John F. Runciman

“ At first he is obdurate, but she begs him to spare her that frightful disgrace, and to surround her with a wall of fire through which only a great hero will dare to pass. He yields, taking her godhood, her limited immortality, away from her, putting her to sleep, calling up the fire, and swearing that only a hero who has no fear of his spear shall pass through, and so the drama ends. Wotan has definitely renounced love. The moment at which he can renounce life rather than endure life without love has not yet come. The old Adam, the biological bias, the will to live, is strong in us all. ”

“ It was the deceitful phantoms of daylight—worldly ambitions—that betrayed Tristan into acting so basely towards Isolda (before the drama opens) ; it was the light of the torch that kept him so long from her this night; and now in the darkness they find rapturous peace. This is the substance of what is said. Twice Brangaena warns them that the dawn is at hand, but they do not heed her. Her songs are exquisite enough, surely, but the lovers, steeped in their bliss, have no ears for them. Their own music is far more beautiful:
And again:
The lovers are presently awakened. ”

“ More beautiful music for the theatre had been written, but never had such energy been put into it as we find in the Dutchman's damnation theme or the tumult of the bitter, angry sea. Any lazy man can, in time, fill up a score with sufficient notes for the trumpets, trombones and drums to produce a deafening uproar, but it took all the native force of a Wagner to fill, to inform, the thought itself with such energy that, looking at the score, the passages seem almost to leap out from the page, and, played on even a small piano, their effect is still overwhelming. ”

“ Throughout the opera new matter is continually introduced, with old themes, changed or unchanged, woven into the tissue; and to go hunting for these old themes, to try to recognise them whenever they crop up, is not only to lose one's enjoyment of the music, but to run a fair risk of misapprehending it altogether, and the drama as well. This jack-fool twaddle about there being not a single phrase in an opera which has not grown out of another is manifestly absurd—for out of what does the first one grow?—and utterly untrue. In every scene of Tristan an enormous amount of new material is added ”

“ In The Flying Dutchman Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in Tannhäuser he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in Lohengrin, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works—the Mastersingers. It is the most delicately beautiful thing he wrote; its freshness is the freshness that seems unlikely to fade with the passage of time. ”

“ The maidens tell her of the dark wood where the dragon hides, and Brunnhilda, chanting her hymn in praise of the love for which one surrenders all, gives her the fragments of the sword and bids her fly, awaiting with undaunted courage her own punishment. The god comes in bursting with rage, and declares that Brunnhilda shall be left on the mountain to wed the first man who finds her. The other maidens fly in horror; she alone remains to make an appeal to Wotan, as Siegmund had appealed to her. ”

“ The hero is the son of Sieglinda and Siegmund; he kills the dragon, takes the ring, shatters Wotan's spear, passes the fiery hedge, and weds Brunnhilde. The details we shall examine when we deal with the drama of Siegfried. Wotan's part is now ended; he retires to Valhalla to await the inevitable dénouement. He willingly abdicates, and wills his own destruction and the destruction of Valhalla and all that existed under his rule. If power involves the compulsion to renounce himself, to destroy all that he loves and all that makes life sweet, then he rather renounces life. ”

“ Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. It is the sea that pervades the whole of the act; but imposed on its ceaseless sound there are very splendid things—some worn a little threadbare by now, but many still fresh. In the next act the prima donna has her opportunity. Senta, the heroine, sits at her spinning-wheel amidst a number of maidens. ”

“ When Liszt read the score of The Valkyrie, he wrote to Wagner that he wanted to cry, like the chorus on the miraculous arrival of Lohengrin, "Wunderschön! wunderschön!" No man can cry otherwise to-day when he hears the last act. The summit of artistic achievement seemed to be reached in the second act, but we are now carried still higher. After the Ride, with its unequalled painting of tempest amongst the rocks and pines, there comes Brunnhilda's glorious chant as she sends off Sieglinda, then her long supplication to Wotan, and finally the sleep and fire-music and Wotan's Farewell. ”

“ In the scene of pleading and counter-pleading between Siegmund and Brunnhilda we have Wagner at the zenith of his powers: the pleading of the man, the calm, cold majesty of the Valkyrie, awe and pathos and heroic defiance, are all there. From the technical point of view, the scene is equal to Tristan: the continuous sweep of the music, with its ever-changing colours and emotions, is almost supermasterly. The tragedy at the end is a stage rather than a musical effect, and it is made the more powerful by being delayed so long and then arriving with such terrific swiftness. ”

“ It had its opera, which was doubtless as good as the average German opera of the time. But without a conservatoire, without musicians of the first rank, with its middling orchestra, it cannot be compared with, say, Vienna, where the very air breathed music and great musical traditions and memories abounded. Bach, the poor organist and schoolmaster, was little more than a name to all save his pupils and their pupils. His Matthew Passion lay there untouched, with the dust thick on it, and there it remained until Mendelssohn had it sung a century after its first and only previous performance. ”

“ At any moment now Wotan's empire may be taken from him; the ring he must gain somehow, but by the laws written on his staff he may not perpetrate such an act of injustice as taking it himself. His position is more tragic than he knows. His brilliant idea is the sword, and here is its theme, one of the most important in the work:
He will raise up a breed of heroes, let them fend for themselves in the world—even heap pains and trials upon them ”

“ The music drama has driven out Italian opera as completely and irrevocably as the steam-engine drove out the stage-coach. As far as his choice of subjects, there is no reason on earth why he should be followed. The myth suited him because he happened to be the Wagner he was, but there are a hundred reasons why present-day composers should leave the myth alone. The myth gave him opportunities to display his passion, keen sympathy with picturesque nature, tremendous sense of a remote past that never existed ”

“ The tragedy deepens and grows more intense with each successive scene; each separates them more widely from life and all that life means, until in the last act the divorce is complete. This is the purpose of the drama; this is the drama, and those who do not like it must turn to another opera.
If the drama is clear, so is the music. Wagner's powers were now at their fullest and ripest; in invention, technical skill, mastery of the colours of the orchestra, he towers far above every composer born in the nineteenth century. ”

“ That drama opens in earnest with The Valkyrie—the story of how, in pursuing his ambitious plan, Wotan is forced to sacrifice first his own son, then his daughter Brunnhilde, who is the incarnation of all that is sweet and beautiful in his own nature. She shares, it is true, his curiously limited immortality—an immortality that may be, and finally is, curtailed—but she can suffer a punishment worse to her than extinction. ”

“ But, of course, when one has heard the opera many times—and twenty performances, supplemented by a study of Von Bülow's incomparable piano arrangement of the score, are hardly enough to enable us to begin to comprehend the real richness and vastness of Tristan—then gradually new features are found, new lights are thrown by the use of leit-motifs, and slowly the music yields us that multiplicity of complex delights—delights intellectual, emotional, or purely sensuous—that only the greatest works of art can give. ”

“ He got magnificent results; and when the leaven of Wagnerism has ceased to work and froth and bubble in the public brain—in a word, when Wagner's music is no longer mere exciting new wine, and we are as accustomed to it as we are to the music of Beethoven—then we shall turn back to Gluck (and also to Mozart) and find them as young and fresh as ever.
Wagner's aim was totally different. First, music, he held, was played out: one must have the spoken word with it. He went to the myth for subjects, and gave plentiful reasons, which need not detain us, for the choice. ”

“ It is idle to search out such points as this with the aid of a guide, for while you are waiting for them you lose the music in which they are set; the prevailing mood eludes you, and the points themselves fail to make their effect. There is another danger. People easily go leit-motif mad, and their insane imagination creates a leit-motif out of any two phrases that have a superficial and accidental resemblance. Tristan and the Ring are not musical puzzles. The themes are quite able to look after themselves, and to assert themselves at the proper moment. ”