmness and new

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XII

Minna joined him in Paris on the 17th November 1859. Their relations were soon as embittered as usual. Wagner was playing for high stakes, living feverishly and expensively, entertaining largely, giving disastrous concerts, accumulating new and heavy debts. The clear-sighted and careful Minna was appalled at the prospect of the ruin that was threatening them once more: and Wagner made the mistake of not confiding in her. She felt herself shut out from his inner life. Apparently he was also givin

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XIII

All this while the understanding between himself and von Bülow's wife had evidently been quietly ripening. Reading between the lines of his earlier accounts of Cosima, it is easy to see that there had been for some time a tentative if unavowed rapprochement between them. In 1861, when taking leave of Cosima at Reichenhall, she gave him, he says, "an almost timid look of enquiry," [223] —which strikes the old Wagnerian hand as one of those phrases in which the composer conceals more than he discl

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XIV

I have given the erotic history of Wagner in such detail not only because of the enormous part the erotic played in his life and in the shaping of his character, but because to know him thoroughly from this side is to have the key to his whole nature. Nowhere and at no time was a middle course possible for him. It was all or nothing. To that extent he was consistent: yet viewed in detail he was a bundle of inconsistencies,—at once a voluptuary and an ascetic, a hero and a rogue, a saint and a si

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XV

At once a Spartan and a voluptuary in body, ready to endure many miseries rather than live any kind of life but the one he desired to live, yet unable to deny himself all sorts of luxuries even when he had not the money to pay for them, he was both a Spartan and a voluptuary in the things of the mind. He cut himself adrift uncompromisingly, even with rudeness, from people he disliked, even though they for their part were not ill-disposed towards him and might have been useful to him. But to his

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XVI

In Mein Leben he half-humorously admits another little failing of his—a passion for reading his own works to his friends. [273] With the production of each new work he feels that here is something that the whole world of thinking men must be hungry to see and hear; so he either has it printed at his own expense—little as he can afford such a luxury—or he calls his friends and acquaintances together and remorselessly reads it to them. In 1851 he read the whole of Opera and Drama to his Zürich cir

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I

For a great revolutionary, Wagner was curiously long in coming to consciousness of himself. The record of his youth and early manhood is one of constant fluctuation between one ideal or influence and another. The most remarkable feature of him in these days, indeed, is his mental malleability. In his later years he is the centre of a solar system of his own; everything else in his orbit is a mere planet that must revolve around him or be cast out. In his younger days, on the contrary, he is extr

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II

That the articles praising the Italians at the expense of the Germans were the products of more than the mere impression of Schröder-Devrient's singing and acting—that they came from the depths of a real change in his intellectual and emotional nature—is shown by the length of time he remained at the same standpoint. The text of Das Liebesverbot was written in a mood of fiery youthful protest against what he held to be the cramping puritanism of the moralists. He deliberately transforms Shakespe

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III

The miseries of his two years and a half in Paris are known to every reader of his life. Penury, deceptions, degradations, however, could not break him either intellectually or morally. A temperament so elastic as his could never be crushed, and least of all when it was young. He himself has told us of the amazement his associates expressed at the toughness and resilience of his spirit. But the fire he passed through in those dreadful days purified him as an artist. It was not alone the failure

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IV

It has often been pointed out that the subjects of all Wagner's dramas were conceived by him before his fortieth year. It is equally true that virtually the whole of the æsthetic theories of his later life were immanent in him from the days of his Parisian sojourn, and needed only to be brought into clearer outline by the thought and the practice of the 'forties and 'fifties. In the essay on Beethoven (1870) he insists that it is the human character of the voice, rather than the mere sentiment t

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V

Of even more importance than the article A Happy Evening in the story of Wagner's development is the essay on The Overture that appeared in the Gazette Musicale in January 1841,—that is to say, a couple of months after the completion of Rienzi , and nearly six months before the commencement of the Flying Dutchman . Here he anticipates some of the æsthetic he was afterwards to expound so eloquently and so convincingly in the great article on Beethoven and elsewhere. He begins with a survey of the

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VI

After the Paris articles of 1841 Wagner wrote little or nothing upon the æsthetics of his art for some ten years. For a time, indeed, he wrote practically no prose of any kind. He left Paris for Dresden in April 1842. At the end of that year he wrote his Autobiographical Sketch for Laube's Zeitung für die elegante Welt . His pen was then silent until 1844, in which year we have the Account of the bringing home of Weber's remains from London to Dresden , and the Speech at Weber's Grave . To 1846

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VII

The years 1848 to 1852 were for Wagner a long spell of intellectual and spiritual indigestion; his too receptive brain was taking into itself more impressions of all kinds than it could assimilate. Art and life, opera and politics, called clamorously to him, and all at the same time, deafening and confusing him. With Lohengrin his second great creative epoch, that had commenced with the Flying Dutchman , had come to its perfect end. New ideas of music and drama were ripening in him, but as yet h

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VIII

In an interesting introduction that he wrote to Art and Revolution when reprinting the essay in his collective works in 1872, Wagner speaks of the influence of Feuerbach upon him at this time: in Feuerbach's conception of art he thought he recognised his own artistic ideal. What that ideal was is painted for us in full in the heated pages of Art and Revolution . His central point is the one to which he remained true his whole life long,—that art should be the pure expression of a free community'

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IX

It was while he was still panting in the mists of idealism that he wrote The Art-Work of the Future , in which the æsthetic ideas that had been maturing in him during the latter part of the Dresden period found their first full expression. The basis of his theory is again the belief that we shall not have a real art until we have a new and free humanity. "Man will never be what he can and should be, until his life is a true mirror of nature, a conscious following of the only real necessity, the

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X

Wagner was the most many-sided of musicians, as a glance at the titles of his prose works will show. He benefited greatly by his versatility: no one can doubt that his music is all the richer for the stimuli his nature received from so many quarters. But if he gained something by it, it is probable that the world lost as much. There are few of us who would not give three-fourths of the prose works for another opera from his pen; and he would have had time to write half a dozen if he had abstaine

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XI

It will be seen from this summary that Wagner, though now mainly occupied with purely æsthetic ideas, was still unable to refrain from mixing these up with political and other considerations that were quite alien to them. He still believes in the "Folk" as "always ... the fructifying source of all art." [353] He is still angry—almost comically angry at times—with the richer classes, who, in the Wagnerian philosophy of that period, are always to the Folk what the aristocratic villain of the melod

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XII

One is sometimes amazed, in reading Opera and Drama , at the persistence with which Wagner pursues the obvious, hunting it down, as Oscar Wilde said of James Payn, with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. He is almost as elaborately absurd over his vowels and consonants as M. Jourdain. The explanation is to be sought partly in the tendency to long-windedness, the passion for pursuing every idea to the death, that was always characteristic of him,—it derived ultimately from the inexorabl

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XIII

The musician, then, being at the basis of all his æsthetics, all his theories of opera and drama, the question arises, what sort of a musician was he? He was the spiritual son of Beethoven; a remoter ancestor was Bach. This is the cardinal fact in the psychology of Wagner; and it will need to be examined in all its bearings. Wagner was one of those dynamically charged personalities after whose passing the world can never be the same as it was before he came—one of the tiny group of men to whom i

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XIV

Having thus summarised the attitude of Wagner to Beethoven and to poetic music in general, let us proceed to fill in the details of the theory, allowing Wagner, wherever possible, to speak for himself. He has set forth his views upon Beethoven with the greatest positiveness in his letters to Uhlig, and much more lucidly there than in Opera and Drama . [370] He saw in Beethoven's music the struggle to express a definite poetic idea in an abstract form that necessarily made the communication of th

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XV

It must be clear to almost every reader, after this exposition of Wagner's own views upon music in general and dramatic music in particular, that, paradoxical as it may seem, he was under a life-long illusion as to the nature of his own genius and the origin and significance of his reforms. So far from the poet in him shaping and controlling the musician, it was the musician who led the poet where he would have him go; so far from drama being with him the end and the music the means, it was musi

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XVI

Beethoven, in fact, had brought a new spirit into the symphony and the overture without being able to discover a new and inevitable form in which this spirit could express itself. Wagner from his earliest years must have felt that he too had a dim perception of a new world of expression, if only he could discover the form for it. That form clearly did not exist in the symphony even as Beethoven had left it, for Wagner's vision was ready to take a bolder poetic flight even than Beethoven's, and i

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XVII

Of this he was more than half conscious himself; and it was always clear to him that as he was in the great line of instrumental succession, and that what he was doing was to extend still further the expressive range of instrumental, endlessly melodic music, it might be urged against him that the logical outcome of all his theory and his practice was not the opera but the symphonic poem or the programme symphony. But against that conclusion he always strenuously protested in advance. Something h

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XVIII

There are as many contradictions between Wagner's theory and practice, indeed, as between his life and his art. Without attempting the impossible task of trying to reconcile them all, let us cast a rapid glance over the main features of his practice, which are far more important than his theory. From every side we are driven to the conclusion that the dominating force in him was the instrumental musician who was born to continue Beethoven's work in another sphere. As his powers developed, his mu

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I—THE EARLY MISCELLANEOUS WORKS

According to Wagner's own account, he sketched tragedies in his childhood, and worked out one that was a sort of blend of Hamlet and King Lear ; and, inspired by Beethoven's Egmont , he soon desired to adorn this grand tragedy with music of his own. A brief study of Logier's Method of Thorough-Bass did not provide him with the needed technique, though, convinced that he was born to be a musician, he wrote a sonata, a quartet and an aria in secret. In his sixteenth year he placed himself under a

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II—THE EARLIEST OPERAS

Wagner worked out the drama of his first opera, Die Hochzeit ("The Wedding"), in 1833, but his sister Rosalie's antipathy to the gory and gruesome subject turned him against the work after he had written only some thirty or forty pages of the score—an Introduction, chorus and septet. The style has little individuality, though the chorus of female voices is not without charm. The septet, however, is an excellent piece of work for a boy of nineteen,—lucid, freely written, and with a certain amount

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III.—THE OPERAS OF THE SECOND PERIOD

Rienzi will always be something of a puzzle to the student. Wagner's own accounts of it in later years show that he too was a little uncertain as to the reasons for its obvious defects. He had tired of his life among little theatrical people in minor provincial towns, so he deliberately planned Rienzi on an elephantine scale in order that it might be impossible except in one of the larger opera houses. He had "grand opera" in his mind throughout, he tells us; he intended not merely to imitate th

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IV.—THE MATURE ARTIST

The years 1848 and 1849 saw the climax of a great crisis both in Wagner's life and his art; it had been developing for two or three years before, and its reverberations did not wholly die away for some years after. All his life and his work at this time were, as I have already said, simply a violent purgation of the spirit—a nightmare agony from which he woke with a cry of relief. He shakes off the theatre, and faces the world on a new footing as a man. And in silence, unknown to everybody and a

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APPENDIX A THE RACIAL ORIGIN OF WAGNER

Wagner's Autobiography has thrown a good deal of light on certain obscure episodes in his career, but it has signally failed to satisfy the world's curiosity on perhaps the most interesting point of all—the question as to who was Wagner's father. Was it the Leipzig police actuary, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, or the actor, painter, poet, singer, dramatist and what not, Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer, who married Frau Wagner some nine months after the decease of her first husband? Under normal

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I

It would be very interesting if some enterprising interviewer in the shades could procure for us Wagner's opinion upon the course of events in music in general and the opera in particular during the thirty years that have elapsed since his death. He would probably cling with his characteristic tenacity to the views he held in his life-time; but if he were candid he would have to admit that the old problems have latterly taken on a new aspect. The theories he expounded so eagerly in his prose wor

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II

Wagner's famous formula was that hitherto the means in opera (the music) had been taken for the end, and the end (the drama) for the means. His own avowed object was to restore to the drama the right of pre-eminence in opera. His claim to have done so is only valid if we define music and drama in the rather limited senses he had in view when framing his theory. His proposition is correct enough if we take it to mean that music must not, as in the Italian opera, occupy the ear to the exclusion of

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III

But granting the premisses implicit in Wagner's theory,—that music is an art of intensely emotional expression, that it can only ally itself with poetry and drama on the condition that these allow themselves to be bent to its will, and that the ideal "stuff" for an opera is that which contains the minimum of matter that music cannot take up into itself and endow with its own loftier and warmer life,—it surely becomes evident that the theory cannot be allowed to end there. In a long article on pr

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IV

Apart from theory, we have only to look at a few concrete instances of both types of art to see that the ideal symphonic poem is the unalloyed quintessence of opera, and that the average opera is merely a symphonic poem puffed out to three Acts, and made rather loose of tissue in the process. What could be easier than to make a three-act opera of Ein Heldenleben ,—and what more futile? Apart from the Adversaries, there are only two characters in Ein Heldenleben , and we cannot fill up a whole th

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V

It is true that Wagner tried to demonstrate that the symphonic poem was a less perfect art-form than the music-drama, inasmuch as it left it to the imagination to supply the characters, the events, or the pictures upon which the music is founded, whereas these really ought to be shown to the eye upon the stage. But a two-fold answer can be given to Wagner. In the first place, there are dozens of passages in his own works that depend for their effect upon precisely that visualising power of the i

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VI

The elimination from an opera-text of everything that is not suited to musical expression is perhaps an unattainable ideal. It is only the titanic musical genius of Wagner that makes us more or less tolerant of what we may call the baser metal in the structure of his music-dramas. Since his day the problem has proved so baffling a one that composers have frankly given it up in despair. Wagner was right: the simpler the story or legend on which we found an opera,—the more it can be trusted to mak

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VII

To recapitulate, then, for a moment: Wagner's theory of the ideal music-drama is sound enough, but neither he nor any of his successors has been able to realise the theory in practice. In every combination of music with the other arts it must of necessity play the leading rôle, because of the greater expansiveness and superior warmth of its expression. [414] As Wagner saw, it will tolerate no text but one that is thoroughly musical in essence—that is to say, one that is so purely emotional throu

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VIII

If, then, there is no æsthetic falsity involved in assuming some previous knowledge of the action or the motive on the part of the spectator, or in communicating this knowledge by other means than a stage presentation, why should we not boldly recognise that the time is ripe for a new form of art that shall carry the potency of music a step further than it was carried by Wagner? After all, it is the music that counts for ninety-five per cent, of our enjoyment of a Wagner opera. The "philosophy"

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IX

Maeterlinck and others have of late familiarised us with the idea of a "static" as distinguished from the older "dynamic" drama. It is highly probable that in the future men will go to the theatre craving the satisfaction of rather different desires from those they seek to satisfy there now. That "drama" is capable of more than one meaning is proved by the existence of dramatic forms so varied as those of the Greek drama, the Shakespearean drama, the Maeterlinckian drama, the Atalanta in Calydon

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X

It is this attitude of the artistic mind of the future towards drama that will, I think, find utterance in a form of quasi-dramatic music in which we shall be rid of all or most of the mere scaffolding of narration or action that serves at present simply to give intellectual support to the music of opera. Even in Wagner are we not painfully conscious at times of the fact that the music, which matters a great deal, is being diluted and made turbid by a quantity of baser matter the only function o

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