W. J. Henderson

“ In this drama we come to the drawing together of the threads, the stretto of the dream fugue. Behold Brünnhilde, who has given all her wisdom to Siegfried and hence has none left for herself, sending him out in quest of further reputation as a mighty hero. There is something pathetic in this and also pitiably modern. Must husbands have had outings in the elemental days even as now? Was the epic man inconstant of soul? Ah Brünnhilde! A wise woman would go with him. It is not good for man to be alone. ”

“ The storm is contrasted with the vague tonalities and muted voicing of Erda's music. After the spear of Wotan is shattered by the rewelded "Nothung," Loge fills the mountains with his radiance and his shimmering music. The last of the futile and disappearing gods has passed from the scene of action. The human drama which is to lead to the dusk of the high ones has begun. ”

“ It is a decrescendo in inspiration, a ritardando in invention. More than any other drama of Wagner does it rely upon the dazzling of the eye to dull the keenness of the musical ear. It is a most imposing pageant set to unimposing music. Wagner fired heaven once with the immolation of Brünnhilde. It was not to be done again. The light on the Holy Grail is white and cold. ”

“ Usually when musical composers have ventured out of the beaten path, just found by the critics after much thorny wandering through the jungle of error, the cry has been that they were going astray. The poor critics have never been able to understand how any genius could depart from the beaten path without being lost in the woods, as they themselves generally are. In nine cases out of ten the composer who does so depart is lost, and hence the critic's calling is not altogether one of sorrow. ”

“ Ah, Isolde! How every man that has a heart can echo that marvellous phrase with which Wagner makes Tristan breathe forth his first and last sigh of love insatiable! Queen of the tawny locks and stately tread, thou art first shown to us as a woman of the old barbaric grandeur, hurling the full tide of thy passions against the inexorable advancing prow of Fate. The gates of honor thrown down, thou art but a woman loved and loving; and, mourning over thy lost chastity, art ready to sink into fathomless night with Tristan. ”

“ This is the manner, not the matter of the Strauss music. How far can this master magician, this royal juggler with [Pg 133] resolutions and suspensions, this acrobat of the flying chord, go with his endeavor to make music say for him the things that the entire decadent literature of modern Europe has striven to put down in plain words? If Strauss means anything, he means that Beethoven and Schumann were but the avant couriers of a vast march of progress into the bowels of delineation, the vitals of psychic communication. ”

“ As the master of evil we behold Klingsor, who comes before us in the first scene of the second act with more paraphernalia of slate-green walls, blue smoke, and exclamatory incantations than Faust ever had in his salad days at the Paris Grand Opera.
Kundry, the only woman in the play, is an ill-made muddle of inhumanity, who never commands a single instant of sympathy. She strives by service to atone for her sins, which are committed under the spell of Klingsor. She has neither love nor passion. ”

“ In the presence of this style of harmony the chord of the diminished seventh becomes as gentle as the tonic triad, for music is filled with what the eloquent and witty James Huneker once happily called "diseased chords of the twenty-sixth."
This style of harmony is not natural to Italian music. The genius of Italian song is utterly opposed to it. The proclivities of the Italian people are inimical to it. It is not adapted to the methods and traditions of the Italian lyric drama, and it has not been found necessary by the writers of the greatest masterpieces of Italian opera. ”

“ Suffice it to say, that here Wagner has accomplished one of the most triumphant demonstrations of the effectiveness of his organic union of the arts tributary to the drama. Music, text, action, scenic form and color, all work together in an irresistibly potent symphony of symbolism, which no reverent man can hear and see without emotion. ”

“ In other words, the modern musician has found his finest inspirations in that struggle of good with evil in the human soul which has inspired the works of the greatest modern dramatists. The only question that remained to be solved after this was, How far would the musician go? The dramatist and the poet ran morbid; the musician, seeking his inspiration in the records of human souls made in the terms of literature, followed the man of the pen into the slough of despond.
The morbid studies of such dramatists as Ibsen and Maeterlinck are the real key to the music of such a composer as Strauss. ”

“ Let us, if you will, go to a dimly lighted concert hall and sit with our heads bent over our scores while ladies and gentlemen, gloved and in evening dress, narrate and chant to us a tremendous drama, helped out by all the resources of modern delineative music, and we try to see the action with our mind's eye. ”

“ To those who accept music, as they accept soup, as one of the conventional details of a polite existence, all this pother about Strauss must seem unnecessary, yet since it has come, they naturally desire to know what it is all about. They must, then, begin by recognizing the fact that the modern orchestra has developed from a collection of ill-assorted and misunderstood instruments into a single instrument, the most eloquent at the disposal of the composer. ”

“ The duet of Siegmund and Sieglinde is generally accepted as one of Wagner's great achievements in sustained melody. The love-song is babbled now by musical babes. It is very pretty, and it has a manly ring, which we may all admire. But the third act of "Die Walküre" dwells from beginning to end in the sunlit regions of genius.
The feebleness of Wotan here loses itself in a sea of infinite pathos. The power of the magic hand of Wagner in the creation of dramatic atmosphere is seen in the tumultuous storming of the Valkyrs through the inky air. ”

“ Strauss's tone poem in about thirty minutes. A benefactor of mankind indeed is this philanthropist, who has not sought to write philosophical music. He has invented for us a kind of sugar-coated knowledge tablet. Abolish dry books and listen to the tone poems of Richard Strauss, and you will have the wisdom of the ages poured into your ears by trumpets and trombones.
And yet how refreshing to the spirit it is to hear after a Strauss tone preachment some such work of pure feeling as Schumann's Spring symphony! Here is no fugued fuddle of the fulminations of science. ”

“ A primeval element art thou not, but a physical investiture of the shifting soul. Thou art the master of this hour—yea, even of the unconscious Brünnhilde and the equally unconscious Wagner. He builded better than he knew. The seed of the serpent hath bruised the heel of the woman. ”

“ Wagner fairly fulfilled the Pater conception of the truly speculative artist, one "by whom no touch of the world of form, color, and passion was disregarded." Gluck treated poetry as a jewel, for which he as an artist was to provide the most chaste, beautiful, and appropriate setting. Wagner viewed poetry and music as two precious metals which he was to melt in the crucible of his genius into a new and more glorious product. ”

“ Remember always that music is the youngest of our modern arts. Remember, too, that although we can trace its beginnings back to the fourth century of the Christian era, we find that twelve hundred years were occupied with the development of a single form of music,—vocal polyphony, the form in which the mighty masterpieces of the Roman Church down to the day of Lasso and Palestrina were composed. ”

“ The Strauss songs are not primarily melodic. Neither are any of the high art songs of our time. All our song masters are marching steadily out into the vague and mystic land of moonlight moods and shifting shadows of tonalities. The strict song form irks them. They cease not to twist their phrases so that these may not coincide with the lines of the stanza. They are stung with the virus of the Wagnerian method. They make melody in fragments. ”

“ The splendid figure of the Queen mother's confidante bewailing her momentary unwatchfulness and her loss of honor, ready for the sake of that betrayal of confidence to give up her now wretched life, is a vastly different creature from the Brangäne of Wagner, who administers the potion as the shortest way out of an impending trouble.
Again, remember that this deed is one of pure unthinking devotion to the mistress. The fatal drink is the visible embodiment of fate. ”

“ It breathes not the yearning of the hero for a free life, but the spirit of the unbounded world itself. It is a song of the receding horizon.
The bandying of conundrums between Wotan and Mime leaves all the psychology to the dwarf. The rest is commemorative. It is a repetition of old themes to recall Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Giants and their unrequited labor, Walhall and its vanishing limelight glories. Take again the opening scene of Act II. How much introspection is there in Wotan's interesting interview with the unseen Fafner? Atmospheric, indeed, this music is, but not psychologic. ”

“ Wotan and all his brood fall victims in the end to the physical manifestation of the evil spirit, Loge.
They are burned in Walhalla. The flickering fire singes out the last vestiges of this rotten dynasty. The spirit of temptation wreaks its own vengeance upon the tempted. "Son lo spirito che nega." The Mephistophelian principle of negation wipes the futile gods off the firmament. Was there any touch of Schopenhauer or Buddha in this? ”

“ These young Italians must get back to a realization of the fundamental truth that music is the speech of emotion. Love, hate, fear, elation, depression, grief,—these are for music to interpret. But you cannot discuss Christianity and positivism in lyrics, nor make intelligent comment in six-eight time on the causes of poverty. The limitations of music are far smaller even than those of lyric poetry, yet its field is as large as that of the true drama, for it is that of all human emotion. ”

“ The score of this drama is mostly a long, faint echo of Wagner's greatest works. Siegfried vainly strives to animate this Parsifalian puppet of renunciation with the blood of the Volsung woe. Cloudlike shreds of "Tristan und Isolde" struggle to float sunset tints across this pallid sky. [Pg 12] All is copying, futile, without inspiration, without newness,—a hotch-potch of the old marketable materials made over with much constructive skill, but with commercial thrift and inartistic insincerity. There is hardly a note of honest æsthetic conviction in the whole thing. ”

“ Music no longer exists for herself. She seeks material always from without. Who writes now an "overture, scherzo, and finale"? Even Schumann, one of the pioneers of the modern romantic movement, did that; but our overfed imaginations require stimulation in the shape of titles. It must be an overture to an East Indian poem, which none of us ever read, or a symphonic fantasia on a Buddhistic doctrine, or a theme and variations setting forth the thoughts and actions of an allegorical character who was in himself a satire upon a generalization. ”

“ For him no flower of music blooms in vain. For him there is some very special loveliness in the operas written before the flood-gates of modern romanticism were opened. For him there is still edification in the stately measures of Gluck's "Orfeo," and there is a fountain of inexhaustible pleasure in the immortal "Don Giovanni" of Mozart. To him the latter, in particular, is a perennial "Fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro." Ability to penetrate to the heart of these works is an evidence of musical aristocracy. They are not for the common herd. ”

“ The poem of "Parsifal" is almost utterly devoid of those great basic elements which make human life dramatic for men and women. Nowhere in it do we see, as in Wagner's other works, the primeval man and woman at gaze upon each other in the naked barbaric splendor of desire. Instead of the one passion which makes plays, we are asked to consider the suffering of a man who is as remote from our common sympathies as his figure is from our eyes when it lies recumbent in the seat behind the altar of the Grail.
Amfortas is held up as typical of the sufferings of humanity under the curse of carnal sin. ”

“ The children of melodic and harmonic darkness are not enlightened by them. They shine for the few, the chosen few, who march with Music herself as their leader. To hear "Lucia" after one of these is like drinking iced water after eating ice-cream. The Donizettian masterpiece becomes suddenly lukewarm.
It has been said that in art there is no such thing as standing still. But the appreciation of art is surely a different matter. Music, the youngest of the arts, is in the very press of her [Pg 191] first forward march. She is in the possession of the priceless gift of unwearied strength. ”

“ The music is the shifting, flickering, changeful, destroying fire; the fire is the soul of Loge and the first fruit of perdition.
The theme returns in the last scene of "Die Walküre," when Wotan, the helpless father, has put his best-beloved to sleep. He is to surround her with a belt of guardian fire. Fire is the soul of Loge, a lovely protector for unconscious [Pg 45] virtue! Again we hear the fire music, but only for fire. Loge, most subtle of the gods of the field, has to all appearances been the most futile. ”