John F. Runciman

“ What was it to the Dutchman's damned soul if all the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must needs live in hell—a world that others make, a world where he has no place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. ”

“ There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead century, with the dust upon it, and yet a faint lingering aroma as of dead rose petals. But the old-world atmosphere of Byrde's music is, at least to me, something finer than that: it is the atmosphere of a world which still lives: it is remote from us and yet very near: for the odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm cool air, and a sense of fragrant climbing flowers and of the shade of full foliaged trees. ”

“ But when the worst has been said, when one has writhed under the recollection of an adipose prima donna fooling with bear-like skittishness a German tenor whose figure and face bewray the lager habit, when one has shuddered to remember the long-winded idiotic dialogue, the fact remains firmly set in one's mind that one has stood before a gigantic work of art—a work whose every defect is redeemed by its overwhelming power and beauty and pathos. There has never been, nor does it seem possible there ever will be, a finer scene written than the dungeon scene. ”

“ This change he depicted in a way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and listen to the music we experience it within ourselves and our inner selves are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions expressed. Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity, naked souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they are generalisations, not characters, and in them we see only ourselves reflected on the stage—ourselves as we are under the spell of Wagner's music and of his drama. ”

“ In fact, not even Tristan has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity of expressing so many phases of emotion and character. And the music Siegfried has to sing is the richest, most copious stream of melody ever given to one artist; in any one scene there is melody enough to have made the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer who wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not even Mozart could have poured out a greater wealth of tune—tune everlastingly varying with the mood of the drama. ”

“ True, the music which accompanies its entry is always impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe—a make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion, which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. ”

“ The very fact of there being such wide disagreement about the value of music that is now so familiar to us all, points to some weakness in it which some of us feel less than others; and I, poor unhappy mortal, who in my unexcited moments neither place Schubert among the highest gods, like Liszt and Sir George Grove, nor damn him cordially, like Wagner and Mr. Shaw, cannot help perceiving that along with much that is magnificently strong, distinguished, and beautiful in his music, there is much that is pitiably weak, and worse than commonplace. ”

“ The old Italian opera form is laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's head uttering deep bass curses through a speaking-trumpet; and perhaps to-morrow the Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged monsters will be laughed at by the apostles of a new and equally absurd convention. It is absolutely the first condition of the existence of an art that one shall be prepared to tolerate things ludicrously unlike anything to be found in real life ”

“ But the moment her hatred is satisfied Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love; her love a second time betrays her; and she seizes the poison and drinks also. Then comes the masterstroke. Done with this world, with nothing but death before them, the two confess their long-pent love; in their exalted state passion comes over them like a flood; in the first rush of passion, honour, shame, friendship seem mere names of illusions, and love is the only real thing in life ”

“ And then Siegfried, with his fund of health and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully presses forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies before him, never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to the full; while Parsifal, lacking health and vitality—probably his father suffered from rickets—sees that the grief and suffering of the world outweigh and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but is so overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his mission to heal and console them. ”

“ It is sheer spectacle, but how magnificent compared with that older type of spectacle which chiefly consisted of brass bands and ladies insufficiently clothed! "Siegfried," on the other hand, contains no tragedy save the destruction of a little vermin. It is the most glorious assertion ever made of the joy and splendour and infinite beauty to be found in life by those who possess the courage to go through it in their own way, and have the overflowing vitality and strength to create their own world as they go. Siegfried is the embodiment of the divine energy that makes life worth living ”

“ Some of his later music makes one think that if the leap—a leap almost unparalleled in the history of art—had been possible twenty years sooner, Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and Handel and Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company. On the other hand, one cannot think of the man—lively, genial, kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of details, careful in small money matters—and assert with one's hand on one's heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic mould. ”

“ Lohengrin, knight of the Grail, redeemer, yet with a touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down the river in his magic boat by the Swan from a far mysterious land, a land of perpetual freshness and beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion than the commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven; and even if we feel it to be absurd that he should have to beg his wife to take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on trust, and he tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about himself. ”

“ Hichens once very happily spoke of the "earth-bigness" of some of the music, and this is the bigness I find in Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the workings of nature—the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt—he does not accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever attained to. ”

“ Or, if one considers detail, in no other opera do the characters depict themselves in every phrase they utter as they do in "Don Giovanni." The songs stamp Mozart as the greatest song-writer who has lived, with the exception of Handel, whose opera songs are immeasurably beyond all others save Mozart's, and a little beyond them. The mere musicianship is as consummate as Bach's, for, like Bach, Mozart possessed that facility which is fatal to many men, but combined with it a high sincerity, a greedy thirst for the beautiful, and an emotional force that prevented it being fatal to him. ”

“ Anyone who is wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair, has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera—failed to see that two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight, and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain would dwell. ”

“ It is in dignity and quality of poetic content rather than in form that Haydn is lacking. Had the horizon of his thought been widened in early or even in middle life by the education of mixing with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded in his music. ”

“ The Germans are now spent: they produce no more great musicians: they produce only music which is as ugly to the ear as it is involved to the eye. It is high time for a return to the simplicity of Mozart, of Handel, of our own Purcell; to dare, as Wagner dared, to write folk-melody, and to put it on the trombones at the risk of being called vulgar and rowdy by persons who do not know great art when it is original, but only when it resembles some great art of the past which they have learnt to know. ”

“ Were not the thing done, one might believe it impossible to express with such simplicity—four sombre minor chords and then the tremolo of the strings—the alternations of trembling fear and fearful hope, the hope of the human soul in extremist agony finding an exalted consolation in the thought that this was the worst. As astounding as this is the quality of light and freshness of atmosphere with which Handel imbues such songs as "Clouds o'ertake the brightest day" and "Crystal streams in murmurs flowing" ”

“ The "Matthew" Passion arouses a very different mood from that aroused by the "John." One does not remember the turbulent people's choruses, nor the piercing note of anguish, nor any rapturous song or chorus; for all else is drowned in the recollection of an overwhelming utterance of love and human sorrow and infinite tenderness. ”

“ But, after all, Mozart wrote for those who have no trains to catch when this masterpiece, the masterpiece of Italian opera, is sung as he intended it to be sung.
The Requiem is a very different work. There is plenty of the gaiety and sunshine of life in "Don Giovanni." The Requiem is steeped in sadness and gloom, with rare moments of fiery exaltation, or hysterical despair; at times beauty has been almost—almost, but never quite—driven from Mozart's thought by the anguish that tormented him as he wrote. ”

“ Born in a time when the secret of living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory, and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. ”

“ Again, he had little or no real strength—none of the massive, healthy strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer hysteria. He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling. He is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect his sincerity, and certainly leaves it an open question how long a great deal of his music will stand after this generation, to which it appeals so strongly, has passed away. ”

“ At first one feels chiefly its old-world freshness—not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming out of the Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun shone daily even in London, and all things were fair and clean. ”

“ And no music is more exclusively its own composer's, has less in it of other composers'. Beethoven is Beethoven plus Mozart, Wagner is Wagner plus Weber and Beethoven; but from every page of Mozart's scores Mozart alone looks at you, with sad laughter in his eyes, and unspeakable tenderness, the tenderness of the giants, of Handel, Bach, and Beethoven, though perhaps Mozart is tenderest of them all. ”

“ Then abruptly her courage rises; her short broken phrases are abandoned; and to a great sweeping melody she declares that, whoever the prisoner may be, she will free him. These twenty bars are as great music as anything in the world: they even leave Senta's declaration in the "Dutchman" far behind; they are at once triumphant and charged with a pathos nearly unendurable in its intensity. The scene ends with a strange hushed unison passage like some unearthly chant: it is the lull before the breaking of the storm. ”

“ Even Mozart never quite attained that union of miraculously balanced form, sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling with a degree of sheer strength that keeps the expression of the main thought lucid, and the surface of the music, so to speak, calm, when obscurity might have been anticipated, and some roughness and storm and stress excused. "Faith displays her rosy wing" is an absolutely perfect instance of a Handel song. ”

“ And so personal force, musical genius, business talent, education, and general brain power went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with dukes and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule, who threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies from windows, and was threatened with never an action for battery in return, who went through the world with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most astonishing lord of music the world has seen. ”

“ He does not get the breezy picturesqueness of Purcell, nor the entrancing absolute beauty that Mozart often gets; but as pieces of art, each constructed so as to get the most out of the human voice in expressing a rich human passion in a noble form, they stand unapproachable in their perfection. For many reasons the English public refused to hear them in his own time, and Handel, as a general whose business was to win the battle, not in this or that way, but in any possible way, turned his attention to oratorio, and in this found success and a fortune. ”