Richard Wagner

With the exception of Die Feen, nothing composed by Wagner prior to Rienzi calls for serious attention, nor would receive any attention whatever were not the author's name Wagner. He himself did not distress his soul about the fate of his early works: he knew too well their value; but when a Wagner cult came into existence these things of small importance were acclaimed, one by one as they came to light, as things of, at any rate, the highest promise. Not even that can justly be claimed for them.

Die Feen has a certain atmosphere and a set artistic purpose which may, in the light of his subsequent achievements, be taken as an indication, a small hint, that the subsequent achievements were possible. So much, but not more, may be conceded. Das Liebesverbot is known to me only from descriptions and brief quotations, but these suffice to show that here is not the true Wagner. Of the orchestral music-the overtures and the symphonies-I have heard oftenest and studied most closely the C major Symphony. Let us take it first.

Already I have referred to the absence of what, in the popular acceptation of the word, might be called the "romantic" element in Wagner's daily life during this period, and the symphony supports my suggested explanation. In the letters, in accounts written by Dorn and others, we find fire, enthusiasm, even a good deal of blatherskite and wild vapouring, but scarcely a hint of "poetry," of the special poetical sense, of the poet's outlook on life: and in his music he was chiefly occupied in mastering the technical side of the craft, assimilating, and at the same time emancipating himself from, the lessons with Weinlig, and, absorbed in the task, simply letting romance, poetry, imagination, fancy and the rest go hang; his practical outward life was devoted to talking what he thought was politics and drinking lager.

Though the symphony is worth looking at because it shows how far Wagner had then got, the general interest in it has for thirty years been its history. It has led to a deal of unnecessarily acrimonious and barren dispute. Wagner's disagreeable diatribes aimed subsequently at the Jews were, and are, in part attributed to Mendelssohn's behaviour regarding it. It was sent to Mendelssohn; and that industrious gentleman never referred to the subject. Wherefore we are asked two things-to contemn the Jew and accept the symphony as a manifestation of tremendous genius. Possibly Mendelssohn never clapped eyes on the symphony. Had he done so, one would have expected him to pay Wagner a superficial, insincere compliment about the score, and imply that something might be done, etc. We have Richard's written word for it that Mendelssohn never referred to Wagner's work. All the same, what I believe may have been the case, and what Wagner most certainly would not have believed to be the case, is that Mendelssohn saw it, and saw nothing in it, and put it on one side, and totally forgot it. The symphony was lost for long years; but some one discovered the parts somewhere, and a score was made, and at the very end of his life Wagner directed a private performance of it. He dismissed it with a humorously disparaging remark, and we need have heard no more about it, had not sundry gentlemen who refuse to accept any Wagner save the inspired prophet of their own imaginings insisted on having it performed in public.

I have, I say, heard it fairly often and beg to testify that it is a miracle of dullness. The themes are not good of their sort, the sort being, as he said, the sort that are useful for contrapuntal working. That working is coldly mechanical, and is not distinguished either by lightness or by sureness of touch. A dozen of Mendelssohn's pupils could have done as well or better. In the andante their is neither grace nor feeling: the music does not flow spontaneously, but is got along by a clockwork tick-tick rhythm. The best stuff is in the finale. Here we find at least sturdiness if not much character.

This criticism of his boyish work is not a disparagement of Wagner: one might as well, indeed, disparage Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or the sun and all the stars in heaven. The symphony tells us, as plainly as words could tell, two things. First, that as far as craftsmanship is concerned he fell between two stools: had his aim been lower, it would have been also less confused, and the result would have turned out better. That is, had he thought only of composing a well-constructed symphony, with skilful, easy-running counterpoint, he might have produced a more obviously clever if more superficial work. That aim was missed by the fact that the Wagner who knew Beethoven by heart was not at all content to achieve mere cleverness: he, too, wanted to write a great symphony. But that ambition also was vague and robbed of its force by his instinctive struggle to acquire a thorough technique. So he showed himself neither a great poet-composer nor a contrapuntal adept. The second fact so plainly stated in the symphony is that he had not discovered what was to be the real driving force of his invention throughout his creative career-the inspiration of a dramatic or pictorial (not poetic) idea. The poetic idea is the inspiration of the composer of pure, "absolute," music-the poetic idea which is interpenetrated by the musical idea, the musical idea that is interpenetrated by the poetic idea, the two being one and indivisible. As this book proceeds the reader will see how, before Wagner could shape fine music at all, he needed the pictorial-dramatic-musical idea (if so cumbrous a phrase may be allowed). From the very first he never succeeded in the attempt to compose pure music of notable quality. As years went on he tried again and again, but only such things as the Kaisermarsch, the Huldigungsmarsch and the Siegfried Idyll are of any value, and these, we may note, were meant to be played in a quasi-theatrical environment. Immense crowds, flags, waving banners, uniforms, flashing swords, snorting chargers and so on set Wagner to work on the first as surely as the picture of the Hall of Song suggested the march in Tannh?user; the same is the case with the second; the Siegfried Idyll, of course, was written for performance at the bedroom door or window of Madame Cosima on that lady's birthday. A distinct picture was in the composer's mind's-eye; and besides, the themes came out of an opera already composed.

Die Feen-The Fairies-is based on a version of the child's tale of Beauty and the Beast, Gozzi's La Donna Serpente. In Gozzi's form a lady is changed to a serpent: the handsome and valiant prince comes along and all ends well. Wagner had not then dreamed of the Nibelung's Ring with its menagerie of nymphs who could sing under water, giants, dwarfs, bears, frogs, crocodiles, "wurms," dragons and birds with the gift of articulate speech; and he would have nothing to do with the serpent. The lady must be changed into a stone. Further, Wagner had now got hold of the notion that haunted him for the rest of his life-a notion he exploited for all it was worth, and a good deal more-the notion that woman's function on the globe is to "redeem" man. So the prince changes the lady back from a stone to a woman, and then, like Goldsmith's dog, to gain some private ends, goes mad. The lady is equal to the occasion: she promptly redeems him-that is, cures him-and all ends well.

Here, at worst, we have the picture, or series of pictures, demanded by Wagner's genius; here also is a dramatic idea of sorts. His imagination immediately flamed. The music is not like that of the symphony, dry and barren wood: on the contrary, it contains many passages of rare beauty and feeling. There is little of the fairy-like in it. To Wagner's criticism of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream overture, that here we had not fairies but gnats, one might retort that in his own opera we have not fairies but baby elephants at play. But throughout there is a quality almost or quite new in music, a feeling for light, a strange, uncanny light. It is worth noticing this, because it is just this sense of all-pervading light which marks off Lohengrin from all preceding operas. The hint came, it goes without saying, from Weber; but there is a vast difference between the unearthly light of Weber and the fresh sweetness of Lohengrin, and here, in his first boyish exploit, we find Wagner trying to utilise in his own way Weber's hint.

For a boy of twenty the opera is wonderfully well planned. Whether, had it been written by Marschner, we should take the trouble to look at it twice is a question I contentedly leave others to solve. But, as it is by Wagner, we do take the trouble to look at it many times, and the main thing we learn is that from the beginning the composer could write his best music for the theatre, while for the concert-room he could only grind out sluggish counterpoint. In addition we may see that it is a work of much nobler artistic aim than Rienzi. Preposterous as is the idea of a woman sacrificing herself to "save" a man, it is an idea, and it stirred the depths of young Wagner's emotional nature. In Rienzi, as we shall see in a later chapter, there is no idea of any sort; that opera did not spring from his heart, nor, properly speaking, from his head, but simply and wholly from a hungry desire for fame and fortune.

The clumsiness of the music is due to several causes. He modelled it, he says, upon three composers, Beethoven, Spontini and Marschner-the second and third being by far the more potent influences. Now, gracefulness is not a characteristic of either of them. Then we must consider that Wagner was not yet one-tenth fully grown, and it is the hobbledehoy who is so heavy on his feet, not the athlete with all his muscles completely trained: Wagner needed years of training before he gained the sure, light touch of Lohengrin and the Mastersingers. His very deadly earnestness over the "lesson" of his opera and his desire to express his feeling accurately and logically led to his overweighting small melodies with ponderous harmonies. The orchestration of the day was heavy. The art of Mozart had been forgotten; Weber scored cumbrously-as was inevitable; Spontini and Marschner scored cumbrously also, partly because they could not help it, partly because they wanted to fill the theatre with sound. Wagner naturally followed them. But it may be noted that the orchestration of The Fairies is not so widely different from that of the Faust overture composed a short while afterwards. A sense of the contrasts to be obtained by alternating word-wind and strings is peculiarly his. Mozart and Beethoven had alternated them, but on the simple plan adopted in their violin sonatas: in those sonatas the violin is given a passage and the piano accompanies, then the same passage is given to the piano and the violin accompanies; in all the symphonies of Mozart, and the earlier ones of Beethoven, virtually the same plan is followed, strings and wind standing for violin and piano. Wagner from the first discarded this mechanical notion; wind and strings are played off against one another, but there are none of these mechanical alternations, one holding the bat while the other has the ball. On the whole The Fairies is very beautifully scored.

* * *

A new opera-house had been a-building in Dresden, a royal court theatre; and a chance in Paris being denied to Rienzi, Wagner, staggering along under the burden of his crushing woes, thought perhaps his grand spectacular work would be the very thing to suit the Dresdeners about the time of the opening. True, there remained three acts to compose and orchestrate-but what was that to a Richard Wagner! Only one other composer has achieved such astounding feats.

Mozart, amidst multitudinous worries, sat down and wrote his three glorious symphonies "as easily as most men write a letter." Wagner was born to achieve the impossible: he had already done it in getting to Paris at all; and now, as a sheer speculation, on the very off-chance of a Saxon court theatre accepting a work by a Saxon composer, harassed by creditors, despondent under repeated disappointments, drudging hours a day at hack-labour, he went to work and composed and instrumentated the last three acts of the most brilliant opera that had been written up to that date-1841. On February 15 of that year he began; on November 19 he ruled the last double-bar and wrote finis. That done, he dispatched the complete score and a copy of the words to Dresden, with a letter to von Lüttichau, the intendant. Again the delays seemed interminable; his letters, especially those to Fischer and Heine, are packed with inquiries about the fate of his opera-he could get no answer at all for a long while, and after it was definitely accepted the usual troubles occurred through the whims and caprices of singers. Even his idol and divinity, Schr?der-Devrient, great artist though she was on the stage, played the very prima donna-which is about as bad a thing as can be said of any woman-off the stage so far as Rienzi was concerned. Being a prima donna first and an artist afterwards, she thought nothing of dashing Wagner's hopes by expressing a desire to appear in some other opera before Rienzi; and as the delay meant a prolongation of the actual misery and possible starvation at Paris we can picture Wagner's impotent rage and despair.

On October 14, 1841, we find him writing to Heine:

"... Herr von Lüttichau has definitely consented to my opera being put on the stage after Reissiger's. That is all very good; but how many questions does not this answer suggest! For instance: does the general management propose to place my work upon the stage with the outlay indispensable to a brilliant effect? On this point W--writes me: 'The general management will leave nothing undone to equip your opera in a suitable manner.' You will understand how terribly terse this seems to me! I am not greatly surprised at receiving no letter from Reissiger since last March: he has worked for me-that is the best and most honourable answer; besides, it would be foolish on my part to expect that Reissiger, now that his own opera must be fairly engrossing his attention, should be much occupied about me. But what alarms me is the absolute silence of our Devrient! I think I have already written a dozen letters to her: I am not exactly surprised at her sending me no single line in answer, because one knows how terrible a thing letter-writing is to many people. But that she has never even indirectly sent me a word, nor let me have a hint, makes me downright uneasy. Good heavens! So much depends upon her-it would really be a mere humanity on her part if she, perhaps through her lady's-maid, had sent me a message to this effect: 'Make your mind easy! I am taking an interest in your affair!'-certainly everything which I have learnt here and there about her behaviour with regard to me gives me every reason to feel comfortable; for instance, she is said to have declared some while ago in Leipzig that she hoped my opera would be brought out in Dresden. This token would have fully quieted me, if it had only come directly to my ears or eyes: hearsay, however, is far too uncertain a thing.

"A month ago I likewise wrote to her, and earnestly begged her to let me have only a line with the name of the lady-singer whom she would like to be cast for the part of Irene, so that I might make a formal list to propose to the management. No answer! Oh, my best Herr Heine, if your kindness would only allow you a few words in which to make me acquainted with the intentions of the adored Devrient! Does she really wish to sing in my opera?-that is the question.

"Good heavens! only to know how all this stands! I have written to Herr Tichatschek, and commended myself to his amiability: shall I be able to count on this gentleman?"

Again, on January 4 of the following year:

"Should it really come to this, that my opera must be laid aside for the whole winter, I should indeed be inconsolable; and he or she who might be to blame for this delay would have incurred a grave responsibility-perhaps for causing me untold sufferings. I cannot write to Madame Devrient; for that I am much too excited, and I know too well that my letters make no impression upon her. But if I have not yet worn out your friendly feeling toward me, and if I can be assured that you rely upon my fullest gratitude, I earnestly beg of you to go to Madame Devrient. Tell her of my astonishment at the news that it is she who hinders my opera from at length appearing; and that I am in the highest degree disturbed to learn that she by no means feels that pleasure in and sympathy for my work which so many flattering assurances had led me to believe. Give her an inkling of the misery she would prepare for me, if (as I have now good reason to fear) a performance of Rienzi could not after all take place this year! But what am I saying? Though you may be the most approved friend of Madame Devrient, even you will not have much influence over her. Therefore, I do not know at all what I should say, what I must do, or what advise! My one great hope I place in you, most valued friend! I have written to Herr von Lüttichau, and herewith turn to Reissiger. If Devrient cannot give up her Armida, if she cannot afford me the sacrifice of a whim, then all my welfare rests only on the promptness with which this opera is brought out, and my own is taken up. I therefore fervently pray Reissiger to hurry: and you-I beseech you-do the same with Devrient. By punctuality and diligence everything can still be set right for me; for the chief thing is-only that my opera should come out before Easter (that is to say, in the first half of March). I am truly quite exhausted! Alas! I meet with so little that is encouraging, that it would really be of untold import to me if, at least in Dresden, things should go according to my wish!"

These excerpts afford some notion of the struggles and disappointments of this time-struggles that were to be repeated when, more than twenty years later, Tristan and the Mastersingers were produced in Munich. More need not be quoted, for the story is always the same-delays caused by intrigues and the whims and caprice of singers, and the indifference of inartistic directors.

It should be said that Meyerbeer seems, for the only time, really to have helped Wagner in getting Rienzi accepted, for a letter of his to von Lüttichau recommending the opera, has been preserved; wherefore let us gladly acknowledge this deed, which was a good, if a very small, one. He again paid a visit to Paris, and this time gave Wagner a word of introduction to Pillet, who had assumed the post of director of the Opéra. Owing to this introduction the Flying Dutchman was written. Wagner sketched a scenario and let Pillet have it. The customary procrastination set in, and at last Pillet flatly told Wagner he could not produce an opera by him: he was young, a German, and so on and so on; and in a word he liked the scenario and had determined to have it set by one Dietsch-which is not a very French-sounding name. He offered Wagner twenty pounds for it, and if the offer was not accepted-well, Wagner might do what he chose. Wagner took it.

He completed his libretto, took lodgings at Meudon, then a lovely suburb of Paris, hired a piano and sat down to compose his Dutchman. He gives a graphic account of his tremors whilst awaiting the piano: he feared that during the degrading struggle for bread the power of composing might have deserted him. The instrument arrived, he sat down, and shouting for joy, struck out the sailors' chorus. In seven weeks the draft was complete-it is dated September 13, 1841. Want of funds compelled him to leave Meudon and resume his treadmill toil-this time in the Rue Jacob in Paris; but he began to score his opera in the autumn and by the end of the year it was entirely finished. He sent it to the Berlin Opera, and at once began to cast round for another subject. He had demonstrated to his own complete satisfaction that grand historical themes were the only useful material for a thoroughly "up-to-date" (date 1842-seventy years ago) composer; and while doing what may be called foraging work he had hit upon the story of The Saracen Young Woman. We may presume that this appealed to him in a mood of reaction after the intensely personal quality of the Dutchman. That mood sent him back in the direction of Rienzi. About the Dutchman he never had the slightest illusion. He knew it to be so far ahead of the time that nothing in the way of a popular success was to be hoped for it. On the other hand, he had perfect faith-a faith justified by the subsequent event-in Rienzi; and since the Wagner of 1842 was by no means the Wagner of 1862, or even of 1852, since also he had been half-starved for a couple of years and money seemed to him a highly desirable thing, he naturally, inevitably, was drawn towards a subject which promised as well, from the box-office point of view, as Rienzi.

However, there is-or was in Wagner's case-a divinity that shapes our ends. Much as he hungered after comforts, luxuries and the flesh-pots of Egypt, the d?mon within his breast was too strong for him. He had planned a new work, more or less on the lines of Rienzi, and perhaps some lucky or unlucky accident might have sent him the inspiration to start with the music. But just at this juncture Lehrs' copy of the S?ngerkrieg attracted his attention: the complete drama of Tannh?user, and the first vague notion of Lohengrin, flashed upon him. As he said, and as I have repeated, a new world was opened before his amazed eyes. The Saracen Young Woman and the rest all went to the wall; and when on April 7, 1842, he set out for Dresden he had different plans altogether in his head. Before he could start Schlesinger advanced the money for more cornet-à-piston arrangements of opera-airs, and he had to take the scores of those operas amongst his luggage.

As yet I have said nothing about his acquaintance with Liszt. It began at this time, and of course was destined to have wonderful results, but for the moment it was of no importance. Wagner was an unknown composer; Liszt was a world-famous pianist. Wagner, moreover, had written only Rienzi and the Dutchman, and was unable even to play them on the piano. He probably made only the slightest impression on Liszt. The incident is worth noticing in this chapter, because, though this Paris episode seems to be nothing but a series of disasters, it is an instance of the good that came of it. Wagner undoubtedly learnt a lot about the stage; he got to know Liszt; he had the world of Tannh?user and Lohengrin opened out to him. When he went off to Dresden and touched German soil once more he swore he would never again leave his fatherland. But he had learnt what his fatherland was quite unable to teach him. His friends said his character changed entirely during this period. Undoubtedly it did change: the Wagner who had aimed only at worldly, commercial success, changed into Wagner the artist whose sincerity carried him through all troubles to the crowning triumph-and discomfiture-of Bayreuth. I have referred before to the fact of the old momentum keeping him going in a certain direction even after he knew that direction to be a wrong one; and the same thing was to occur again, as we shall see in a moment. After writing the Dutchman he actually deliberated as to the wisdom of doing another Rienzi. The claims of his stomach were, naturally after a two years of semi-starvation, very strong, and another Rienzi might have meant easily earned bread-and-butter. But the Paris change was fundamental; and even if he had tried to do another Rienzi he could not possibly have done it. Without his knowing it, the artist in him had triumphed over the merely commercial composer.

* * *

In the music the head and shoulders of the real Wagner emerge boldly from the ruck of commonplace which constitutes the bulk of the operatic music of the time. How any one could have failed to see the strength and beauty of much of the Dutchman is one of those things almost impossible to understand to-day. Of the tawdry vulgarity, the blatant clamour, of Rienzi there is not a hint. The opera is by no means all on the highest level, but a good third of it is, and there are pages which Richard never afterwards surpassed. A dozen passages are prophetic of the Wagner of Tristan and the Ring.

Let me begin by quoting a few of these. The phrase (a, page 118) immediately suggests Tristan, as it screams higher and higher with ever-increasing intensity of passion; a variant of it (b) is charged with the same feeling, and is used in the same way. The feeling is not the same as in Tristan; both are used when Eric makes his last despairing appeals to Senta. But look at (c). Compare it with one of the themes (d) expressive of Wotan's anguish, and then recollect that (c) is used when Vanderdecken, in veiled speech, tells Daland of his woes. When Vanderdecken is yearning for Senta's love, and trembling lest by telling the truth he should frighten her, we get (e), afterwards developed with such poignant effect in the first and last acts of Tristan. Vanderdecken enters with Daland, and Senta, almost stunned, sets eyes on him for the first time. The musical phrase is (f), which, simplified and more direct in its appeal, was to be used when Siegmund and Sieglinda first gaze on one another. Then the passage (g) is one which the reader will find mentioned in my chapter on Tristan (p. 263) as standing for quite a multitude of things in the Ring. A curious case is the little phrase (h) which occurs in the middle of the watchman's song. Of no significance here, of what tremendous import it is in the first act of Tristan.

None of these phrases or passages is developed with the power and resource characteristic of Wagner's later work; but it is astonishing that after the baldness and noise of Rienzi he should have gone straight on to invent such music at all. He was still groping his way, and had to trust to the conventional framework of opera construction to a large extent; that is, each act is divided into set numbers, even when the numbers are based on music which has been heard before and to which, therefore, a definite meaning has become attached. He could not yet trust himself in an open sea of music, as he did in Tristan; rather, we have a chain of lakes, the music sometimes overflowing out of one into another. The marvellous continual development of themes with intricate interweavings and incessant transmogrifications-all this was part of the technique of the Tristan period. Neither in the Dutchman nor in Tannh?user nor in Lohengrin is there any sign of it. Of what may be called leitmotivs there are only three, the Dutchman (i) and Senta (j), while a portion of the second (k) may be regarded as a third, for it is used by itself, independently. One little group of notes (l) I have seen described as a leitmotiv; and if it is one, I should like to know what it stands for. As can be seen, it is a bit of the Senta theme (fourth bar of j); and in the overture a long connecting passage is built on it. But it also forms part of the chorus of sailors in the first act, part of the watchman's song in a varied form, part of another sailors' chorus (m); it is the very backbone of the spinning chorus; and lastly, a large portion of the spectral sailors' chorus is made up of it. I have no explanation to offer-unless it be that Wagner, bent on suggesting the sea throughout the opera, felt that this phrase helped him to sustain the atmosphere. The sea, indeed, throughout the Dutchman, is the background, foreground, the whole environment of the drama; in this wild legend which came out of the sea, every action is related to the sea, and one might say that the sea's voice is echoed in every one's speech. The sea music, therefore, based on Senta's ballad-apart from the leitmotivs which that contains-is of the very first importance. The easiest way to get a firm grasp of the Dutchman is to analyse this ballad. Then in passing rapidly over the score afterwards we shall see at a glance the structure of the whole, and how the new thematic matter is either welded into this sea music or stodgily interpolated. The song is too long to be transcribed here; but every reader must have in his possession a copy at this time of day. There are ten bars of introduction: in the eleventh, to the Dutchman theme, Senta sings the "Yo-ho-ho"; at the fifteenth, with a glorious swing and rush she dashes into the ballad-

"Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an,

Blutroth die Segel, schwarz der Mast?

Auf hohem Bord der bleiche Mann,

Des Schilfes Herr, wacht ohne Rast."

This consists of eight bars-a four-bar section repeated. Then we get the storm music, four bars of which I quote (n), and this is freely employed throughout the opera. The storm subsides, and at bar thirty-nine Senta sings to her own theme-

"Doch kann dem bleichen Manne Erl?sung einstens noch werden,

F?nd' er ein Weib, das bis in den Tod getreu ihm auf Erden."

leading into the second part (k) to the words-

"Ach! Wann wirst du, bleicher Seemann, sie finden?

Betet zum Himmel dass bald

Ein Weib Treue ihm halt'!"

The three themes are of very unequal power. The first is one of the landmarks in musical history; neither Wagner himself nor any of the other great masters ever hit upon a more gigantic theme, terrible in its direct force at its announcement, still more terrible as it is used in the overture and later in the drama. The second, Senta, is a piece of sloppy German sentimentality: this is not a heroine who will (rightly or wrongly) sacrifice herself for an idea, but a hausfrau who will always have her husband's supper ready and his slippers laid to warm on the stove shelf. It is significant that Senta herself in her moment of highest exaltation does not refer to it: Wagner often calculated wrong, but he never felt wrong. The third, the grief and anguish of the condemned sailor, and pity for him, is one of the most wonderful things in music; for blent with its pathos is the feeling of a remoter time, the feeling that it all happened in ages that are past, the feeling for "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago." This sense of the past, the historic sense-call it what you will-was thus strong in Wagner at this early period, and it grew even stronger later on, finding its most passionate expression in Tristan and its loveliest expression in the Mastersingers. The faculty to shape pregnant musical themes is the stamp of the great master. The early men are supposed to have "taken church melodies" and worked them up into masses: what they did was to take meaningless strings of notes, bare suggestions, and give them form and meaning by means of rhythm (for only boobies talk of the old church music not possessing rhythm). The later composers sometimes followed the same procedure-which is equivalent to a sculptor "taking" a block of marble and hewing out a statue; but more and more they trusted to their own imaginations. In either case the "mighty line" results; and there is not a great composition in the world which has not great themes; and, vice versa, when the themes are trivial the work evolved from them is invariably trivial. I see modern works full of cleverness and colour: I do not waste much time on them; there cannot be anything in them, and they will not survive. Along with some weak motives-or, to be more accurate, motives which are musically weak but dramatically a help-Wagner has a huge list of tremendous ones, each a landmark. However, this by way of digression.

Music evolved from this ballad forms, as I have said, the structural outline of the opera. The overture is almost entirely shaped out of it, being one of that sort which is supposed to foreshadow the opera, to tell the tale in music before we see it enacted on the stage. From the Dutchman onward Wagner nearly always constructed his introductions-whether to whole operas or to single acts or even scenes-on this plan, largely discarding the purely architectural forms. Here, for example, we have at the outset the blind fury of the tempest, taken and developed from (n), with the Dutchman theme. The storm reaches its height, and there is a brief lull, and Vanderdecken seems to dream of a possible redeemer; the elements immediately rage again, with the wind screaming fiercely through sails and ropes, and waves crashing against the ship's sides; he yearns for rest (k), seems to implore the Almighty to send the Day of Judgment; and at length the Senta motive enters triumphantly, and with the redemption of the wanderer the thing ends. That, one can see, is the chain of incidents Wagner has translated into tones, or illustrated with tones; but as a prelude to the opera, it is the atmosphere of the sea that counts: the roar of the billows, the "hui!" of the wind, the dashing and plunging. When the curtain rises the storm goes on while Daland's men, with their hoarse "Yo-ho-ho," add even more colour. The motion of the sea is kept up, partly with fresh musical material, until at last it all but ceases; the watchman sings his song of the soft south wind and falls asleep. Then the sky darkens, the Flying Dutchman comes in, and the storm music rages once more. It is woven into Vanderdecken's magnificent scena (surely the greatest opera scena written up to the year 1842); and then disappears. In its place we get pages of (for Wagner) wearisome twaddle. The reason is obvious. For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would have set to dry recitative. Wagner was determined that his music should flow on; but the inspiration of the sea was gone, and he could only fill up with uninspired stuff. He had not yet mastered his new musico-dramatic art; indeed, I much doubt whether he realized its possibilities. In his Tristan days he knew how to avoid explanations on the stage; nothing in Tristan needs explanation; in the Mastersingers and the Ring his resources-his inventiveness and technical mastery of music-were unbounded, and an intractable incident he simply smothered in splendid music. Here, the bargaining of Daland and Vanderdecken is a very intractable incident, and in trying to make the best of it he made the worst. That is, he would have saved us an appalling longueur had he given us two minutes of frank recitative in place of twenty minutes of make-believe music-music in the very finest kapellmeister style of the period. Even the passage quoted (c) is made nothing of. There are one or two fine dramatic touches, as, for instance, when Daland asks if his ship is any the worse: "Mein Schiff ist fest, es leidet keinen Schaden," with its bitter double meaning; but on the whole things are very dreary and dispiriting until the south wind blows up and stirs the composer's imagination. The sweet wind carries off the mariners to their home; the water ripples and plashes gently; and to the last bar of the act all is peace and beauty. The music has not, perhaps, the point of, say, the quieter bits of Mendelssohn's Hebrides, but it runs delicately along, and it more than serves.

The figure (l), which has been so prominent in the overture and sailors' choruses, is equally noticeable in the next act. The spinning chorus, in fact, may be said to grow out of it. There is no break between the two acts (Wagner's first intention was to go straight on, making the Dutchman an opera in one long act); the introduction to the second is a continuation of the conclusion of the first. The figure is repeated several times in a long diminuendo, changing the key from B flat to A major, so we never cease to feel the presence of the eternal sea. Inside the skipper's old-world house one is conscious that the waves are plashing not far from the walls, and that the air is salt and fresh there. There is a pervading dreamy atmosphere: again we are carried away into far-off times; the scene has the unreality of a dream, a dream of the sea. Mlle. Senta quickly shatters that illusion with her passion and living young blood; but in memory one always has this cottage, where women pass the days in singing, where there are no clocks, and time can only be measured by the waves as they break on the shore. The maiden's spinning song is small scale music; nothing ambitious is wanted, and nothing ambitious is attempted. As a bit of music it is infinitely superior to the clumsy wooden bridal chorus in Lohengrin; the touch is light, the melodies fresh and dainty, and the subdued hum of the wheels and the bustle are suggested throughout without becoming monotonous. Not for a musical, but for a purely theatrical, reason we get a snatch of (k); Senta is not spinning; she is engaged in staring at the picture. After much chattering she sings the ballad, and at the end declaims her intention of saving the Dutchman to the music which is employed when she actually accomplishes that feat. When Eric rushes in, the orchestra has the usual operatic storm-in-a-teacup sort of stuff; the chattering chorus of women getting ready for Daland's reception is neither here nor there; Eric's expostulations are insignificant, and the air he sings-with interruptions on the part of Senta-is by no means equal to the better parts of the opera. Here Wagner has again been faced by the difficulty he met in the first act: a prosaic scene had to be set to poetic music, and the task was beyond him. Eric is one of the most frightfully conventional personages in opera; he bores and exasperates one to madness. He warbles away in the approved Italian tenor fashion while one's enthusiasm is growing cold and one's interest waning. His dream, however, in which he sees Senta meet the Dutchman, embrace him and sail away with him, has a genuine ring. The atmosphere is strange, almost nightmareish, with the Dutchman theme sounding up at intervals, dreamlike. With the exception of the mere mention of this motive in the score, the music is new, is not evolved out of previous passages; but when Eric has finished we hear the Senta theme, both sections. The Dutchman and Daland enter, and we hear (f) three times in all; but there is no development of it. Daland's air is entirely fresh matter; as is the opening of the big duet between the Dutchman and Senta.

We are now approaching the supreme moment of the drama. The Dutchman's recitative-like beginning-declamation of the same type, and with the same accent, as some recitative in the song-tournament in Tannh?user-is noble in the highest degree; we have a recurrence of the dream-atmosphere at Senta's words, "Versank ich jetzt in wunderbares Tr?umen?"-for though her fanaticism is all too real, when her opportunity comes she is for the moment incredulous. It hardly does to consider the moral aspect of the play at this juncture. Vanderdecken is merely a greedy, selfish skipper who, having got into some trouble, is anxious that a pure young maiden should throw away her life that he may be comfortable. Not any casuistry or splitting of hairs can alter the plain fact-

"Wirst du des Vaters Wahl nicht schelten?

Was er versprach, wie?-dürft' es gelten?"

However, he has the honesty to warn her of her probable fate. She rises to the occasion. She may be as mad as a hatter, but in the music she is given to "Der du auch sei'st," her lunacy becomes sublimity. Up to the moment of writing this white-hot glowing passage Wagner had never reached the sublime: now for a few minutes he sustains it. Again the breath of the sea is brought in when the Dutchman a second time warns her, and the sea music roars as a sinister accompaniment. Senta only becomes the more exalted. "Wohl kenn' ich Weibes heil'ge Pflichten," she sings to music which is absolutely the finest page in the opera. The pure white flame of a deathless devotion is here. I doubt whether Wagner ever again in his life had such an ethereal moment: it is sheer fervour and sweetness, unmixed with the hot human passion of Tristan or the smoky philosophies of the Ring. To wish Senta had a reasonable cause for her ecstasy of self-immolation is, of course, to wish the Dutchman were not the Dutchman. In truth, we must take the scenes as they come without inquiring too curiously; the storm music which goes with the wanderer, and the moments of glorious splendour that come to the redeeming woman, are things worth living to have written and worth living to hear.

The music of the last act I shall pass quickly over. The seamen's and women's choruses are not particularly striking; the spectral choruses certainly are. The sea music is here turned into something unearthly, frightful; these damned souls have no hope of being saved, and in their misery they scoff and mock and laugh hideously. More new musical matter, some of it of a very fine quality, is introduced when Eric again appeals to Senta; and the figure (a) is developed with stupendous effect. In the final scene, when the Dutchman goes off, Senta can say nothing more after her declarations in the second-nothing, that is, of any musical value; and Wagner has wisely confined her to recitative.

The Flying Dutchman, then, has many weaknesses. The libretto is a manufacture, not, like Tristan, a growth. Much of the music does not rise above the level of Spontini or Marschner; there are wearisome pages, there are heavy chords repeated again and again with violin figurations on top, there are lines of the verse repeated to fit in with the conventional melodies in four-bar lengths. It was only a few years before that Wagner, at Riga, had written enthusiastically about Bellini and his melody, a type of melody he felt to be fresh and expressive compared with the dry-as-dust mixture of Viennese melody (i.e. the Haydn and Mozart type) and stodgy German counterpoint which formed the bulk of Marschner's and Spontini's music; and here we see him in the very deed of trying his hand at it. Very often the result, it must be admitted, is lamentable. There was no Italian suppleness and grace in Wagner's nature: when he was in deadly earnest, and striving to express himself without thinking of models, he wrote gorgeous stuff; when the inspiration waned, or when he deluded himself with the belief that what he supposed to be Bellini-like tunes really expressed the feeling of the moment, then he gave us pages as dry and dreary as Spontini and Marschner at their worst. Besides those I have already mentioned there are in the love duet-if it can be called a love duet-mere figurations over bar on bar on leaden-footed, heavy chords; and these figurations are not true melody. These tunes in regular four-bar lengths are melody of an amorphous sort; only when they were tightened up, made truer, more pregnant-in a word, when they were so shaped as to stand really and truly for the thought and feeling in the composer-did they become the beautiful things we find in Lohengrin, foretelling the sublime things we find in Tristan. Eric's tunes are as colourless as Donizetti's. All this we may joyfully admit, knowing how much there is to be said on the other side, and seeing in the Dutchman only a foretaste of Wagner's greatest work. A really great work it assuredly is. We have the magnificent sea-music, and, in spite of outer incoherences, the smell and atmosphere of the sea maintained to the last bar of the opera. In his music at least Vanderdecken is a deeply tragic figure. There is the ballad, by very far the finest in music; there is Senta's declaration of faith. Whenever it was possible for the composer to be inspired he instantly responded. Had he not lived to write another note his memory would live by the Dutchman. It is an enormous leap from Rienzi. There brilliancy is attained by huge choruses and vigorous orchestration and rhythms that continually verge on the vulgar. In the Dutchman it is the stuff and texture of the music that make the effect. Play Rienzi on a piano, and you have nothing; play the Dutchman, and you have immediately the roar of the sea, the Dutchman's loneliness and sadness, Senta's exaltation. I have spoken of Wagner having finished his apprenticeship when he went to Magdeburg, and in a sense he had; but perhaps in the fuller sense he finished it only with the Dutchman. He made mistakes, and thanks largely to them, so mastered his own personal art that he was prepared to take another and a vaster leap-from the Dutchman to Tannh?user. He cast the slough of the old Italian opera form.

Some characteristics of his harmony and instrumentation will most conveniently be considered later. For the present I wish to draw my reader's attention rather to Wagner the musico-dramatist than to Wagner the technical musician.

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