Ernest Newman

“ Any other operatic librettist and composer, after that million-throated outburst, would have set a strutting Sachs on his feet, smilingly and condescendingly accepting the homage of the multitude. Wagner makes his Sachs realise nothing but his own unworthiness and the sense of something hollow and fleeting in all this vociferation; and there is hardly an effect in all music to compare for subtlety, for poetry, for the profundity of its humanity, with the instantaneous melting of the crimson and purple strains of the folk into the quiet grey theme of Sachs' sorrow in the strings. ”

“ When he begins work upon the music of the Rhinegold he is a new being. His imagination has developed to an extent that is without a parallel in the case of any other musician. The characters and the milieu of the Rhinegold are themselves evidence of the audacious sweep of his vision: he undertakes to re-create in music gods and men and giants, creatures of the waters and creatures of the bowels of the earth; the music has to flood the scene now with water, now with fire, with the murky vapours of the underworld and the serene air of the heights over against Valhalla. ”

“ 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 he had no clear conception of their drift. He had gradually become profoundly disgusted with the theatre, yet saw no possible reformation of it except by way of a reformation of man and society as a whole. So he became a revolutionist,—not for politics' sake but for art's sake. ”

“ The Greek drama, in fact, was singularly akin to the music-drama of Wagner. As Wagner saw, the true modern equivalent of the Greek chorus is the orchestra; it is at once part of the action and aloof from it, an ideal spectator, sympathising, commenting, correcting. The Greek drama resembles ideal opera, again, in that the ultimate sentiment disengaged from it is one not of facts shown, or of interest held by the mere interplay of intrigue, but of a high poetic spirit, purifying and transfiguring the common life of things. ”

“ Wagner's root idea in Parsifal was to show us, in Kundry, a living symbol of the dual nature of woman, half-angel and half-beast, in turns sensual and repentant, the destroyer and the saviour of man. But it is precisely symbols of this kind, cutting down to the obscurest depths of human psychology, that cannot retain their vast suggestiveness after they have been narrowed down to the personality of a single actor. We no longer see the eternal and infernal womanly; it is only a German prima-donna, stout of build and heavy of movement, that we see upon the stage. ”

“ The poet, in proportion as his work is genuine, faultless poetry, has no need of the musician. Music is cruel, ravenous, selfish, overbearing with poetry; it deprives it, for its own ends, of almost everything that makes it poetry, altering its verbal values, disregarding its rhymes, substituting another rhythm for that of the poet. It has no need of anything but the poetic idea, and to get at that kernel it ruthlessly tears away all the delicacies of tissue that enclose it. Wagner himself, however much he might theorise about poetry, was never a poet ”

“ 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 it is given to bestride an old world and a new, but to sunder them by a gulf that becomes ever more and more impassable; one of the very few [213] who are able so to fill the veins of a whole civilisation with a new principle of vitality that the tingle of it is felt not only by the rarer but by the commonest spirits—some new principle from which, whether a man likes it or not, he will find it impossible to escape. ”

“ Nor can poetry alone create the genuine art-work, for no genuine art-work is possible without an appeal to the eye. Poetry should be written to be acted, not read. "The whole impenetrable medley of stored-up literature is in truth—in spite of its million phrases—nothing but the toilsome stammering of speech-impotent thought that longs to pass over into natural immediacy,—a stammering that has been going on for centuries, in verse and prose, without achieving the living Word." Shakespeare was to the art-work of the future no more than Thespis was to the perfected Greek drama. ”

“ We are probably developing towards a form of symphonic music that shall be to the art of its own day what the Beethoven symphony of the middle period was to the art of his time,—a musical drama-without-words, and perfectly lucid without words. When the new instrumental music has assimilated all the finest spirit and mastered the full harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and the best technique of the new day, some future Wagner will perhaps turn the mighty stream into a fresh dramatic channel, the nature of which it is almost impossible to anticipate. ”

“ Never before had any composer dreamed of an opera so rich in all varieties of emotion, of action, of atmosphere. The practice he had in the Rhinegold developed his powers still further: in the Valkyrie the painting grows surer and surer, the imagination sweeps on to conceptions beyond anything that any musician before him would have thought possible: in Siegfried there is an absolute exultation of style; the music seems to dance and cry aloud out of pure joy in its own strength and beauty. ”

“ 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 of which is to make it clear to us why these particular people are there at that particular moment, and what it is that they are doing? It cannot be reiterated too often that it is only the music that can keep alive any form of art into which music enters. The mere facts in an art-work lose their force with repetition; it is only artistic emotion that can be born anew again and again and yet again. ”

“ Who would exchange the imagination's vision of the glorious Valkyrie-flight through the storm and the cloud-wrack for the actual visible Grane, with his evident air of having been borrowed from the mews round the corner? Who that is moved by the Grail music in Parsifal has not felt his heart sink within him at the sight of the slow mechanical evolutions of the Knights in the Grail scene at Bayreuth? Who has not felt at the sight of the "property" swan that the rarefied atmosphere of Monsalvat has gone, and with it most of the remoteness, the shining whiteness, of Lohengrin? ”

“ Wagner is probably the only figure in the whole history of music of whom this can be said. Bach created no such upheaval. He counts for next to nothing in the music of his own day and that of the two generations that followed him. He did not make a new world in music: rather had a new world to be made before men's eyes were competent to take the measure of that towering stature, or men's hearts quick enough with life to respond to the profound humanism of that great soul. We were not fit for Bach until Beethoven and Wagner—and Wagner, perhaps, even more than Beethoven—made us so. ”

“ This is more or less the case with the creations of the other arts: how diversely will one and the same picture, one and the same drama, affect diverse individuals, and even the same individual at different times! And yet how much more definitely and positively the painter or the poet must draw his figures than the instrumental composer, who is not bound, like them, to model his form by the appearances of the everyday world, but who has at his disposal an immeasurable realm in a super-terrestrial kingdom, and to whose hand is given the most spiritual of substances—tone! ”

“ There is nothing in all other men's music comparable to Wagner's feat of keeping the vast scheme of the Ring in his head for more than a quarter of a century, and actually laying it aside completely for eleven years during that time, without relaxing his grip for a moment upon the smallest limb of the great drama. It is in virtue of this fiery and unceasing play of the imagination and this stupendous synthetic power that he takes his place among the half-dozen most comprehensive minds that have ever worked in art. ”

“ We can speak of the Wagnerian imagination as we can speak of the Shakespearean imagination; Wagner's is the only imagination in music that can be compared with Shakespeare's in dramatic fertility and comprehensiveness. It pours itself over the whole surface of a work, into every nook and cranny of it. It is a vast mind, infinite in its sympathies, protean in its creative power. For sheer drastic incisiveness of theme he has not his equal in all music; each vision instinctively, without an effort, finds its own inevitable utterance. ”

“ The ordinary "abstract" composer's mind must have been a pure puzzle to a man like him, who could not understand how modern music could have any raison d'être apart from something definitely poetic or pictorial to be expressed. To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it till it was "workable," and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition—this was something he could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire musician engaged in it. ”

“ When a composer is so mighty of body as this, he can well afford to lose a drop or two of blood on his pilgrimage through the ages.
"In music, as in nature," says Vincent d'Indy, "there are mountains and valleys; there are artists of genius who raise their art to such heights that the herd of second-rank creators, unable to breathe in these altitudes, is forced to descend again to more temperate levels (which, however, are often sown with charming flowers) , until the eruption of a new genius heaves up a new mountain peak. ”

“ The Lohengrin Prelude tells us nothing of any dramatic contest,—not even that which rages in the heart of Elsa. It shows us only Lohengrin, the representative of the Grail, coming to earth and leaving it again. There is no hint of the reason for his return to Monsalvat: there is no hint even that his stay on earth has been in any degree troubled by enemies or evil. Beautiful as it is, therefore, and eloquently as it sings of Lohengrin himself, the Prelude is not in the full sense of the word a real prelude to the drama. ”

“ And only "the great revolution of mankind" can restore to us this art-work. "If the Greek art-work comprehended the spirit of a beautiful nation, the art-work of the future must comprehend the spirit of a free humanity soaring above all barriers of race." The new art demands a new mankind, and, as a preliminary, a return to nature. Man has been destroyed by culture. The goal both of art and of the social impulse must be "the strong and beautiful man, to whom revolution shall give his strength, and art his beauty." ”

“ Great as is the inventive power of a Bach, a Beethoven or a Brahms, it cannot be denied that much of their work is simply a varied exploitation of a relatively small number of formulas,—that a very small amount of thematic invention can be made to go a very long way under the guidance of an established pattern. Nor, broadly speaking, is the same intensity of imagination, or the same scope of imagination, required to invent a hundred ordinary fugal or symphonic themes as to find a hundred themes that are the veritable musical counterparts of as many human beings. ”

“ Like Bach, Wagner could never conceive any emotion without intensifying it to the utmost. The barest hint of joy in one of Bach's texts will set him carolling like a lark; the barest hint of mortality will bedim his music with all the tears of all the universe for its dead. Wagner has the same insatiable hunger for expression. In Tristan in particular every emotion is developed to its furthest limit of poignancy. The passion of love becomes almost delirium ”

“ But these were not all,—there were also Liszt, King Ludwig, Bülow, the Wesendoncks, Wille, Madame Laussot, and many another besides from whom he was estranged permanently or for a time. All his life through he insisted on being the centre of his own universe. He saw and felt himself with exaggerated sensibilities; whatever happened to him was either a bliss or a woe above anything that could happen to ordinary mortals. Like Strindberg he imagines at one time that the whole world exists simply to hurt him; at another, it is a portent of happiness for the whole world because he is happy. ”

“ Can we not imagine something like the second Act of Tristan with silent and only dimly visible actors, the music, helped by their gestures, telling us all that is in their souls, while they are too remote from us for the crude personality of the actors and the theatrical artificiality of the stage-setting to jar upon us as they do at present? Cannot some story be taken as so well known to everyone that only the shadowiest hints of the course of it need be given to the spectator, the real drama being in the music? ”

“ In any one else's hands Alberich would have been a mere conventional villain of melodrama. As Wagner draws him he is as real as Iago,—an enemy of the light and all that live in the light, but their enemy by reason of the very nature of his being, following his own instincts with perfect naturalness and perfect consistency. So it comes about that we invariably believe in Alberich and the justice of his cause when he is speaking for himself; nowhere is he a mere foil or relief to characters with whom we may have more moral sympathy. ”

“ The motives are unforgettable once we have heard them. They depict their subject once for all: who to-day, enormously as the apparatus of musical expression has developed since Wagner's time, would dare to try to find better symbols than those he has invented for the tarnhelm, the fire, the Rhine, the sword, the dragon, the potion that brings oblivion to Siegfried; or for any of the men and women of the operas—for Wotan, for Siegfried, for Mime, for the "reine Thor," for Herzeleide, for Hagen, for Gutrune, for Brynhilde, and for a dozen others? ”