Tristan's crime is indeed in the eyes of a chivalrous soul a far blacker one than that of adultery. He has betrayed his friend, his sovereign, his kinsman, his benefactor, and has broken his faith towards the woman who trusted him. He is so completely overcome with love for the woman whom he himself has brought to be the bride of his uncle, that no going back is possible. But one course is yet open to him to save his honour. He may die; and he accordingly seeks death with full consciousness and determination. Three times he tries to rid himself of life: first when he drinks the supposed poison with Isolde; again when he drops his sword in the duel with Melot; the third time he succeeds, when he tears off his bandages at the decisive moment, when no escape is possible but by instant death.

Love for its own sake is not a subject for dramatic treatment. Love-stories are the bane of love. In real life we do not talk about our love-affairs, most men thinking that they have quite enough to do with their own without caring to hear those of other people. Still less do we wish to hear the vapid inanities which seem proper to that condition poured forth on the stage. I know of no European drama of any importance which treats of a prosperous and happy love as its principal subject; it needs the delicate pen of a Kalidasa to make it endurable. It does not of course follow that love is to be altogether banished from dramatic art. The dramatist surveys the whole field of human life and could not, if he wished, afford to neglect the most powerful and universal of human motives. All depends upon the treatment, and no subject is more beset with difficulties. The earlier Greek dramatists, with their usual unerring judgment, avoided sexual love, i.e. the love between a young woman and a young man, although love-stories and love-lyrics were well known to them. The only play which has come down to us where love is a predominant motive is the Trachiniae. The love of Deianeira is the ardent longing of a highly emotional young woman and mother, but its very intensity brings disaster on both herself and her husband. Broadly speaking, love is a legitimate motive for the dramatist when it is used, not as a purpose in itself, but as a setting for something else. In the words of Corneille, "l'amour ne doit etre que l'ornement, et non l'ame de nos pieces," and this is how it is generally employed by the best dramatists. The love of Benedict and Beatrice, for example, is simply a setting for their witty talk and repartee. On the Spanish stage love is often a setting for entertaining intrigue, as in Lope de Vega's El Perro del Hortelano. In Schiller's Wallenstein the love of Max and Thekla is a refreshing breath of pure air through the abyss of treachery and corruption; almost the same applies to Romeo and Juliet, and in both the end is death. Of the Elizabethans, Ford seems to have had a predilection for love-plots, but all, as far as I remember, end tragically. I have selected, as they occurred to me, a few representative plays from the dramatic literature of different countries; an exhaustive inquiry would, I feel sure, only confirm the view that a preference for love subjects for their own sake is a sure sign of decadence in the drama. Goethe, who in his youth swore to dedicate his life to the service of love, and—unhappily—kept his vow; Goethe, who nauseates us with love in his romances and lyrics, who even in the Eternal City cannot forget his worship of "Amor" and his visits to his "Liebchen," never misuses love in his dramas. He tells us sarcastically that on the stage, when the lovers are at last united, the curtain falls quickly and covers up the sequel.

A work of art like Tristan und Isolde can never be understood by the norms which prevail in society. By the social theory, marriage is a contract between two parties for their mutual advantage; it is inspired by a refined form of selfishness. That spontaneous self-immolation which marks the love of pure and vigorous natures lies beyond its intelligence. The law is satisfied if only the parties subscribe their names in solemn agreement before a proper civil or ecclesiastical authority. It could not well be otherwise, for the true-born Aphrodite Ourania will not submit to any bonds but her own. I should be indeed misunderstood if it were thought that I was advocating licence in any form whatever. What is called "free-love" is pure sensuality, the bastard Aphrodite Pandemos. Nothing is more sacred to me than the marriage vow, but I hold that the marriage vow itself needs the sanction of love, and that when this is absent, or has broken down in the stress of life, I say—not that sin is justified, but that love will take vengeance upon those who have insulted her name. Lovers whose object is sensual enjoyment with as little personal inconvenience as possible, who break the law while wishing to escape the legal penalty, have nothing in common with Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Those who love for the sake of loving, whose love is stronger than life, who readily and cheerfully accept death as the due penalty of sin, these, and these alone, are beyond the pale of human conventions; they can only be judged by the laws of a higher morality than that of human tribunals.

Some details of the story we must construct for ourselves, and are entitled to do so when they are not essential. The poet is himself not always conscious of all the bearings of what he composes; he works by inspiration, not by reason, and we know that Wagner himself was sometimes under singular delusions with regard to his own works. Two questions will occur to everybody at the beginning: 1. Has Isolde started on the voyage to be the bride of King Marke with her own consent? 2. Does she love Tristan before they drink the potion? Many will answer these questions quite positively, the first in the negative, the second in the affirmative. But the indications are very shadowy indeed in the text, and the old story, the only source which could throw any light on the question, tells the contrary in both cases. Perhaps it will be contended that the constant presence of the love-motive at decisive moments leaves no doubt that they love each other from the beginning. To this I reply that it is not possible for a musical strain by itself to prove anything. It can only call to mind as a reminiscence something with which it has been definitely connected before. We cannot do better than leave such questions to be answered by each according to his own judgment. Like a skilful painter Wagner has drawn secondary incidents with a shadowy outline in order that the attention may be concentrated on the main features. The main thing is to realize that they are inessential, but those who feel the need of greater clearness may reconstruct for themselves. My own belief is that their feelings at the beginning of the first act are a very subtle and complex mixture, of which they could not then have given a very clear account even to themselves, and that the poet has therefore, with consummate artistic skill, purposely left them unexplained.

The one decisive and all-important motive of the drama is the love of the hero and the heroine in conflict with Tristan's honour; and on this the whole force of the musical torrent is concentrated. In the end love must prevail. Love, with Wagner, is the divine possession which dominates every noble heart, but here it is incompatible with the conditions of human life, and of that honour which is its very breath. And so at the end, as the lovers pass through their death-agony clasped in each other's embrace, the love-motive soars triumphant and joyous above the surging billows of the orchestra, and they are united in the more glorious love beyond, in the "love that is stronger than death."

I have now to speak of Wagner's much discussed "pessimism." At first sight it might seem a strange contradiction to speak of pessimism in a man who composed Die Meistersinger, whose love of all things beautiful was a passion, whose faith in human nature, unshaken by every disillusionment, would almost seem like madness, did we not know that it was that very faith which finally carried him through to victory. Wagner's pessimism was not borrowed from Schopenhauer, but was his own, as it is, in one form or another, the creed of every thinking man, the foundation of every satisfying philosophy and art. Pessimism does not consist in looking only at the dark side of things, and closing the eyes to all that is beautiful; that is blindness and ignorance, not philosophy. Pessimism is on the contrary the outcome of an intense love, of a passionate delight in the harmony, the fitness, and beauty of nature, inspiring a keenly sympathetic soul. He cannot close his eyes to the fact that all this lovely world is made to perish; that its individuals are engaged in a fierce warfare upon one another; each preys upon its fellows with a savagery which shuns no cruelty and recks of no crime. Love itself in its mortal embodiment withers and turns to evil. His moral sense tells him that this ought not to be; there must be some delusion; is it in nature or is it in his own understanding? As a rule we put this darker aspect of nature out of sight; we exclude the poor, the vicious, the unhappy from our company, because they would hinder us in our mad pursuit of pleasure, and it needs the strength and sincerity which accompany the advance of years to bring a revolt against the selfish blindness of our youth. As we watch and learn from the terrible tragedy of nature, as we realize more and more the baseness and depravity of human life, our faith becomes stronger that beauty, truth, righteousness, are eternal and cannot be born only that they may perish; that man is not "a wild and ravening beast held in check only by the bonds of civilization," but is a divine and immortal being. Our vision gradually opens and we learn more clearly that all which we once took for pleasure and for pain are unreal, visionary reflections from a higher and purer existence where all creation is united in the eternal embrace of love. For those who, through courage and sincerity, through faith and hope and love, have attained the higher insight, have seen the very face of Brahm behind the delusive veil of Maya, there is no discord or contradiction in all this; despair gives way to a resigned quietism, to that "peace of God which passeth all understanding." Such is the ineffable insight of the artist, and no poetry is satisfying which does not spring from this source. Wagner in the letter I quoted before, speaks of the cheerful playfulness of Spanish poets after they had adopted the ascetic life. The philosophic pessimist is not a fretful and malignant caviller who sneers at the follies of others because he thinks himself so much wiser than they. Any one may note among the ascetics of his acquaintance, those who take no pleasure in what delights others and live a life of self-denial and abstemiousness, how cheerful is their conversation, how bright and steadfast their glance, how their tolerance of the follies of others is only equalled by the saintliness of their own lives.

Such is Wagner's pessimism; it is the pessimism of the Vedanta philosophy; that is to say, it is most clearly formulated in that system, and in the Upanishads upon which it rests, but really it is the common basis of all religions.[28] It breathes in the poems of Hafiz, in the philosophy of Parmenides, Plato, and the Stoics, in the profound wisdom of Ecclesiastes, in mediaeval mysticism, and the faith of the early Christian Church. Buddhism and Christianity are both pessimist in their origin. It is not an "opinion," i.e. a creed or formula which may be weighed and either accepted or rejected, but is an insight which, when once understood and felt, is as self-evident as the air we breathe. But it is an insight which can only be attained through moral discipline, never through the rationalism of vulgar and self-seeking minds. Nor is it for those who are enlightened at all moments of their lives, but only in times of poetic exaltation, when the faculties are awake and become creative.

[Footnote 28: Except Islam, which is rather a moral discipline than a religion.]



CHAPTER VIII

ON CERTAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA

In this chapter I propose to consider certain criticisms which are often made on Wagner's treatment of the drama, which differ from some of those mentioned before, in being intelligible and worthy of respect, since they have not been made maliciously or through ignorance. In so far as they are invalid they rest upon misunderstandings which can easily be accounted for by Wagner's unparalleled originality, by the novelty of his art, necessarily involving a wide departure from the classic standards by which alone the critic can form his judgment. To comprehend his work we must give up many of those cherished canons which hitherto have passed unquestioned.

Wagner's Tristan has often—even by Lichtenberger—been described as a philosophic work; and as abstract thought or philosophy, it is said, is foreign to art, a work which admits it must be condemned. Let us first understand what is meant by philosophy. It is surely a train of thought in the mind of the spectator, not in the object which he contemplates. Anything in the world may be the subject of philosophic thought, or may suggest it; there is plenty of philosophy to be drawn from a daisy, but we do not therefore call a daisy a philosophic flower. So, too, we may philosophize about Wagner's Tristan, but the philosophy is our own; it is not in the work. What is meant no doubt is that the work itself is not a concrete reality, but an exposition of an abstract conception. Philosophy has only herself to blame if abstractions are in the naif, ordinary mind opposed to realities, for it is unhappily true that nearly the whole of our current philosophy does consist of abstractions which are mere "Hirngespinnste," rooted in words and not in nature; philosophy itself has in art become a term of reproach from being associated with unreality. We must, however, distinguish between notions which are real but difficult to grasp and those which cannot be grasped, because there is nothing in them, and this distinction cannot be made without thought and labour from which the ordinary mind shrinks, being too indolent or indifferent. Poetry is not opposed to philosophy, and is not the less poetry when it concerns itself with those higher notions which are outside the range of our more ordinary comprehension, [Greek: ho-s philosophias ousaes megistaes monsikaes]. Both poetry and philosophy deal in abstractions, only in both the abstractions must be true, i.e. must be true general statements of ideas found in nature; when this is the case poetry and philosophy are indistinguishable, except by mere external and conventional features. Under which heading are we to class, for example, Plato's Republic? Or the Upanishads? or the book of Job? They are generally thought of as philosophy, but all who have even partially understood them will feel their poetic spell. Or if we take our greatest poems, to mention only some of those most familiar to us: Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust or Marlowe's, Tennyson's In Memoriam, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat—all of these might be just as well classed under philosophy as under poetry. Only untrue philosophy is unpoetical, that which has grown out of the reason of man. Abstractions manufactured by human reason are no more philosophy than an account of centaurs and gryphons is natural history. They are not to be found in Wagner's Tristan.

The particular philosophy which Wagner's Tristan is supposed to set forth is that of Schopenhauer. But Schopenhauer's doctrine of Negation of Will or Nirvana—for it is identical with that of Buddhism—is a negation of existence itself absolutely. The man who puts an end to his own life does not attain Nirvana; he is not dissatisfied with life in itself, but only with its conditions, and he passes through the endless cycle of Samsara until the moment arrives when, sickened with the wearisome struggle, he longs for complete annihilation. The lovers in Tristan look forward to a renewed existence beyond the grave, in the "realm of night," where, freed from the trammels of the senses their love will endure, purified from the pollution of human lust in glory undimmed by the sordid conditions of human life.

Sehnen hin zur heil'gen Nacht Wo ur-ewig einzig wahr Liebes-Wonne ihm lacht.

Such a future life would with Schopenhauer only be a renewal of the misery of existence in another form. It is the Christian, not the Buddhist, way of feeling that inspires the lovers. Christianity starts from the insufficiency and misery of human life, but contemplates redemption therefrom by love, whereas Buddhism conceives of no possibility of redemption. Its release is annihilation, and it is a religion of despair, not of hope.

It would be interesting, if it did not take us too far from our present subject, to compare this conception of love with that of Sokrates as set forth in the Symposium of Plato. Sokrates believed fully in immortality, but wisely refrained from speculating on the conditions of existence after death. His Eros is confined to this life, but none the less he treats it as a divine gift. Love is the mediator and interpreter between gods and men; and love of the beautiful, which manifests itself in the procreation and love of offspring, is the desire for immortality, the children being the continuation of the immortal part of their parents.[29] This is the lower mystery. The higher, which is not revealed to all, is the gradual expansion of love until it comprehends the eternal Idea. The beauty which we love in the individual becomes a stepping-stone from which we may rise to the love of all beautiful things, passing from one to many, from beautiful forms to beautiful deeds, from them to beautiful thoughts, laws, institutions, sciences, until we contemplate the vast sea of beauty in the boundless love of wisdom, a beauty which does not grow and perish, but is eternal. There could be no finer commentary on Wagner's Tristan than this wondrous speech of Sokrates in the Symposium.

[Footnote 29: It is worth noting in passing how this beautiful conception of Plato coincides with views expressed in our own day by a scientific man of the highest distinction, the foremost living representative of Darwinian evolution, Professor Weismann. See his Essays on Heredity.]

It is true, however paradoxical it may seem, that Wagner's very stupendous power is itself a source of weakness; it is too great for more limited minds to grasp. If love is really the one divine fact of human existence, to which all else is as nothing; and if at the same time a pure and burning love resolutely followed of necessity leads to destruction, then how are we to live at all? Is this life to count for nothing? I shall not attempt to answer this question. I cannot bring the truth that all noble and generous actions are bound to end in failure, to bring death upon their doers, within the scheme of a divinely ordered universe. I will only observe that it is a truth tacitly acknowledged by all who compose tragedies or take pleasure in witnessing them. How else could we endure to contemplate the failure and destruction of a Lear, a Wallenstein, a Deianira, an Antigone?

Here our attempts to extract philosophy out of the Tristan drama must cease. My only purpose has been to show that its abstractions are warm with the living breath of reality, and whatever is beyond this must be left for the student to carry out for himself, from the point of view of his own mind. Such exercises are interesting and salutary to the philosophic mind, but for minds trained in the modern formulas of "self-interest" and "liberty" they are only possible after a complete reconstruction of the foundations of knowledge, a "revaluation of all values."

The decisive part played by the magic love-potion has given rise to much comment. Hostile critics ridicule it, and condemn the whole work as turning on an absurdity, while those who are favourable try to explain it away, but their explanations have always seemed to me more unnatural than the thing explained. Why may we not accept it as it is evidently intended? In art at least, rationalism has not yet—thanks perhaps to Shakespearian traditions—prevailed so far that we must exclude supernatural motives altogether. Wagner could scarcely have used the myth and the names of Tristan and Isolde without introducing the philtre with which they have always been associated. It would be just as reasonable to explain away the ghost in Hamlet as the love-potion of Isolde; if we accept one we can accept the other, for in both the prime mover of the tragedy is supernatural. Lessing, in comparing the ghost of Hamlet's father with the ghost of Ninus in Voltaire's Semiramis, has some remarks which are equally valid for all supernatural motives in the drama. The principle which he evolves is that a supernatural being to be admissible must interest us for its own sake as a living and acting personage; in other words, it must be an organic portion of the play, not a mere machine brought in for stage effect. "Voltaire treats the apparition of a dead person as a miracle, Shakespeare as a perfectly natural occurrence." I do not think that the difference between what is allowable and what is not could be more clearly put than in this last sentence. We are not obliged to believe that the potion is the sole cause of their love; that they hated each other as deadly enemies at one moment and became lovers at the next. Such a notion would be altogether too crude. We are justified in supposing that behind Isolde's rage and Tristan's disdain there lies a deeper feeling, as yet unconfessed but sufficiently deep-rooted to endure when the anger of the moment has passed away, and that this is what is effected by the draught.

A very marked characteristic or mannerism of Wagner's dramas is the tedious length of explanation in some scenes or soliloquies, and they have often been severely criticized. There is one in Tristan, King Marke's speech at the end of Act II., and I may say at once that after all that has been said the objections cannot be entirely set aside. It numbers nearly two hundred bars in slow tempo, and takes about ten minutes. The argument generally used in defending it is that the action is laid within, and the interest is in the music. But the objection—to me at least—is not that the action is at a standstill, but that the scene is undramatic, and much of it unmitigated prose. The action has stood still nearly all through the act, but no one would wish to miss a bar of any other portion. The king's reproaches of his friend and vassal for his treachery, and the music with its gloomy orchestration, mostly of horns, bassoons, viola, and lower strings, with occasional English horn, and the deepest notes of the clarinet interspersed with wails of the bass-clarinet, are profoundly touching and proceed naturally out of the situation. Had there been nothing more than these it might have been much shorter, but Wagner has taken the occasion to try to throw some light upon the circumstances that preceded the events of the play. If they were to be told they should have been told earlier. Here we have forgotten our perplexity at the beginning and are now thrilled with the situation, not at all in the mood for hearing explanations. Nor does it really explain; if the hearer does not already know why Isolde was brought to be the bride of King Marke, he will scarcely learn it from Marke's speech.

When I spoke just now of Wagner's predilection for long soliloquies and prosy explanations as a mannerism, I do not think that I was expressing myself too strongly. Thus in Die Walkuere, in Wotan's long speech to Bruennhilde in Act II., he sketches the main events of Das Rheingold. In Siegfried the amusing riddle scene, a reminiscence of the Eddic Alvismal, seems intended to relate events which have gone before. In Goetterdaemmerung it is Siegfried who just before his death tells the story of the preceding evening.[30] In Parsifal Gurnemanz explains all the circumstances to the Knappen. How undramatic are these explanations we shall realize when we compare them with such soliloquies as Tannhaeuser's account of his pilgrimage or Siegmund's story of his life, which, though equally lengthy, keep us spellbound from the first bar to the last, because they directly lead up to and form part of the scene which is actually before us. Tannhaeuser's wild aspect and manner, Siegmund's desolation and longing for community with other human beings, are in direct connection with the story told.

[Footnote 30: From which we may conclude that Wagner when composing the tetralogy contemplated the separate numbers being sometimes performed singly. For this the explanations are again inadequate. Much better it would have been to provide at the performance a short printed or spoken introduction, a plan which in my humble opinion might well be adopted in most plays.]

I am, of course, only expressing an individual opinion, because I feel bound in giving a full account of the work to say how it appears to me; others may very probably feel it differently. It matters little. Even if I am right in thinking that Wagner has miscalculated the effect on the stage, Tristan will still remain a work immeasurably superior to a thousand that are faultless.



CHAPTER IX

MUSIC AS AN ART OF EXPRESSION

"Art generally ... as such, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as a vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.

"Art, properly so called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no handiwork for drawing-room tables, no relief of the ennui of boudoirs; it must be understood and undertaken seriously or not at all. To advance it, men's lives must be given, and to receive it, their hearts."

These words, among the first written for serious publication by John Ruskin when he was a young graduate of Oxford, are the text of his whole life's teaching.

"Daily and hourly," writes Carlyle, "the world natural grows out of a world magical to me.... Daily, too, I see that there is no true poetry but in reality."

More than two thousand years before Plato had written in the third book of his Republic against the indifference to manly virtue and the cult of a languishing effeminacy in the poetry and art of his day. He inveighs against the [Greek: panarmonia] and [Greek: poluchodia] of the musicians, by which we may understand over-instrumentation,—as if the Athenians even then had their Berliozes and Strausses—and continues (I quote from Jowett's translation): "Neither we nor our guardians whom we have to educate can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms of temperance ([Greek: so-phrosunae]), courage, liberality, magnificence ([Greek: megalorepeia]), and their kindred, etc."

The teaching of all these three great masters, and I might have multiplied quotations from the works of the greatest—but only from those of the greatest—thinkers of ancient and modern times, is the same: that art is not a mere play of beautiful forms, but that the artist must know a truth and have been able to express it; that his work must be approved or condemned according as that truth is healthful or the reverse. It is the doctrine of sincerity, and is opposed to the common and weaker doctrine of "art for art's sake"—i.e. that art is self-contained, that we occupy ourselves with it solely for the pleasure which it affords through our senses, that it has no didactic purpose. By this latter view, beauty in art is an idea quite distinct from utility or morality; by the other, beauty, utility, and morality are fundamentally one, being all emanations from the one supreme Idea of creation named by Plato—"the Good," or "the Good in itself," "the Idea of Good."

Can we apply this distinction to music? All the other arts derive their subject-matter from the material world, but Polyhymnia seems to detach herself from her sisters, to soar away from the things of this earth, and to dwell in the ethereal regions of pure ideality. The objects of painting, poetry, sculpture, etc., are those of our surroundings; the artist only puts the things familiar to us in nature in a new light, and, by concentrating the attention upon certain aspects, reveals much that minds less poetic than his had not noticed before. The morality which these arts are able to convey is the morality of nature. But music is not concerned with any material objects; its means are rhythm, melodic intervals, harmony, all purely ideal existences, and seemingly all connected in some mysterious way with number, itself an immaterial idea of time. And although the manner of our perception of harmony has, to some extent, that of melody to a still smaller extent, been explained in our time by physiologists, the explanations only relate to the form of our perception. They show how, through the harmonic overtones, the mind is able to recognize the connection between a chord and the one which preceded it, but cannot tell why one progression of harmonies is pleasant, another the reverse, as Helmholtz himself was fully aware. How then can it be possible for music to be a vehicle of thought? What can it have to do with "temperance, courage, liberality"?

The question is not one which I can hope fully to answer within these pages, but it cannot be altogether passed over; we must know something of the nature of music, must have some clear notion of what it is if we are to understand its relation to language in the drama. The explanation given by Leibnitz that it is an exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi is quite inadequate. Music is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which we receive from contemplating a mathematical process of great complexity is altogether different from that of music. Highly complex as are the mathematical relations of the vibrations which convey musical tones from the instrument to the ear the final result of those relations, the impression on the rods of Corti's organ in the Cochlea, are as purely physiological as the impressions of touch. Scientific, i.e. inductive, research must always find an end at the point where the organs become too small for observation; it can throw no light on the nature of the impression transmitted from Corti's organ to the consciousness.

A suggestion has been put forward by Schopenhauer which may be viewed as an attempt to explain transcendentally the nature of music. It is well known that, according to Schopenhauer, a work of art represents the (Platonic) Idea of the object which it depicts, this Idea being itself the first and highest stage of objectivation of Will. Music is, however, a direct objectivation of Will, i.e. not through an Idea.

Music, therefore, is not like the other arts the image (Abbild) of an Idea, but an image of the Will itself, of which the Ideas are also the objectivity. This is why the impression which music makes upon us is so much more powerful and more penetrating than that of the other arts, for they tell only of the shadow, music of the substance. But inasmuch as it is the same will that objectivates itself, only in quite different ways in the Ideas and in music, so there results, not indeed a resemblance, but rather a parallelism, an analogy between music and the Ideas which appear in the world, multiplied and imperfect as phenomena.

Beyond this we must not follow our author. Schopenhauer no doubt possessed a very keen sense for music, but his theoretical education was of the slightest, and his further remarks make the impression of his having read up ad hoc some theoretical writer of his time. But we may accept his definition as at least a first step in the inquiry.

The objective world lies before us in two forms, as light and as sound. From the visible world of light we receive all the data for our understanding, in the forms of time, space, and causality. Beside it lies the world of sound, in time alone, and appealing directly to our inner emotional consciousness, or, as we vaguely express it, to the "feelings," which the light-world can only reach indirectly through the understanding. Both these worlds are fundamentally one, differing only in their manifestation, and, however diverse they may appear, they are united by the element common to both, Rhythm. In general the language of the understanding is articulate speech, that of the emotions is music. The Unity subsisting between these two worlds, of understanding and emotion, of language and music, can only be realized intuitively; it can scarcely be demonstrated. But we have vivid illustrations of it in many familiar facts, for instance, that animals are able to make themselves understood to us and to each other without articulate language, by gesture and song. Thus we have the mutual relations of the two dramatic elements. Shortly stated, words tell the story, music the feelings of the persons. Gesture would seem to hold a place between language and song, appealing to the emotions as directly, and sometimes almost as forcibly as sound.[31] These relations are not so sharply marked off from each other as appears in the analysis. In a highly wrought organism each part, while keeping strictly to its own functions, is nevertheless capable to some extent, when necessity arises, of extending its field. It is like a well-disciplined army where the duties of each unit are strictly laid down, but where the units themselves possess intelligence and are capable when needful of independent action, and a continual intercommunication between all the parts ensures their harmonious working.

[Footnote 31: The reader who is interested will find the subject more fully treated in Wagner's Beethoven.]

Applying what has been said to the drama let us select one incident of our work, the tearing down of the torch by Isolde in the second act. The words have told us that the torch is a signal of danger, and now the sounds of the hunt having died away, its removal informs Tristan that the way is clear for him to approach. More than this the poet could scarcely do in the words. To have expatiated upon the awful consequences which the lovers know full well must inevitably follow, on the conflict of hope, awe, heroic resolution, defiance of the certain death before them—to have told all this in words would have necessitated a long speech, most unnatural and undramatic at such a moment of tension, and could scarcely have avoided degenerating into bombast. By a few simple transitions, a few devices of instrumentation, the orchestra relates all this and much more, while Isolde's flute-motive, so exquisitely graceful and tender in the preceding scene, has now become a shriek of resolution bewildered but undaunted in the supreme crisis, above the savage call of the trumpets to death. So far the music; we see in the torch hurled from its shining post and left expiring on the ground, a symbol of the drama that is concentrated in the act; of Tristan's glory extinguished in the realm of night. All this in the scenic representation forms one issue, the different elements coalescing in the hearer's mind into a single dramatic incident.

Wagner's view of the relation of music to words has been the subject of much controversy, often unhappily very heated. Before Wagner the common notion was that music in combination with words had only to enforce them and to accentuate their declamation. Such was the view of Gluck. As regards lyric productions, the setting of songs to music, this principle may be sufficient, but the case is different when both words and music are controlled by a dramatic action.

Another view places music in a class altogether by itself, apart from the other arts, and unable to unite with them except in so far as to employ them as its vehicle. Wherever music appears in company with poetry, music must take the lead, must be governed by its own laws, retain its own forms, while poetry, its compliant servant, must avoid all higher expression and accommodate itself as best it can to the music. So the highest form of music will be instrumental, where it is unfettered by the ties of poetry.

A little work published in the fifties by the Vienna critic, Dr. E. Hanslick, entitled Vom musikalisch-Schoenen, discusses this question very fully. It attained great celebrity at the time of its publication and is still read. It is the best attempt that I have seen to state theoretically the case against Wagner in sober and reasoned language, and though it contains a few misunderstandings it is free from offensive personalities and well worthy of attention. The author is a disciple of that school of German aestheticians of which F. Th. Vischer is the foremost representative.

According to Dr. Hanslick, music, being an art isolated from objective nature, can never be anything but music. Whatever it expresses can only be stated in terms of music; it can never present a definite human "feeling." The essence of music is movement, and it can represent certain dynamic ideas. Thus, although it can never express love, hope, longing, etc., since those feelings involve a perception (Vorstellung) or a concept (Begriff), things foreign to its nature, it can represent given ideas as strong, weak, increasing, diminishing, etc.—or as anything which is a function of time, movement, and proportion. It can also by analogy suggest in the hearer the ideas of pleasing, soft, violent, elegant, and the like. Whatever is beyond this is symbolical. Movement and symbolism are the only means by which music can express anything. The notion that music can express a definite feeling was, the author declares, universally held by aestheticians at that time, and amongst those who held it he seems to include Wagner. By way of exposing its fallacy he quotes the air from Gluck's Orpheus:

[Music: J'ai per - du mon Eu - ri - di - ce— rien n'e - ga - le mon mal - heur.]

It would be possible, he says, to substitute words of an exactly opposite meaning—

J'ai trouve mon Euridice, Rien n'egale mon bonheur—

without the music being affected in any way. This being so, he continues, music can never unite with words to express any notion at all, and the only form artistically admissible is absolute or instrumental music. The pleasure which it imparts is the same as that which we derive from a kaleidoscope, except in so far as it is ennobled by the fact of its emanating from a human mind instead of from a machine. The union of music with words is a morganatic marriage, in which the words must suffer violence. With this the author believes himself to have demolished Wagner's canon that in the musical drama the music is only a means, the end being the drama.

Undoubtedly there is much truth in these observations. If for the moment we confine our attention to instrumental music it is undeniable that a musical melody in itself can never be anything but music. Wagner himself has insisted that music attains all the fulness of which it is capable as absolute or instrumental music, and as this truth has been too often forgotten by composers, we have nothing but gratitude for an author who once more strives to bring it into notice. But it is only a one-sided truth, and insufficient. By the same rigid reasoning it might be contended that a human face, being nothing but modelling and colour, can never express anything but functions of lines and forms, and colours. Everything in nature as well as in art has for those who look below the surface a significance beyond its external features. Nor does it follow that music will always remain content with its own glorious isolation, that it will never seek for union with other arts, sacrificing indeed its pristine purity, but gaining mightily in warm human expression. Even in the heyday of absolute music, in the instrumental compositions of Sebastian Bach, we may notice this tendency, though here it is rather the dance than poetry with which it strives to ally itself; while in Beethoven's symphonies the yearning for human community and human fellowship is noticeable from the first, and in the final work it breaks its bonds and dissolves into song.

The primary error in Dr. Hanslick's argument is that it begins at the wrong end, and tacitly assumes that art can be controlled by theoretical speculations. An a priori development of the theory of art out of supposed first principles must in the end lead to contradictions and absurdities, and every one must feel his conclusion that the union of music and words is illegitimate—a view which, among other things, would deprive us of Schubert's songs—to be an absurdity. Had the inquiry commenced with familiar instances from existing works of art in which music is felt to possess a very vivid power of expression and then been carried backwards to find what it can express and what not, and what are the conditions of its expression, the results might have been valuable and we should have been spared a dissertation resting wholly upon confusion of the meaning of words. Here a definite meaning has been attached to the word "feeling" (Gefuehl); it is understood as including such feelings as "hope," "love," "fear," etc. These, of course, music cannot express. Wagner himself insists that music can never express a definite feeling, and even censures it as a "misunderstanding" on the part of Beethoven that in his later works he attempted to do so.[32] The best word to denote what music can express is that used by Helmholtz—Gemuethstimmung—untranslatable into English, but for which we may use the term "emotional mood" as denoting something similar. It is a tuning or a tone of the mind, a mood that music expresses, and from a word of such vague meaning there is no risk of false deductions being drawn.

[Footnote 32: Wagner, Ges. Schr., iii. 341; iv. 387.]

All our musical sense revolts against the dictum that music cannot under any circumstances express a general feeling. Take, for example, Agatha's outburst on seeing the approach of her lover Max in the second act of Der Freischuetz:

[Music: All' mei - ne Pul - se schla-gen, und das Herz wallt un - ge - stuem, Suess ent - - zueckt ent - ge - - - gen ihm,.... etc.]

Would it be possible to hear this passage and not feel the melody as a direct and most vivid expression of joy?—joy, that is, in the abstract, but not a definite joy at some given event—that is told by the words and scenery? Whatever share words and gesture may contribute is as nothing compared with that exultant and rapturous outburst of melody. Wherever there is any character-drawing in Italian opera, it is in the music, not in the words, as, for example, in the more dramatic portions of Elvira's music in Don Giovanni. The frequent movement in octaves imparts a nobility and dignity to her expression which are altogether absent in the words.

The paraphrase of the words of the air from Gluck's Orphee is amusing enough as a jeu d' esprit, but surely cannot be taken seriously. Hanslick seems to have misapprehended the music; it does not express grief, and is not intended to. The words express the desolation of Orpheus at the loss of his beloved, but the Stimmung of the melody is one of calm resignation. It is the serene self-restraint with which Gluck loves to imbue his classic heroes and heroines, and which is equally appropriate to joy and grief. Grillparzer, whose authority both as a dramatist and as a sensitive lover of music is rightly esteemed very highly, has declared that it would be possible to take any one of Mozart's arias, and set words of quite different meaning to them. This may be true of many of Mozart's arias, which were often composed more with regard to the organ of a particular singer than to the text before him, but is assuredly not true of his great dramatic scenes and finales.

Whatever value such speculations may possess vanishes before the unconscious instinct of the creating artist. It is well known that German dramatists and poets have from the beginning felt keenly the need of musical expression. If the need was less felt by English dramatists of our great period the reason is that it required the development of music in the hands of the great German masters before its power could be fully known. Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Hoffmann, Richter, and a host of others all sighed for the aid of music.[33] Kleist declared music to be the root of all the other arts. Their dream could not be realized until the right form of the drama which could unite with music had been found. It was at last found by Wagner after repeated trial and failure. He determined the form as that in which the characters act out of their own inner impulses. The historical drama shows men as torn hither and thither by external political considerations. The action is impelled by wheels within wheels of intrigue and complex psychological mechanism. For such subjects the romance, with its almost unlimited powers of expatiation, is the proper vehicle, but they are unfitted for music; they necessitate wearisome explanations of complicated motives altogether foreign to the direct emotional character of musical drama. The musical character is the one who is entirely himself, and whose motives are therefore clear from the first; such subjects are to be found above all in the mythologies of imaginative and poetically gifted peoples. That does not of course mean that other subjects are excluded, for there is no domain of life which may not offer the same conditions, provided only that the characters have a strong and well-marked individuality. When once this principle was discovered the musical drama became a reality. Wagner uses for this form of drama the term reinmenschlich—purely human—an expression which was in keeping with the humanitarian views prevalent at the time when he wrote, but not free from objection and apt to be misunderstood in our day.

[Footnote 33: Many utterances of German poets to this effect will be found reproduced in Chamberlain's Richard Wagner.]

If the drama longed for the means of expressing its own inmost nature, no less did music seek for a nearer approach to objectivity and to the conditions of human existence. If it is true that music is the root of all the arts, then it must also be the root of human life, and must seek to reveal itself in life and in the drama which is the mirror of life. The desire for human expression is already, as we have seen, very clearly discernible in the symphonies and sonatas of Beethoven, but it is since his time that the most remarkable development has taken place. The programme music of Berlioz, Liszt, and other composers has rightly been condemned by many critics, but the mistake was in the manner of the composition rather than in the intention, which was natural, indeed inevitable. Wagner's assertion that with Beethoven "the last symphony has been written"—rationally understood, of course, as meaning that nothing beyond is possible on instrumental lines—is quite true. There was nothing left but for music to take form in things of human interest. Only the composers, perhaps as much from want of an adequate dramatic form as from want of skill, failed to attain their end. While evidently striving to follow out Beethoven's hint, mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei, their powers failed, and they produced more Malerei than Empfindung. The reader may consider by the light of these remarks the passage in Liszt's Faust symphony in the slow movement, where Gretchen is represented as plucking a daisy, repeating, "He loves me, he loves me not," etc. The composer has depicted the scene with wonderful skill and exquisite poetic feeling, but the essence of Goethe's scene, which lies entirely in its unconscious innocence, is gone in this highly wrought artificial presentation. It is the difference between nature and art, between the naive, pure-minded maiden and the actress painted and decorated for the stage.

There are few persons, I believe, who on hearing an instrumental composition do not feel a desire to form a mental picture of its contents, so to speak, to objectivate it in their minds. Aestheticians tell us that we are wrong, and we are apt to laugh at each other's pictures, but we all do it. Beethoven, as we know from his friend Schindler and his pupil Ries, often, if not always, had some object before him when composing his instrumental works. The fact that the same music suggests different interpretations to different minds will not disturb us if we remember that music does not and never can depict or describe its object: for that we have the arts of poetry and painting. What music can give is the emotional mood which it calls forth, and which may be common to many objects very different in their external character. A "stormy" movement may be referred to a storm of winds and waves, or to a storm of human passions, and so might suggest a battle, a shipwreck, a revolution, a violent emotion of love or hatred, or a play of Shakespeare. But the aversion which we naturally feel to the labelling of sonatas and symphonies with titles is in my opinion justifiable,[34] because here we recognize an attempt to stereotype one particular interpretation, instead of leaving the mind of each hearer free to form his own.

[Footnote 34: The latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "the Hammerklavier." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill this absurd name.]

A musical composition is a vessel into which many wines can be poured. It cannot in itself express either any material object or any definite feeling which involves such an object. No music can alone, without a suggestion from elsewhere, express a person, a place, or love or fear or a battle or "a calm sea and prosperous voyage," or any similar thing. But it has a marvellous power of receiving suggestions which are offered to it, by words or otherwise, of carrying them on and, by means of its own forces of movement and proportion, intensifying their expression to, a degree inconceivable without its aid. Mathematics present an exact analogy to music, and are to science what music is to art. Both are ideal forms which in one sense only attain complete individuality when they are pure, but in another sense have no meaning until they are applied to some object of nature. A mathematical formula is only true so long as it remains an ideal in the mind; but its existence has no other purpose than to state a law for material phenomena, when it at once loses its essential qualities as a mathematical formula, certainty and accuracy. In this way we may understand simultaneously the supremacy of absolute music and the truth for which Wagner contends, that music can never be anything but expression.

Dr. Hanslick's dictum that music has no other means for its expression than movement and symbolism cannot be admitted. It can express through association. All the senses have in some degree the faculty of recalling in the mind impressions with which they have once been associated. Who has never had the memory of his home or of some place familiar to his childhood recalled by the scent of a flower or a plant? No sense possesses this power in anything like the same degree as that of hearing, especially when the connection has been established through a musical strain. It is on this principle that Wagner mainly relies in his dramatic musical motives. In itself the connection is in the first instance artificial. A musical strain of a striking individual character is brought into connection with some idea of the drama, it may be a person or a scene or an incident, in short, anything which may serve as a dramatic motive, and thenceforward whenever the musical strain is heard, the idea with which it has been associated will be called up in the mind of the hearer. All the resources of modern music are then at the disposal of the composer for exhibiting his motive in the most varied lights, intensifying, varying, contrasting, or combining with other motives, as the dramatic situation requires.

It often happens that the musical strain is heard before its association with an idea of the drama has been established, as, for example, in the instrumental prelude. The idea then seems to hover in the music as a vague presentiment (Ahnung) of something that is to come. A superb example of this occurs at the end of Die Walkuere. Wotan has laid his daughter to rest, and surrounded her with a barrier of fire. "Let none cross this fire who dreads my spear," he cries, and at once the threat is answered by a defiant blast from the trombones uttering a strain which has not yet taken definite form, but which we learn from the sequel is the theme proper to Siegfried the hero, who is destined to bring to an end the power of the god.

Or the motive may reappear after it has served its purpose on the stage; it is then a reminiscence of past events. No finer example of this could be found than in the music of Isolde's swan-song, the so-called Liebestod, which is built up out of the motives of the life into a symphonic structure of almost unparalleled force and truth.



CHAPTER X

SOME REMARKS ON THE MUSICAL DICTION OF TRISTAN UND ISOLDE

Before beginning the detailed consideration of our work, I wish to say a few words on some features of the music. As I am writing for the general reader and not for the musician, I shall endeavour to express myself in generally understood terms, and avoid technical details.

Each of Wagner's works presents a distinct and strongly defined musical physiognomy marking it off from all the others. The music of each is cast in its own mould and is at once recognizable from that of the rest. The most characteristic features of the music of Tristan und Isolde are its concentrated intensity and the ineffable sweetness of its melody. The number of musical-dramatic motives employed is very small, but they are insisted upon and emphasized by a musical working out unparalleled in the other works. In Rheingold, for example, some twelve or fifteen motives—if we count only those of well-marked contours, and which are used in definite dramatic association—can be distinguished; whereas in the whole of Tristan there are of such Leitmotive in the narrowest sense not more than three or four. The treatment is also very different. The Ring is not entirely innocent of what has been wittily called the "visiting-card" employment of motives, while in Tristan the musical motive does not repeat, but rather supplements, the words, indicating what these have left untold, thus entering as truly into the substance of the drama as it does into that of the music.

The most important motive of all, the one which pervades the drama from beginning to end, is the love-motive. Its fundamental form is that in which it appears in the second bar of the Prelude in the oboe (No. 1).[35] Variants of it occur without the characteristic semitone suspension (1a) or with a falling seventh (1b). The cello motive of the opening phrase of the Prelude may also be considered as derived from the same by contrary movement (1c).

[Footnote 35: See the musical examples at the end.]

Of equal importance, though occurring less frequently, and only at important and decisive moments, is the death-motive (2). This motive is less varied than the last, recurring generally in the same key—A flat passing into C minor—and with similar instrumentation, the brass and drums entering pp on the second chord.

The second act opens with a strongly marked phrase which is the musical counterpart of the great metaphor so conspicuous throughout the act, of the day as destructive of love. The working out of this motive whilst the lovers are together is a marvel of musical composition, and it always returns in the same connection.

Perhaps we may also include among these fundamental musical-dramatical motives one occurring in the middle of the second act at the words "Sehnen hin zur heilgen Nacht" (No. 4). It is akin to the death-motive proper, but the solemn harmonies are here torn asunder into a strain so discordant that without the dramatic context it would scarcely be bearable. It is the rending of the bond with this life and with the day. The music here reminds us that, however heroically the lovers accept their inevitable end, they feel that it means a rough and painful severance from that life which was once so dear and beautiful.

Other motives are reminiscences more or less of a purely musical nature or connected only in a general way with scenes or incidents of the drama. They call back indistinctly scenes of bygone times, and will be spoken of as they occur in the work.

The best preliminary study for Wagner's use of motives is that of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies. Macmillan's Magazine for July, 1876, contains a valuable article by the late Mr. Dannreuther which will be useful as an introduction, and ought to be familiar to all who are interested in modern developments of music. Mr. Dannreuther there treats of the type of variation peculiar to Beethoven, which he compares to the metamorphosis of insects or of the organs of plants: "It is not so much the alteration of a given thought, a change of dress or of decoration, it is an actual creation of something new and distinct from out of a given germ." He then proceeds to trace the principle in some of Beethoven's later works, and shows how for example the great B flat sonata (Op. 106) is built upon a scheme of rising tenths and falling thirds; the A flat sonata (Op. 110) upon two simple melodies. Wagner's procedure is similar; he takes a musical motive which has already been used and brings forth out of it something totally new, scarcely resembling its parent in external features, and yet recognizable as the same.

The problem before Wagner was how to render this new acquisition available for the drama, and we shall best understand him if we look upon him as all his life seeking its solution, each work representing an experimental stage rather than a perfectly finished model. In the earlier part of the Ring he began with a purely conventional conjunction of a musical strain with a tangible and visible object—a ring, a giant, a goddess, etc. This is wrong method, and, although generally his instinctive sense of dramatic propriety kept him from going very far astray, the effects of his wrong procedure are occasionally visible. Why, for example, should a given melody in thirds on two bassoons denote a ring? and why should it bear a thematic kinship to another melody denoting Walhall? The association is purely conventional and serves no purpose, for the material object, a ring, is fully expressed in the word; there is nothing more to be said about it than that it is just a ring, and we do not want the bassoons to repeat or confirm what is quite intelligible without them. In Tristan this pitfall is mostly avoided, but it is in Die Meistersinger and Parsifal that we find the motives most skilfully employed.

A critical analysis of the harmonic structure of our work does not fall within the scope of this treatise. It will be found in text-books specially devoted to the subject. I can here only offer a few general remarks.

Modern harmonies are made theoretically much more difficult than they need be by our system of notation, which grew up in the Middle Ages. The old modes knew no modulation in our sense, and in the seventeenth century, when the tempered system came into vogue, making every kind of modulation possible, the old notation was retained. How unsuited it is for modern music appears from the drastic contradictions which it involves. It is quite a common thing to see the same note simultaneously written as F sharp in one part and as G flat in another. This is what makes modern harmony seem so much more difficult than it really is, for when the music comes to be heard, these formidable-looking intervals resolve themselves into something quite natural and generally not difficult of apprehension by a musical ear. Unfortunately we are compelled to learn music through the medium of a keyed instrument, generally through the most unmusical of instruments, the piano, and we learn theory largely through the eye and the reason instead of through the ear. The problems of harmony will seem much simpler if we remember that its basis is the interval—music does not know "notes" as such, but only intervals—that the number of possible intervals is very small and their relations quite simple, and that everything which is not reducible to a very simple vulgar fraction is heard, not as a harmony, but as a passing note, an inflection of a note of a chord. In fact the advance made in chord combinations since the introduction of the tempered system is not very great. All, or nearly all, the chords used by Wagner are to be found in the works of Bach. The suggestion to explain Wagner's harmonies by assuming a "chromatic scale" rests upon a misapprehension of the nature of a scale. Every scale implies a tonality, i.e. a tonic note, to which all the other notes bear some definite numerical relation. There cannot be a chromatic scale in the scientific sense in music; what we call by that name in a keyed instrument is merely a diatonic scale with the intervals filled in; it always belongs to a definite key, and the accidentals are only passing notes. It is in passing notes that we must seek the key to Wagner's harmonies. With Wagner more than with any other composer since Bach the parts must be read horizontally as well as vertically. As long as we look upon harmonic progressions as vertical columns of chords following one upon the other we may indeed explain, but we shall never understand them. Each chord must be viewed as the result of the confluence of all the separate voices moving harmoniously together. This, too, will help us to grasp the character of "altered" chords, so lavishly employed by Wagner, and of "inflection," by which term I mean to denote all kinds of passing notes, appoggiaturas, suspensions, changing notes, and the like. All are phenomena of harmonic notes striving melodically onwards, either upwards or downwards.

Although little has been done in the invention of new combinations, the character of the harmonic structure has changed considerably since the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is evident at first glance on comparing a score of Haydn or Mozart with one of Wagner or Liszt. There, although chromatic harmonies are not unfrequent, they occur only sporadically, the general structure being diatonic, whereas with the later masters the whole tissue is chromatic; the score fairly bristles with accidentals, and a simple major or minor triad is the exception. Very different too is the periodic structure. The phrases no longer fall naturally into eight-bar periods interpunctuated with cadences, but are determined by the text, and although the eight-bar scheme is generally maintained—much disguised, it is true, but still recognizable—it is determined not by half-closes at the sections, but by the eight beats of the two-line metre, while the periods follow each other in even flow without any indication of cadence. In other words the musical form is governed by the declamation.

Theory of harmony is one thing, living music quite another. The musical hearer of a work like Tristan und Isolde will understand its harmonic structure, though he know nothing of the theoretical progression of the chords, provided the performance be good, i.e. correct, just as a man ignorant of grammar will understand a sentence which is clearly enunciated. The composer needs no theory of harmony; his ear is his only guide, as the eye of the artist is a sufficient guide for his colouring without any theory of colour. There is only one thing which the composer must keep before him and which the hearer must consciously be able to recognize—the Tonality. The problem of harmony therefore in practice reduces itself to that of modulation. To recognize the tonality quickly and certainly, look for the cadences. They are as it were landmarks, placed along the melodic road, indicating from time to time where we are.

I cannot dismiss the subject of harmony without mentioning the chord which from its employment at decisive moments and its extraordinary mystic expressiveness has been called the soul of the Tristan music. Its direct form is

[Music]

as it occurs in the beginning of the Prelude.

The instrumentation of Tristan does not present any special features different from that of Wagner's other works. It is less heavily scored than the Ring, and at the same time the instrumentation is more concentrated. Wagner usually employs his wind in groups of at least three in each colour—e.g. three flutes, two oboi and one English horn, two clarinets and a bass clarinet, etc.—and so is able to keep his colours pure. It is partly to this that the extraordinary purity of his tone in the tutti is due, partly also to the sonority imparted to the brass by means of the bass tuba, and still more to the consummate skill of the composer in the distribution of his parts.

There is an interesting note at the beginning of the score in which the composer seems to be trying to excuse himself for using valve instruments in the horns. While admitting the degradation of tone and loss of the power of soft binding resulting from the use of valves, he thinks that the innovation (which I need scarcely observe is not his) is justified by the advantage gained in greater freedom of movement. In such matters one must be allowed to form one's own judgment, and though it may seem like trying to teach a fish to swim, a humble amateur may be permitted to wish that Wagner had here resisted the tide of progress. It is not only that the tone and power of binding are injured, but the whole character of horns and trumpets is altered when they are expected to sing chromatic passages like the violin and the clarinet. As the point is of some interest, I should like to bring it before the reader with some examples. The essential character of the horns is nowhere more truly conveyed than in the soft passage near the beginning of the overture to Der Freischuetz, and it is the contrast between the two nature scales on the C horn and the F horn which gives the character to this lovely idyll. The trumpets are capable of even less variety of expression than the horns, as their individuality is even more strongly marked. How entirely that character is conditioned by the mechanism of the instrument may be illustrated by an example. The third movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony contains an interlude molto meno mosso. The choral theme is accompanied by a continuous A, sustained in octave in the violins, which in the intervals between the verses descends to G sharp and returns

[Music]

The repeat at the end enters ff. after a strong crescendo, and at this point the sustained A is taken over from the violins by the trumpets and given forth with piercing distinctness above the tutti of the orchestra, the effect being one of extraordinary brilliancy. Now comes the point with which we are concerned. In the intervals the trumpet cannot descend to G sharp, because it has not got the note in its natural scale, and is therefore obliged to repeat

[Music]

Indisputably the composer would have written G sharp had the trumpet been able to play it; it was only the defective scale of the instrument which led him to write A, but the effect of hearing A when we expect G sharp is electrifying; the unbending rigidity of the trumpet is here expressed with a vividness and force which nothing else could have given.

Many more examples might be brought from the works of the great composers to show how the horns and trumpets have lost in expressive power by having adopted the chromatic scale of other instruments. Wagner's use of the brass generally is most skilful; he is especially happy in avoiding the blatancy and coarseness which soils the scores of some composers. Neither trumpets nor drums are much used continuously in the score of Tristan. The former are often employed in the lower part of their scale and only for particular effects. Trombones generally utter single chords, or slow successions of chords, adding solemnity to the sound, and crowning a climax. A favourite instrument with Wagner is the harp, and he uses it freely in Tristan. The effect is, as it were, to place the orchestra upon springs, adding lightness and elasticity to the tone, as may be noticed in the accompaniment to the duet at the end of the first act.

We often hear Wagner's melody described as if it were not melody in the ordinary meaning of the word, but a kind of "recitative" or "declamation." The great French singer, Madame Viardot Garcia, was asked on one occasion in a private circle to sing the part of Isolde. She took the score and sang it a prima vista to Klindworth's accompaniment. On being told that in Germany singers could not be found to undertake the part, alleging that it was too difficult and unmelodious, she naively asked whether German singers were not musical! Assuredly any person to whom Wagner's music, especially that of Tristan, appears unmelodious is unmusical, or at least defective in the sense for melody. Wagner's music is easy to sing; much easier, for example, than that of Mozart. This, however, is only true for singers who are highly musical. The great majority have not had any real musical education, and it is to these that the common notion that Wagner's music is unsingable, that it ruins the voice, is due. The notion that recitative and melody are things opposed to one another is itself a misunderstanding. The characteristic mark of recitative in the narrow sense is that it is not bound by rhythmic forms, and therefore has a somewhat dry, matter-of-fact character, which would become tedious if it continued unrelieved—as life would be dull without any sweets. Wagner says: "My melody is declamation, and my declamation melody." There is no line of demarcation; they are as inseparably united as emotion and intellect. But although the stream of emotion in human life is continuous, it is not continually at the same tension. Moments of high exaltation alternate with more subdued intervals, and a very large part of the mechanical routine of life is emotionally almost quiescent. In the drama the emotional element alternates with the narrative, and according as the one or the other predominates, the weight of the expression is in the music or the words; each therefore rises and falls in alternation. Even in Shakespeare's spoken drama traces of this ebb and flow may be noticed, the language becoming more musical under the stress of higher emotion. In the opera the intervals between the lyric arias, etc., had to be filled in with dry explanation or narrative, and there arose the recitative secco, a rapid recitation in which the melody is reduced to a mere shadow. The German language was unfitted for dry recitative of this type, and these filling-in parts had therefore to be spoken—a device which proved intolerable, since it destroyed the illusion of the music. Wagner, as we saw, got over the difficulty by choosing a form of drama in which the emotional element was supreme, and the narrative filling in reduced to a minimum. We further saw how in Tristan und Isolde the principle is driven to such an exaggerated extreme as sometimes to render the action almost unintelligible. Nowhere is the music unmelodious or uninteresting, but it is elastic and pliable and changes its character with the emotional intensity of the dramatic situation, being more subdued in parts of the first act, asserting itself whenever rage, irony, tenderness, or other emotion call for expression; omnipotent in the great love-duet, culminating in the nocturne, and once more soaring in highest ecstasy in Isolde's dissolution, with endless gradations in the portions between. Hearers who are not accustomed to the dramatic expression of music attend only to those moments of intense lyric expression, just as in the opera they attend only to the arias; all else appears to them uninteresting and unmelodious. This is to miss the essential thing in Wagner's works—the drama itself; but it is precisely what is done by those hearers who are incapable of the effort of following attentively the dramatic development.



CHAPTER XI

OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC

It remains for us now to examine the work itself, scene by scene, that we may see how the principles of art which we have been considering in the preceding chapters are illustrated. The following notes are written with a practical end; they are intended to assist those who are unacquainted with the work and are about to hear it for the first time to follow the composer's intentions. They do not profess to give a full commentary or explanation, but only to start the reader on the right path that he may find the way for himself. Those who read German should begin by thoroughly mastering the text. Tristan is not like a modern problem play to be understood at once from the stage, without any effort. There are many, I regret to say, who spare themselves even this trouble, but it is indispensable, for even if singers always enunciated their words more distinctly than they do, it would be quite impossible to follow the difficult text on first hearing. Beyond this, however, very little preparation is necessary; especially the study of lists of Leitmotive should be avoided, since they give a totally wrong conception of the music. We cannot study an edifice by looking at the bricks of which it is built. Lectures with musical illustrations, provided they are really well done, by a competent pianist, are valuable, and it is also of use to study selected scenes at the piano with text and music, the scene on the stage being always kept before the mind, and the voice part being sung as far as possible. For those who are quick of musical apprehension such studies are not necessary, but the careful reading of the text is indispensable for all. In all studies at the piano the arrangement of Hans von Buelow should be used, even by those who are unable to master all its difficulties, since the simplified arrangements are very imperfect. As a help to those who study the text at home, I have recounted the general course of the action and dialogue just in sufficient outline to enable the reader to follow what is going on, adding here and there a literal translation, where it seemed desirable, especially where the meaning of the original is difficult to grasp.

Some introductory matter must first be told. Marke, King of Cornwall, has lately been involved in a war with the King of Ireland, whose general, Morold, has invaded the country to compel tribute. Tristan, King Marke's nephew, has defeated the army and killed Morold, but himself been wounded in the fight. His wound refusing to heal, he has sought the advice of the renowned Irish princess and medicine-woman, Isolde. She had been the betrothed bride of Morold, and in his head, sent back to Ireland in derision, as "tribute," by the conqueror, she has found a splinter from the sword which slew him, and has kept it. While Tristan is lying sick under her care she notices a gap in his sword, into which the splinter fits, and she knows that he is the slayer of her lover. She approaches him with sword upraised to slay him; he looks up at her; their eyes meet; she lets the sword fall, and bids him begone and trouble her no more. Tristan returns to Cornwall cured. His uncle is childless, and wishes to leave the kingdom to Tristan when he dies. But there are cabals in the state; a party has been formed, under Tristan's friend Melot, to induce King Marke to marry and beget a direct heir to the throne. Tristan joins them, and with great difficulty persuades his uncle to despatch him to Ireland to bring the Princess Isolde to be Markers wife. The curtain rises when they are on board the ship on the voyage to Cornwall, just approaching the land.

The Prelude is a condensed picture of the entire drama. As an instrumental piece it is unable to render the definite actions, but it can give with great distinctness a tone or an atmosphere out of which these acts will shape themselves in the sequel, a presentiment of what is to be. The subject of our work is Love trying to raise itself out of the contamination of human life into a higher and purer sphere, but failing so long as it is clogged with the conditions of bodily existence. The text of the Prelude may be taken from the words of Tristan in the third act:

Sehnen! Sehnen! Im Sterben mich zu sehnen, Vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben.

This theme is enunciated with almost realistic eloquence in the very first phrase, in the two contrasting strains, the love-motive striving upwards in the oboe, and its variant fading downwards in the 'cello. The union of the two produces a harmony of extraordinary expressiveness, which I have already referred to in the last chapter as the "soul of the Tristan music." Every hearer must be struck with its mysterious beauty, and it has been the subject of many theoretical discussions. It is best understood as the chord on the second degree of the scale of A minor, with inflections:

[Music]

G sharp being a suspension or appoggiatura resolved upwards on to A while the D sharp (more properly E flat) is explained by the melody of the violoncelli, which, instead of moving at once to D, pass through a step of a semitone. There is, however, one thing to be noticed in this melody. The dissonant D sharp (or E flat) is not resolved in its own instrument, the violoncelli, but is taken up by the English horn, and by it resolved in the next bar. This instrument therefore has a distinct melody of its own, consisting only of two notes, but still heard as a kind of sigh, and quite different from the merely filling-in part of the clarinets and bassoons. There are really three melodies combined:

[Music: Oboi. V' celli. Eng. Horn]

It will not be necessary for us to anatomize any more chords in this way. I did so in this case in order to show the intimate connection between the harmony and the melody, and how the explanation of the harmonies must be sought through the melodies by which they are brought about.

The entire Prelude is made up of various forms of the love-motive. The key is A minor, to which it pretty closely adheres, the transient modulations into a', c', etc., only serving to enforce the feeling of tonality. The reason for this close adherence to one key is not far to seek. Wagner never modulates without a reason; the Prelude presents one simple feeling, and there is no cause for or possibility of modulation.[36] At the 78th bar the music begins to modulate, and seems tending to the distant key of E flat minor, the love-motive is taken up forte and piu forte by the trumpets, but in bar 84 the modulation abruptly comes to an end, the soaring violins fall to the earth, and the piece ends as it began, with a reminiscence of the first part in A minor. An expressive recitative of the violoncelli and basses then leads to C minor, the key of the first scene.

[Footnote 36: See the remarks on modulation at the end of his essay Ueber die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama, Ges. Schr. x. pp. 248 seq., where he gives the advice to young students of composition: "Never leave a key so long as you can say what you have to say in it."]

ACT I., SCENE I.—The scene opens in a pavilion on the deck of the ship. Isolde is reclining on a couch, her face buried in the pillows. Brangaene's listless attitude as she gazes across the water, the young sailor's ditty to his Irish girl as he keeps watch on the mast, reflect the calmness of the sea as the ship glides before the westerly breeze, and contrast with the tempest raging in Isolde's breast. Suddenly she starts up in alarm, but Brangaene tries to soothe her, and tells her, to the soft undulating accompaniment of two bassoons in thirds, how she already sees the loom of the land, and that they will reach it by the evening. At present Brangaene has no suspicion of anything disturbing her mistress, whose feelings are indicated by an agitated passage in the strings (No. 6). She starts from her reverie. "What land?" she asks. "Cornwall? Never." Then follows a terrific outburst:

Is. Degenerate race, unworthy of your fathers! Whither, oh mother, hast thou bestowed the might over the sea and the storm? Oh, tame art of the sorceress, brewing balsam-drinks only! Awake once more, bold power! arise from the bosom in which thou hast hidden thyself! Hear my will, ye doubting winds: Hither to battle and din of the tempest, to the raging whirl of the roaring storm! Drive the sleep from this dreaming sea; awake angry greed from its depths; show it the prey which I offer; let it shatter this haughty ship, gorge itself upon the shivered fragments! What lives thereon, the breathing life, I give to you winds as your guerdon.

Both the words and the music of this wonderful invocation are worthy of attention. Especially the words of the original German with their drastic alliteration may be commended to those who still doubt Wagner's powers as a poet. The music is mostly taken from the sailor's song (No. 5), but quite changed in character; the rapid staccato movement with the strongly marked figure of the bass have transformed the peaceful ditty into a dance of furies. The entry of the trombones at the words Heran zu Kampfe is characteristic of Wagner's employment of the brass throughout the work. Their slow swelling chords add volume and solemnity to the orchestral tone. They continue for a few bars only, and the voice distantly hints at the love-motive (zu tobender Stuerme wuethendem Wirbel), but for a moment only; it goes no further.

The terrified Brangaene tries to calm her, and at the same time to learn what is the cause of her anger. She recalls Isolde's strange and cold behaviour on parting from her parents in Ireland, and on the voyage; why is she thus? A peculiar imploring tenderness is imparted to her appeal at the end by the falling sevenths, an interval which we have already met with in the Prelude and which is characteristic of this act.

Her efforts are vain; Isolde starts up hastily crying "Air! air! throw open the curtains!"

SCENE II.—The curtain thrown back discloses the deck of the ship with the crew grouped around Tristan, who is steering,[37] his man Kurwenal reclining near him. The refrain of the sailors' song is again heard. Isolde's eyes are fixed upon Tristan as she begins to the strain of the love-motive accompanied by muted strings:

Chosen for me!—lost to me! . . . . . Death-devoted head! Death-devoted heart!

enunciating with these words the death-motive (No. 2).

[Footnote 37: A curious mistake in the stage-management may be noticed. The scene is obviously laid in the forecastle; one glance at the stage is enough to show this, and the sails are set that way. Nor can it be altered, for it would never do to have them looking among the audience for the land ahead. So that Tristan's ship has her rudder in the bow! Rarely is Wagner at fault in trifles of this kind; in all other respects the deck-scene is admirably truthful. The sailors hauling, the song in the rigging, the obvious time of day—in the "dogwatches"—are little touches of realism which will be appreciated by all who know board-ship life.]

She turns to Brangaene, and with a look of the utmost scorn, indicating Tristan, she asks:

What thinkst thou of the slave? ... Him there who shirks my gaze, and looks on the ground in shame and fear?

Isolde here strikes the tone which she maintains throughout the act until all is changed by the philtre. Never has such blighting sarcasm before been represented in the drama as that which Isolde pours out upon Tristan. She is by far the stronger character of the two. Her rage is volcanic, and uses here its most effective weapon. Tristan writhes under her taunts, but cannot escape. The music unites inseparably with the words; even the rime adds its point as in mockery she continues Brangaene's praise of the hero:

Br. Dost thou ask of Tristan, beloved lady? the wonder of all lands, the much-belauded man, the hero without rival, the guard and ban of glory?

Is. (interrupting and repeating the phrase in mockery). Who shrinking from the battle takes refuge where he can, because he has gained a corpse as bride for his master!

She commands Brangaene to go to Tristan and deliver a message; she is to remind him that he has not yet attended upon her as his duty requires.

Br. Shall I request him to wait upon you?

_Is. [Tell him that] I, Isolde, _command_ [my] presumptuous [servant] fear for his _mistress_.

While Brangaene is making her way through the sailors to where Tristan is standing at the helm, an interlude made of the sailors' song phrase is played on four horns and two bassoons over a pedal bass, the strings coming in in strongly marked rhythm on the last beat of each bar, marking the hauling of the ropes to clear the anchor. Tristan is in a reverie, scarcely conscious of what is going on around him; the love-motive once in the oboe shows how his thoughts are occupied. He starts at the word Isolde, but collects himself, and tries to conceal his evident distress under a manner of supercilious indifference. Brangaene becomes more urgent; he pleads his inability to come now because he cannot leave the helm. Then Brangaene delivers Isolde's message in the same peremptory words in which she has received it.

Kurwenal suddenly starts up and, with or without permission, sends his answer to Isolde. Tristan, he says, is no servant of hers, for he is giving her the crown of Cornwall and the heritage of England. "Let her mark that, though it anger a thousand Mistress Isoldes." Brangaene hurriedly withdraws to the pavilion; he sings an insulting song after her in derision of Morold and his expedition for tribute:

"His head now hangs in Ireland, As tribute sent from England!"

As she closes the curtains the sailors are heard outside singing the refrain of his song, which is a masterpiece of popular music. One can imagine it to be the national song of the Cornish-men after the expedition. With regard to its very remarkable instrumentation, I cannot do better than quote the remarks of that admirable musician, Heinrich Porges: "The augmented chord at the words auf oedem Meere, the humorous middle part of the horns, the unison of the trombones which, with the sharp entry of the violas, effect the modulation from B flat to D major, impart the most living colour to each moment."

SCENE III.—(The interior of the pavilion, the curtains closed.) Isolde has heard the interview, and makes Brangaene repeat everything as it happened. Inexpressibly pathetic is the turn which she gives to the words of the song as she repeats the phrase of Brangaene:

Is. (bitterly). "How should he safely steer the ship to King Marke's land...." (with sudden emphasis, quickly) to hand him the tribute which he brings from Ireland!