William Smyth Rockstro and Donald Francis Tovey

“ What Mozart’s music with exquisite humour and simplicity expresses is as yet nothing more serious than the wish to scratch Don Giovanni’s eyes out; as soon as his character is revealed to her in Leporello’s comic aria of the “catalogue,” she determines that others at all events shall not suffer as she has suffered; and from that moment her character steadily develops in seriousness and dignity. She is not all strength, and Don Giovanni fools her to the top of her bent ”

“ But in music he had no more to learn, and Parsifal, while the most solemn and concentrated of all Wagner's dramas, is musically not always unsuggestive of old age. Its harmonic style is, except in the Grail music, even more abstruse than in Tristan; and the intense quiet of the action is far removed from the forces which in that tumultuous tragedy carry the listener through every difficulty. ”

“ After Die Entführung, Mozart’s record is a series of masterpieces, accompanied, but not interrupted, by a running commentary of pièces d’occasion. With rare exceptions, everything he writes illustrates the perfect solution of an art-problem, and he often achieves an artistic triumph with the most eccentric materials. The modern organist can find since Bach no grander piece in his repertory than the two fantasias which Mozart wrote for the barrel of a musical clock. ”

“ After even the finest things in Tannhäuser, the Vorspiel to Lohengrin comes as a revelation, with its quiet solemnity and breadth of design, its ethereal purity of tone-colour, and its complete emancipation from earlier operatic forms. The suspense and climax in the first act is so intense, and the whole drama is so well designed, that we must have a very vivid idea of the later Wagner before we can see how far the quality of musical thought still falls short of his ideals. The elaborate choral writing sometimes rises to almost Hellenic regions of dramatic art ”

“ The crowning complication in the effect of Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin on the musical thought of the 19th century was that the unprecedented fusion of their musical with their dramatic contents revealed some of the meaning of serious music to ears that had been deaf to the classics. Wagnerism was henceforth proclaimed out of the mouths of babes and sucklings; learned musicians felt that it had an unfair advantage; and by the time Wagner's popularity began to thrive as a persecuted heresy he had left it in the lurch. ”

“ In this, his last work, as in many wonderful polyphonic experiments immediately before it, Mozart showed unmistakable signs of the growth of a new style, which would undoubtedly have had an influence even more powerful on the history of music as being embodied in works surpassing his ripest known achievements as these surpass the marvellous productions of his childhood. Nevertheless, what he has given us is unique, and the intelligent love of Mozart’s work is a liberal education in the meaning of art. ”

“ The Rhine-daughter sings it in a childlike, indolently graceful way which well expresses the kind of toy the ring or the world itself would be to her. One of her sisters bids her be careful, but they reassure themselves with the thought that the Rhine-gold is safe, since no one can win it who does not renounce love. Alberich broods over what he hears, and already the theme changes its character as he thinks of such mastery of the world as he might gain by it (Melody, Ex. 12) . He curses love and grasps the gold. The theme of world-mastery grows dark with the darkness of the Nibelung's mind. ”

“ But so long as we treat Wagner like a prose philosopher, a librettist, a poet, a mere musician, or anything short of the complex and many-sided artist he really is, we shall find insuperable obstacles to understanding or enjoying his works. A true work of art is incomparably greater than the sum of its ideas ”

“ But Spohr would feel Wagner's works to be an advance upon contemporary romantic opera rather than a foreshadowing of an unknown future. When we listen to the free declamation of the singers at the outset of Der fliegende Holländer—a declamation which is accompanied by an orchestral and thematic texture as far removed from that of mere recitative as it is from the forms of the classical aria—the repetition of a whole sentence in order to form a firm musical close has almost as quaint a ring as a Shakespearean rhymed tag would have in a prose drama of Ibsen. ”

“ With Mozart there is no temptation to do so. But with Wagner, just as there are people who have never tried to follow a sonata but who have been awakened by his music-dramas to a sense of the possibilities of serious music, so there are lovers of music who avow that they owe to Wagner their appreciation of poetry. But people whose love of literature is more independent find it hard to take Wagner's poetry and prose seriously, unless they have already measured him by his music. ”

“ Perhaps the first place where an intelligent tradition of Mozart as a comic genius of the highest type has been restored is Munich, where the standard set under the conductorship of Richard Strauss will not soon be forgotten.
In Cosí fan tutte Mozart’s struggles with an absurd libretto show even clearer evidence of the accuracy and power of his genius than when he is working under conditions where success is possible. ”

“ The little pieces composed by Mozart in his fifth and sixth years are a fascinating study in the unswerving progress made by a child who masters every step, not by some miraculous intuition that enables him to dispense with learning, but by a hardly less miraculous directness of thought that prevents him from either making the same mistake twice or exactly repeating a form once mastered. ”

“ The concertante for 4 wind instruments which recently went triumphantly round the orchestral societies of Europe as a long-lost work written during Mozart’s visit to Paris (though it is not for the same instruments) is not so bad as the notorious forged masses, but it is, to any one acquainted with Mozart’s style at any period of his career, almost as obviously spurious. Mozart often wrote without thought, but never, even when he was six years old, without mastery; and there is much genuine work that is as dull as this concertante, but none that is obviously constructed by a fool. ”

“ Fortunately, Mozart had at fifteen acquired more than enough technique to rest upon; and thus the growing boy could keep his spirits up, continuing his public successes and indulging his easy sense of mastery, without putting a strain upon his brain which nature need revenge then or afterwards. ”

“ No contemporary, unaided by personal knowledge, could be expected to trust in Wagner's purity of ideal on the strength of Tannhäuser, which actually achieved popularity by such coarse methods of climax as the revivalistic end of the overture, by such maudlin pathos as O du mein holder Abendstern, and by the amiably childish grand-opera skill with which half the action is achieved by processions and a considerable fraction of the music is represented by fanfares. ”

“ During the absence of Wolfgang and his father the good archbishop of Salzburg died; and in the spring of the year 1772 Hieronymus, count of Colloredo, was elected in his stead, to the horror of all who were acquainted with his real character. The Mozart family did their best to propitiate their new lord, for whose installation Wolfgang, after his return from Milan, composed an opera, Il Sogno di Scipione; but the newly-elected prelate had no taste for art, and was utterly incapable of appreciating the charm of any intellectual pursuit whatever. ”

“ In spite of the necessary allusions to the ominous theme of the curse, which would give any less great composer ample excuse for succumbing to the listener's sense of impending doom, Wagner's music speaks to us through the child-minds of the Rhine-daughters and terrifies us with the ruthless calm of Nature. ”

“ The faults make analysis exceptionally difficult, for they are no longer commonplace; indeed, the gravest dangers of modern Wagnerism arise from the fact that there is hardly any non-musical aspect in which Wagner's later work is not important enough to produce a school of essentially non-musical critics who have no notion how far Wagner's mature music transcends the rest of his thought, nor how often it rises where his philosophy falls. ”

“ Be this as it may, we may confidently date the purification of Wagner's music at the moment when he set to work on a story which carried him finally away from that world of stereotyped operatic passions into which he had already breathed so much disturbing life.
The disturbing life already appears in Der fliegende Holländer, at the point where Senta's father enters with the Dutchman, and Senta (who is already in an advanced state of Schwärmerei over the legend of the Flying Dutchman) stands rooted to the spot, comparing the living Dutchman with his portrait which hangs over the door. ”

“ His studies in the severer contrapuntal forms speedily gave him the greatest technical mastery of choral music attained since Bach; and more than one stray piece of church music, or movement from a mass or litany, written before he was fifteen, deserves to take rank as a true masterpiece of which the date is immaterial. At the age of fifteen we see a loss of freshness, especially in the numerous operas which show at its worst that hopeless condition of operatic art from which only Gluck’s most drastic reforms could rescue it. ”

“ The quiet expression of these startling ideas is more remarkable than their adoption; for smaller artists live on still more startling ideas; but most remarkable of all is the presentation of Parsifal, both in his foolishness and in the wisdom which comes to him through pity. The chief excuse for doubting whether Wagner's last work is really his greatest is that most of its dramatic subtleties are beyond musical expression, since they do not lead to definite conflicts and blendings of emotion. ”

“ Genuinely dramatic music, even if it seem as purely musical as Mozart's, must always be approached through its drama; and Wagner's masterpieces demand that we shall use this approach; but, as with Mozart, we must not stop on the threshold. ”

“ The peculiar art therein is that while the discords owe their intelligibility and softness to the smooth melodic lines by which in “resolving” they prove themselves but transient rainbow-hues on or below the surface, they owe their strangeness to the intense vividness with which at the moment of impact they suggest a mysteriously remote foreign key. ”

“ But we shall also find that, even if we could conceive the poetry to be a perfect expression of all that can be given in words and actions, the orchestra will express something greater; it will not run parallel with the poetry; the Leitmotif system will not be a collection of labels; the musical expression of singer and orchestra will not be a mere heightened resource of dramatic declamation. ”

“ But it is much more likely that Wagner would then have found his artistic difficulties too formidable to let the ideas descend to us from Walhalla and the Hall of the Grail at all. More than a modicum of rusticity is needed as a protection to a man who attempts such colossal reforms. This necessity had its consequences in the disquieting inequalities of Wagner's early work, and the undeniable egotism that embittered his fiery nature throughout his life ”

“ But Vienna was a hotbed of intrigue. Everything that could be done by jealous plotters to mar the composer’s success was done, and that so effectively that Mozart declared he would never bring out another opera in the city which treated him so meanly. Fortunately, Figaro, like Die Entführung, was repeated with brilliant success at Prague. Mozart went there to hear it, and received a commission to write an opera for the next season, with a fee of 100 ducats. Da Ponte furnished a libretto, founded on Tirso de Molina’s tale, El Convidado de piedra, and entitled Il Don Giovanni. ”

“ We must not forget that these boyish demerits belong to the work of a man of thirty-five whose claims and aspirations already purported to dwarf the whole record of the classics. And the defects are in all respects commonplace; they have no resemblance to that uncanny discomfort which often warns the wise critic that he is dealing with an immortal. ”

“ Many attempts have been made to improve the libretti of Euryanthe and Oberon, but none are quite successful, for Weber has taken a great artist's pains in making the best of bad material. All that can be said against Weber's achievements only reveals the more emphatically how noble and how complete in essentials was his success and his claim to immortality. His pianoforte works, while showing his helplessness in purely musical form, more than bear out his contemporary reputation as a very great pianoforte player. ”

“ Ethical and operatic points of view are similarly confused when it is asserted that the Flying Dutchman can be saved by a faithful woman, though it appears from the relations between Senta and Erik that so long as the woman is faithful to the Dutchman it does not matter that she jilts some one else. Erik would not have been a sufficiently pathetic operatic tenor if his claim on Senta had been less complete. In Tannhäuser and Lohengrin Wagner's intellectual power develops far more rapidly in the drama than in the music. ”

“ It is the business of an artistic intellect to grasp the artistic possibility of a world in which the “Utopia of gallantry” is at war with a full-blooded and incipiently moral humanity until the critical moment determines, not the breaking up of the artistic unity, but the right conclusion of the story. ”

“ The vast myth of the Ring is related in full several times in each of the three main dramas, with ruthless disregard for the otherwise magnificent dramatic effect of the whole; hosts of original dramatic and ethical ideas, with which Wagner's brain was even more fertile than his voluminous prose works would indicate, assert themselves at all points, only to be thwarted by repeated attempts to allegorize the philosophy of Schopenhauer; all efforts to read a consistent scheme, ethical or philosophical, into the result are doomed to failure ”

“ Wagner had hardly finished the score of Lohengrin before he was at work upon the poem of Der Ring des Nibelungen. And with this he suddenly became a mature artist. On a superficial view this is a paradox, for there are many more violations of probability and much graver faults of structure in the later works than in the earlier. Every critic could recognize the structural merits of the earlier plays, for their operatic conventionalities and abruptness of motive are always intelligible as stage devices. ”