Wagner by John F. Runciman

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WAGNER

BY JOHN F. RUNCIMAN

Bell's Miniature Series of Musicians

LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
[Second Edition] 1913

CONTENTS

LIFE OF WAGNER
HIS YOUTH (1813-1834)
MAGDEBURG, RIGA, PARIS (1834-1842)
DRESDEN (1842-1849)
ZURICH--PARIS (1849-1861)
MUNICH--TRIEBSCHEN (1864-1871)
BAYREUTH
WAGNER'S WORKS

LIFE OF WAGNER

HIS YOUTH 1813-1834.

The old world is very remote from us now, but it is worth while making a
small attempt to realize how it stood to Wagner. When he was born, in
1813, Bach had been dead only a little over sixty years; Mozart had been
dead about twenty years, and Haydn about ten; Beethoven was in the full
splendour of his tremendous powers; Weber and Schubert had still their
finest work to do. To grasp all that this means, let us consider our
relation to Mendelssohn. He died nearly sixty years ago; yet, whatever
we may think of him as a composer, we can scarcely call him
old-fashioned: he remains indisputably one of the moderns. Now, Wagner
can never have looked upon Bach as a modern. He spoke of him and his old
periwig almost as one might allude to an extinct race of animals. The
history of an art cannot be measured off in years: in some periods it
moves slowly, in others with startling rapidity. Since Mendelssohn's day
composers have sought rather to develop old resources and forms than to
find and create new ones, whereas in the sixty years that lie between
Bach's death and Wagner's birth the whole form and content, the very
stuff, of music was changed. In 1750 he would have been a daring and
extraordinarily sapient being who prophesied that within forty years
Mozart's G minor Symphony would be written. Between Bach and Wagner is a
great gulf set, a gulf bridged by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven; between ourselves and Mendelssohn there is no such chasm and
certainly no such list of mighty names. It was in the period of swift
transition from Bach's fugues to Beethoven's Choral Symphony that Wagner
was born, a period when musical Germany was in a state of tumultuous
ebullition. Later we shall see for how much this counted in the growth
of Wagner's genius. In the meantime it may be observed that in externals
the world of 1813 was not so far removed from the world of 1750. All the
men on whose work Wagner was fed and brought up had their roots in a
past that is now dead and buried. Had he been born a few years earlier
he might have worn a wig; the stock was not to depart for many a year to
come. A man might still, without causing remark, wear coats, waistcoats
and trousers of many hues. The old world was going fast, but it had not
gone. The fires of the French Revolution had cast strange lights amongst
the peoples and struck a deadly chill into the hearts of kings and
governors. Napoleon had shown what the will, brain and energy of a man
could do, and all the forces of reaction were gathering together to
crush him at Waterloo; the heads of men were seething with new ideas,
destined to bring about the strangest results a few years afterwards;
but the old order still prevailed, had not yet yielded to the new. Let
us remember how short a time had passed since Haydn retired, after a
life spent at a pig-tail German Court in the service of a princeling
whose position was about as lofty as that of an English country squire,
though it must be admitted that his tastes were a little more elevated.
Railways had not defiled the landscapes of Europe, nor gas robbed her
cities of all romance by night. The watchman blew his horn and called
the hour, and told all those abed that it rained or snowed. Most of the
blessings of civilization, which were to do so much for humanity and
have done so little, had yet to come. Fair fields and forests, fresh,
unpolluted rivers, cities of great-gabled houses, old-world narrow
streets and beautiful gardens, and, excepting in England, few noisy
smoking factories and foul chemical works--this was the Europe into
which Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813.

He was born in Leipzig. His father, a police official of some vague
sort, died when he was a few months old, and his mother went to Dresden
and married Ludwig Geyer, an actor. Richard, however, had no great luck
in the matter of fathers, for six years later Geyer also died. Dresden
was, as things were in those days--ninety years ago--a fairly musical
city; it had Weber at the opera and musicians of various degrees of
celebrity, deserved or undeserved. This, however, cannot have much
affected Wagner as a child. Rather, it is worth while glancing for a
moment at the artistic life which went on at his home. Whatever else it
may have been, it was not specially musical. Geyer was an actor,
Wagner's sister became an actress, and the atmosphere of the theatre
must have pervaded the family circle. This accounts somewhat for
Wagner's earlier artistic attempts. He showed none of the preternatural
musical precocity of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, who in their very
cradles were steeped in music. While his musical powers lay a long time
latent, his thoughts and energies were from babyhood directed to the
theatre. At the age of ten he probably knew a great deal more about the
drama of the day than he did of its music; probably he knew better when
a play was well represented than when a symphony was well played. Yet,
while his theatrical tendencies were encouraged, he must have been far
from being indifferent to music. He realized that Weber was a very great
man, and used to watch him passing in the street. This is significant,
for Weber remained to him throughout his life as a demigod; from _Die
Feen_, his boyish opera, until after _Lohengrin_ he used freely the
Weber phraseology and melodic contours, and when Weber's remains were
transported from London to be reinterred in Germany it was Wagner who
pronounced the inevitable discourse.

Still, the theatre was his first love, a love rather intensified than
otherwise when his mother removed back again to Leipzig and Richard was
sent to Nicolai Lyceum. How the family lived at this time is hard to
say, but probably it was done through the help of his sister and other
relatives. Anyhow, it was not till later that Wagner learnt the meaning
of the word poverty, and then it entered like iron into his soul; and in
the meantime he got a good general education. Leipzig was then hardly
more musical than Dresden. Bach had worked and died there; Mozart, not
so long before Wagner's birth, had visited it and got to know some of
Bach's motets by the astounding process of memorizing the separate parts
and putting them together mentally. It was far from being the busy, if
somewhat philistine, musical centre we know to-day. It had its
Gewandhaus concerts, but their state may be inferred from a report
written by Mendelssohn long afterwards, in which he spoke of dismissing
the incompetents of the band, who went away as men who had lost their
bread. 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.

Here Wagner took lessons on the pianoforte from Gottlieb Mueller, and
never learnt to play. Later he worked at counterpoint with Weinlig. But
at first the drama and not music continued to hold his attention. He
studied Greek plays and Shakespeare, and his highest ambition was to
achieve a stupendous drama which in the matter of sensations and murders
should eclipse anything yet done. But it dawned upon him that without
music his play could not make its full and proper effect, so into music
he went, and was at once caught in the impetuous torrent of the time. He
could not play, but he could read scores, and soon all Beethoven was as
well known to him as his mother's face. Accounts, more or less
trustworthy, are given of his singing and whistling the chamber works;
and it is an undoubted fact that he made a pianoforte transcription--one
would much like to see it--of the Choral Symphony. He tried his hand at
composition, and wrote some things that are without value; he sketched
one opera which came to nothing, and in 1833 completed another, _The
Fairies (_Die Feen_), which was not produced till more than fifty years
afterwards. The following year he was appointed conductor of the
Magdeburg Theatre, and with this appointment may be said to end his
apprenticeship to the trade he was to follow for some years.

MAGDEBURG, RIGA, PARIS, 1834-1842.

The trade he had chosen was that of operatic conductor. It was not until
eight years later that he made a serious debut as an operatic composer.
_The Forbidden Love (Das Liebesverbot)_ is entirely unknown to me; but
it may be doubted whether Wagner, with his head full of confused ideas,
and as yet no definite and distinctive plan or method, could at this
time produce a great work of art. He had to pass through his _Rienzi_
period first. But two points may be remarked. Already he had determined
to make his own librettos; and his early association with the theatre
enabled him to judge much better than any of the libretto-makers of that
or any other time as to what would prove effective on the stage. In the
second place, in the music of _The Fairies_, we see to what an extent he
had assimilated Weber; the themes are Weberesque in outline, and the
whole colour--colour of harmony and orchestration--is also Weberesque.
He went on planning and writing operas, but his daily bread-earning work
was rehearsing his company and conducting. The experience must have been
invaluable to him; but there is nothing especially remarkable to record
of the period. He himself left an account of the failure of _The
Forbidden Love_, which was produced in 1836. The company went to pieces
immediately after, and he was glad to find a position at Koenigsberg.
This, however, came to nothing, or next to nothing, owing to the
director's failure, and again Wagner had to remove, this time to Riga.

The Riga period is one of the most important of his life. He had married
Minna Planer, who is said to have been a very pretty woman and quite
incapable of understanding her husband and his artistic aspirations; and
he began, slowly and tentatively, to shape a course through life for
himself. He continued to gain experience in the production of other
composers' operas; he studied incessantly, and at last he hit upon the
idea of writing a grand opera in the Meyerbeer style, and going to Paris
with it, in the hope of getting it produced at the opera there. He was
harassed by creditors; and with the daring and energy characteristic of
the man whom Fate had destined to build Bayreuth, he determined to try
by one bold stroke to retrieve his fortunes. He was still a young man
when he went to Riga in 1837, but he was in such a feverish hurry for
fame and glory, not to say money, that no obstacle was allowed to stand
in his way. During the last few years he had composed a number of
occasional things--which we need not stop to consider--but nothing on
the sumptuous scale of _Rienzi_. Heroic personages, dramatic or
melodramatic situations, opportunities for huge gaily-dressed crowds and
scenic display--these were what the young man was after; and in the
story of Rienzi he found plenty to fire an imagination always prone to
flame and flare at the slightest suggestion. The libretto was written;
the music was partly written; and in 1839 Wagner took one of the most
momentous steps in all his stormy career--he sailed from Riga,
accompanied by his wife and dog, with the intention of reaching Paris by
way of London.

The voyage itself bore noteworthy artistic fruit; for within three years
the roar and scream of the tempest, the smashing of heavy seas upon the
ship's sides and deck, and (I dare say) the captain's curses, were to be
translated into tone and take artistic shape in _The Flying Dutchman_.
London reached in safety, Wagner stayed first near the Tower and then in
Soho. He lost his dog, found it, and crossed the Channel to Boulogne.
Here he met Meyerbeer, who gave him an introduction to a bankrupt
theatre, the Renaissance, in Paris. In Paris he met many well-known
people, amongst them Heine, who clasped his hands and looked heavenwards
when he heard of a penniless German coming to such a city to seek his
fortune, with nothing save an unfinished opera and an introduction from
Meyerbeer. The late Sir Charles Halle met him at this time, and left
some amusing reminiscences in his Autobiography. Heine's view of the
situation was speedily justified. Not by any efforts could _Rienzi_ be
unloaded upon an opera director, and Wagner began to experience the
bitterness of poverty. To earn a bare living, he thought himself lucky
to be entrusted with the making of transcriptions of popular airs and
the writing of articles for the press.

The three years' stay in Paris did Wagner no particular harm that I
have been able to trace beyond implanting in him that deadly fear of
being hard up which haunted him all his life thenceforward, and is an
offensive and yet pathetic feature of his letters to all his friends. On
the other hand, he heard opera performances on a scale outside and
beyond his past experience; he heard Habenek direct the Choral Symphony
at the Conservatoire, and learnt much, not only about that mighty
work--which he must already have known by heart--but also of the art of
conducting; he finished _Rienzi_ and sent it off to Dresden, where it
was accepted; and he planned and completed _The Flying Dutchman_, which
was accepted for production at Berlin. He had also written the _Faust_
Overture in its first form. And probably also he had acquired that
almost fatal fluency of the pen which was to make so many enemies for
him afterwards, and yet to lead to the realization of his life's dream
in Bayreuth. A bare list of the names of the friends and opponents he
gained at this time would take up more space than is available in so
brief a study as this, and I must pass over many interesting incidents.
The most important is that connected with _The Flying Dutchman_
libretto. Wagner submitted his sketches to the opera, where they were
placed at the disposal of another composer, and he was offered (I think)
L20 or nothing for them. He took the L20, and then, his artistic
conscience happily triumphing over his commercial conscience, he used
the money to live upon until he had completed his own opera on the same
subject. The French _Dutchman_ (music by Dietsch) was produced. It
failed and is forgotten. How Wagner's fared all the world knows.

_Rienzi_ was now getting ready at Dresden, and thither Wagner went in
April, 1842. The opera was produced in October, with enormous success,
and the name of Wagner became famous throughout Germany. Nowadays so
much of the music appears so very cheap and tawdry that it is only after
a severe mental struggle one can understand the enthusiasm the work
aroused. We must put away all thought of the later Wagner; we must
forget that when _Rienzi_ was produced the _Dutchman_ had already been
some time finished. We must remember the sort of music the Dresden
public had suffered under: dull, workmanlike operas, without an original
touch, without the breath of life in them--in a word, kapellmeister
music. The pomp and outward show of that remarkable heavy-weight
Spontini must have come as a relief after the Dresden opera-goer's
ordinary fare; but Spontini, though he lays on his colours with a
barbarian regal hand, never sparkles; he is altogether lacking in
vivacity, elasticity; he had no gift for gracious or piquant melody. Of
the operas of Marschner much the same must be said; in them we find the
tricks of the Romantics without the best Romantics' sense of beauty, all
the horrors of Weber without Weber's passion. Black woods, supernatural
fireworks by night, enchantments, vampires, guns that went off by
themselves--all this jugglery was fast being done to death, and what at
first had been a nerve-shaking novelty was becoming a mere tedium. In
opera _The Castle of Otranto_ was played out. Into this region of
inspissated gloom Richard burst with _Rienzi_, the brilliant, the
fearless, the tragic hero; all was blazing light and colour; it
sparkled; if the champagne of it was of an inferior quality--often,
indeed, poor goose-berry--yet it bubbled and frothed gaily. Besides,
there were great sweeping tunes--such as the hackneyed prayer--and
plenty of really dainty, if very Weberesque, melodies. All that
Meyerbeer had to teach was there, and the stolid Dresdener gazed with
delight on the brilliance of the latest Parisian musical fashions. So
Wagner gained his first success, and deserved it. It was not the Paris
success he had dreamed of a few years before, when fame, money and all
worldly things desirable were to be his. But it meant bread-and-butter
without drudging for the publishers or the press; it meant the means of
living while he wrote masterpieces which were to set half the world
against him and eventually make him immeasurably the greatest musical
figure of his time. He was appointed Court kapellmeister, and there he
remained until 1849. Before proceeding to this next period of seven
years we must consider _The Flying Dutchman_.

This is his first music drama. He called it a romantic opera; but here
for the first time the drama grows out of an idea and the music out of
the drama. The thing suggested itself to him during that stormy trip to
London: the roaring waves, the whistling of the salt winds, the
loneliness of the bitter North Sea--these set his imagination aworking
on the old legend of the mariner doomed to sail the ocean until the Day
of Judgment. In this there was colour and atmosphere enough, but no
drama. The dramatic idea he took from Heine's sentimental version. In
this the Dutchman's lot is softened and mitigated by a possibility of
salvation. He can go ashore once in seven years, and if he can find a
maiden who will love him and be faithful unto death he will be released
from the necessity to wander. That is to say, his chances of redemption
depend upon constancy of some unknown young lady. All the Dutchman has
to do is to find her, make himself agreeable, and trust to luck. A more
childish notion never occurred to an intellectual man, nor a more
selfish one. The lady might have done nothing wrong; she was to be
punished for loving not wisely but too well; and there is nothing in the
old legend or in the Wagner-Heine form of it to show the Dutchman to
have been a deserving person. Yet, on the other hand, Wagner, with still
vivid memories of the agonies he had endured during his voyage, may have
thought the punishment excessive for a momentary loss of temper in
trying circumstances and a passing swear-word; and the girl was to find
the fullest joy her nature was capable of in sacrificing herself. But
there is no fundamental verity inherent in the idea: the Dutchman's
salvation might as well depend on a throw of dice; and all this early
nineteenth-century romantic sentimentalism, with one of its main
notions--that a woman cannot be better occupied than in "saving" a
man--this, grafted on to the stern, relentless old story, makes a
compound that is always unreal and sometimes ludicrous. But it gave
Wagner three opportunities: of painting the stormy sea, of depicting the
hopeless misery of the Dutchman Vanderdecken, and of expressing in music
woman's most passionate and unselfish love.

No one need be afraid of "not understanding" the _Dutchman_. The story
is simplicity itself. Wagner knew the theatre and every stagey device by
heart, and in none of his dramas is there anything half so hard to
follow as the plots, say, of _Rigoletto_ and _Aida_ and most Italian
operas. Nor, again, does the music present any difficulty. In spite of
the use of the _leit-motif_ which I shall discuss presently, the
separate numbers are as clean cut as those of any Mozart opera. He joins
his different items, it is true, but it is impossible to avoid knowing
where one leaves off and the next begins. The play opens with the raging
tempest on a rocky coast; the ship of one Daland is driven there, and
Daland goes ashore to see if there is any likelihood of the storm
ceasing--a proceeding at which any land-lubber, not to mention
experienced tars, might well laugh. Finding himself far from his port
and no probability of the wind and sea falling immediately, he goes on
board again to take a little rest, and descends to his cabin, leaving a
sailor as watchman, to see, I suppose, that the vessel does not batter
itself to pieces on the cliffs. The watchman sings himself to sleep with
a most beautiful ballad. The sky darkens, the sea boils more furiously
than ever, and the phantom ship arrives. With a prodigious uproar her
anchor takes ground--another evidence of Wagner's seamanship--and
Vanderdecken comes ashore in his turn. His seven years are up; now he
has another chance of finding the faithful maiden. The opening of this
scene is as fine as anything Wagner ever wrote; the later portions are
fine, too, but quite old-fashioned. The storm ceases, and Vanderdecken
having expressed his hopes and fears, Daland comes on deck, enters into
conversation with the stranger, and in a few minutes it is arranged that
the two shall go together, and if the Dutchman can win Senta's heart,
she shall be his.

Now, it will be noted here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey
and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain,
he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. 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. After a
conventional spinning chorus, Senta sings the ballad of the Flying
Dutchman, whose picture hangs on the wall, and ends up with an ecstatic
appeal to Heaven, Fate--everyone in general and no one in particular--to
give her the chance of saving him. Daland and Vanderdecken enter, and
the drama begins to approach its climax. The spinning chorus is pretty;
but nothing in the act--nor, in fact, in the whole opera--matches the
glorious passage where Senta takes her fate in both hands and avows her
resolution to follow the Dutchman to death or whatever else may befall.

The essence of the last act may be given in a few words. It begins as if
Wagner had felt that he had not made sufficient use of the uncanny
effects to be got out of the phantom ship, and we get a long string of
choruses not necessary to the drama. At the last Vanderdecken, he, too,
rises to the full height of his character, and, determining that he will
not sacrifice Senta, renounces her and goes on board his boat to sail
off. But Senta throws herself into the water after him; the phantom
vessel falls to pieces, and the glorified forms of the two are seen
mounting towards the sky. But Vanderdecken's sudden resolve has the air
of an afterthought, and counts for little beside the fact that
throughout the drama the sacrifice of Senta has been insisted on as the
price of his redemption. It is the Senta theme, also, that is played as
the pair mount.

The _Dutchman_ must stand amongst Wagner's great works. 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. When the
opera was produced the effect on the audience was certainly
overwhelming, almost stupefying. The _Dutchman_ had been accepted at
Berlin on Meyerbeer's recommendation, but that recommendation Wagner
probably thought of no great value, and after the success of _Rienzi_ he
determined to have it also played at Dresden, and the first performance
took place at the beginning of 1843. The noise of the storm rolled far
outside the theatre, and from that time forward Wagner and his music
were subjects of discussion throughout Europe. His originality was not
doubted; the din of his orchestra was no louder than that of Spontini's
or Marschner's, but the harmony seemed bold to those who had never known
Bach and had already forgotten Beethoven, and people were puzzled by the
lack of full-stops at the end of each number. Things that seem
old-fashioned to us now were then new, while Wagner's own genuine
inventions could at first hardly be grasped. However, Wagner had no
reason to be dissatisfied. He had already his admirers, he was secure in
an important post, and he could cheerfully set forth in search of fresh
woods and pastures new, or, to use a more appropriate figure, fresh seas
to cross in search of new continents.

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