Wagnerian

“ Wagner at that time was an entirely new experience to Cornelius, and after the concert, while speaking to Liszt of the beauty of Wagner's music, he instanced this bright and pretty melody, emphasizing its beauty as though it were the special object of his admiration. We boys, while we recognized the beauty of the bridal march and its fitness for the place in which it occurs, were apt to coddle ourselves upon our superior knowledge of Wagner, and would have saved our enthusiasm for the more completed and distinctly Wagnerian characteristics. ”

“ What is it in our age that Wagner's art expresses? That brutality and most delicate weakness which exist side by side, that running wild of natural instincts, and nervous hyper-sensitiveness, that thirst for emotion which arises from fatigue and the love of fatigue.—All this is understood by the Wagnerites.
42. Stupefaction or intoxication constitute all Wagnerian art. On the other hand I could mention instances in which Wagner stands higher, in which real joy flows from him. ”

“ In Bach, again, will be found the basis both of Wagner's realism and of the Wagnerian system of allusive "motives." The towering greatness of Wagner is nowhere more strikingly shown than in the failure of all his successors to handle his form—or, indeed, any other—with anything like the same power, freedom and consistency; both the opera and symphonic music are waiting for someone big enough to build afresh upon the foundations Wagner has laid, and with the materials he has left. ”

“ There have been many complaints that the singing of Wagner opera ruins the voice, but to contradict this statement we have only to look at the careers of the greatest Wagnerian singers,—Materna, Lehmann, Brandt, Niemann, Winkelmann, Vogl, the De Reszkes, Nordica, Brema, and others who have sung the music of Wagner for years without any unlooked-for deterioration. ”

“ The lyric stage was the theatre of his career, and in the works prepared for it he expended the force of his intellect, and developed the ideas that proclaim him an epoch-maker. Let us, therefore, turn our attention to the Wagner theories, and their practical exposition in the so-called “music of the future,” which has become so intensely that of the present. What is the Wagnerian theory of the opera? ”

“ He has applied to these cold spots musical forms taken from parts of the work that have the warmth of inspiration, forms created by a burst of direct inspiration, which he has adapted by clever though up-hill musical work, better calculated to rejoice the eye of the expert who reads than to touch or charm those who hear it. The Wagnerian ideologies are the wasted part of Wagner's literary invention. They have no part in the pulsing life of his music. ”

“ Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more “dramatic” effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of decadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism, “self-denial”. Neither taste, voices, nor gifts, Wagner's stage requires but one thing: Germans!... The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs.... ”

“ If I depart here for a brief space from my announced purpose not to analyze the music in the manner of the Wagnerian commentators, it will be only because the themes of the prelude are the most pregnant of those employed in the working out of the drama, because their specific significance in the purpose of the composer is plainly set forth by their association with scenes and words, and because they are most admirably fitted by structure and emotional content to express the things attributed to them. ”

“ Wagner waged warfare, not against the Italian opera, not against operatic composers, but against impostors and sophists, and while trampling upon the serpent in his own path he was as little likely to remain untouched by the good-natured lovableness of the Italian as he was to slight the high intelligence, the artistic receptiveness and thoroughness of the French. ”

“ Even in the art which is necessarily confined within a room the artist's mind seems to be wandering outside, and the portrait-painter will admit through some open window or crevice a breeze from field and forest beyond. In the same spirit the musicians, and particularly the most German of all, Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, delight in the rhythms of the popular dance. Of all modern composers Wagner was the most volksthümlich; the roots of his art are in the Volks-Sage, the Volkslied, and the dance, and the masses have always been true to him. ”

“ It is easy to hear too much of Wagner, and I think there can be no question that his works are made far too common in Germany. Wagner's characters are not those of everyday life; they are on a higher and more ideal moral level than ordinary men and women; they are semi-divine. Nor are his works for everyday hearing, but only for high festivals when we can enjoy them at our leisure with our minds prepared. For our daily bread we have other composers as great as he, and more nutritious and wholesome for continued diet--Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and how many more of the highest rank! ”

“ But it cannot be too forcibly urged that if we confine our study of Wagner to the forms and names of the phrases out of which he constructs his musical fabric, we shall at the last have enriched our minds with a thematic catalogue and—nothing else. We shall remain guiltless of knowledge unless we learn something of the nature of those phrases by noting the attributes which lend them propriety and fitness, and can recognize, measurably at least, the reasons for their introduction and development. Those attributes give character and mood to the music constructed out of the phrases. ”

“ I only ask of those who think there is to read Wagner's own published writings, and to judge from them, not from what is said about him. I do not mean to say that he did not believe with the most intense conviction in his own idea of a new German dramatic art, uniting the separate arts in itself, and did not proclaim it as a thing of the first national importance; every serious reformer believes in himself in that sense. ”

“ Wagner's theory is essentially different and is peculiarly his own. With him the drama denotes, not the text-book, but the actual performance on the stage, in which there are three co-ordinate elements, acting, words, and music, not one of which is subordinate to the others, but all of equal value, expressing different sides of the dramatic subject-matter. Of the inability of words in themselves to inspire music, he is very emphatic: "No verses of a poet, not even of a Goethe or a Schiller, can determine the music. ”

“ In the thirty years which have elapsed since Wagner died, many great composers have come to the front, all of whom without exception show in their external physiognomy the impress of his personality. How many have inherited his spirit? How many have been actuated by his sincerity, his fearless resolve to follow his inspiration from on high at every cost, regardless of all personal advantage? Future ages alone can answer this question. The German nation is at the present day passing through a severe trial of its inner strength. ”

“ It should always be borne in mind that no matter how numerous the hand-books—which a witty German critic called "musical Baedeckers"—if one wishes to know Wagner's purpose in the use of a typical phrase or melody, he need take no one's word for it except Wagner's. He can turn to the score and trace it out himself, learning its meaning from the words and situations with which it is associated. ”

“ The most tiresome quality in Wagner's literary style is that he scarcely ever comes to the point. Whenever he asserts a rule in clear and unmistakable language, it is either brought in almost parenthetically amidst a mass of rhetoric, or--as, for example, in the dictum of music being a means to the dramatic end--he treats it with scorn, as something too obvious to be stated. ”

“ The ultimate question concerning the correctness or effectiveness of Wagner's system must be answered along with the question, Does the music touch the emotions, quicken the fancy, fire the imagination? If it does this we may, to a great extent, if we wish, get along without the intellectual process of reflection and comparison conditioned upon a recognition of his themes and their uses. ”

“ Wagner's aim was not, as might appear on a superficial view, to prolong a rhapsodical love-scene, but a dramatic one, to bring the two characters, each being such as he had conceived it, to a full understanding of each other before they could be united in death.
An introductory passage made of the love-motive simultaneously in direct and contrary movement--the union of opposites--leads to a duet which opens with the harmonies of No. 4 (K.A. 117) . Its character throughout is triumphant joy, well supported by a running violin accompaniment which continues to the end. ”

“ Some sort of Introduction appears to me a necessary preliminary to the study of Wagner, not because his works are artificial or unnatural, but because our minds have become perverted by the highly artificial products of the Italian and French opera, so that a work of Wagner at first appears to us very much as Paradise Lost or a tragedy of Sophokles would appear to a person who had never read anything but light French novels. He must entirely change the attitude of his mind, and the change, although it be a return to nature and truth, is not easy to make. ”

“ For years and years vain attempts have been made to get away from Richard Wagner. Creative musicians have long felt that Wagner's great and never-to-be-forgotten art no longer suited modern times"! One feels inclined to ask whether the writer looks upon musical composers as racehorses to be pitted against each other, or as religious creeds which must destroy their rivals in order to live. ”

“ The first act of the drama treats of the election of the hero, the guileless simpleton of the talismanic oracle. In the second stage of the action the hero is proved by temptation. All the elements here are derived from legendary stories, but in their combination Wagner has proceeded with remarkable dramatic power, freedom, and ingenuity. ”

“ Wagner, by ignoring the question which plays so important a role in all the other versions, and making the healing of Amfortas depend upon a touch of the sacred lance, has gained a theatrical effect at the expense of a profoundly beautiful ethical principle. He has also laid himself open to a charge of inconsistency which, strangely enough, seems to have escaped the attention of his many inimical critics in Germany. ”

“ One can understand the attraction it must have exercised, apart from all philosophic and symbolic aims, on a composer of operas the bent of whose mind led him in the direction of spectacular opera. For such is indeed the trend of Wagner's mind, at any rate such is one of the faculties that constituted his genius; he has a passionate taste for theatrical decoration and the composition of scenic effects; he adores their fascination, and he has a wonderful aptitude for their processes and artifices. ”

“ The highest ideals of German opera culminated in the music dramas of Wagner. As musician, poet, dramatist, and master of scenic effects and theatrical requirements, he grew to be the champion of national art, a self-appointed reformer not alone of opera as an end to itself, but as a means whereby the conditions of social life might be inspired and uplifted. And the remarkable concentration of his musical thought, his rare gifts as a poet, and his noble histrionic conceptions proved him worthy of the task. ”

“ Until recently, there were still many people who thought of Wagner as a youthful and eccentric enthusiast, all afire with misdirected genius, a mere carpet-knight on the sublime battle-field of art, a beginner just sowing his wild-oats in works like "Lohengrin," "Tristan and Iseult," or the "Rheingold." It is a revelation full of suggestive value for these to realize that he is a musical thinker, ripe with sixty years of labor and experience; that he represents the rarest and choicest fruits of modern culture, not only as musician, but as poet and philosopher ”

“ With Frenchmen the musical rendering of things is subtle, sober, dainty, vibrant, lively, stripped and free from excess of matter, full of rhythm. With Wagner it is startling, opulent, sumptuous, streaming with colour; it makes far less call on rhythmic invention (which is not Wagner's strong point) than on forms, on harmony and instrumentation. But its spirit is not German. Wagner, who was so German, so pitiably German in his ideas and literary lubrucations is very little of a German at root in his musical genius, nor am I the first person to have noticed the fact. ”

“ Other but comparatively unimportant features in the Wagner music drama are, e.g., the use of the Leitmotiv, or leading motive—found occasionally in Gluck, Mozart, Weber, etc., but here first adopted with a definite purpose, and the contention for mythological rather than historical subjects—now largely admitted. But all Wagner's principles would have been useless without the energy and perseverance which directed his work, the loving study which stored his memory with all the great works of his predecessors, and, above all, the genius which commands the admiration of the musical world. ”