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Wagner\'s Tristan und Isolde

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WAGNER'S "TRISTAN UND ISOLDE"

AN ESSAY ON
THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA

BY GEORGE AINSLIE HIGHT







Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrade's hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of
my soul,
Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering
song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling,
flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet
again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses.

_Walt Whitman._





PREFACE

The following pages contain little if anything that is new, or that
would be likely to interest those who are already at home in Wagner's
work. They are intended for those who are beginning the study of
Wagner. In spite of many books, I know of no Wagner literature in
English to which a beginner can turn who wishes to know what Wagner
was aiming at, in what respect his works differ from those of the
operatic composers who preceded him. 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.

Those who wish fully to understand Wagner's aims must read his own
published works. I have not attempted to give his views in a condensed
form, being convinced that any such attempt could only end in failure.
Whenever it has been made, the result has been a caricature; you
cannot separate a man's work from his personality. All that I could do
was to endeavour to lay some of the problems involved, as I conceive
them, before the reader in my own words.

SAMER, PAS DE CALAIS, _May_, 1912.



CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. ON WAGNER CRITICISM

II. WAGNER AS MAN

III. WAGNER'S THEORETICAL WRITINGS

IV. THE ROOTS OF GERMAN MUSIC

V. THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA AND ITS ANTECEDENTS

VI. THE EARLIER VERSIONS OF THE TRISTAN
MYTH

VII. WAGNER'S CONCEPTION OF THE TRISTAN
MYTHOS

VIII. ON CERTAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE WAGNERIAN
DRAMA

IX. MUSIC AS AN ART OF EXPRESSION

X. SOME REMARKS ON THE MUSICAL DICTION
OF "TRISTAN UND ISOLDE"

XI. OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC

XII. OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC
CONTINUED

XIII. OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC
CONTINUED

XIV. CONCLUSION

APPENDIX



[Greek: Theohus d' ephame eleountas aemas sugchoreutas te kahi
choraegohus aemin dedo¯ke'nai to'n te Ap'ollo¯a kahi Mousas
kahi dhae kahi tri'ton ephamen, ei' memnaemetha, Dionuson.]




CHAPTER I

ON WAGNER CRITICISM


A new work on Wagner requires some justification. It might be urged
that, since the _Meister_ has been dead for some decades and the
violence of party feeling may be assumed to have somewhat abated, we
are now in a position to form a sober estimate of his work, to review
his aims, and judge of his measure of success.

Such, however, is not my purpose in the following pages. I conceive
that the endeavour to _estimate_ an artist's work involves a
misconception of the nature of art. We can estimate products of
utility, things expressible in figures, the weight of evidence, a Bill
for Parliament, a tradesman's profits. But a work of art is written
for our pleasure, and all that we can attempt is to understand it.
True, we must judge in a certain sense, we must weigh and estimate
before we can arrive at understanding; but it is one thing to meditate
in the privacy of one's own mind, quite another to publish these
constructive processes as an end in themselves, to set up critical
"laws" and expect that poets are going to conform to them.

Art, says Ruskin, is a language, a vehicle of thought, in itself
nothing. Plato's teaching in the third book of his _Republic_ is
the same, and the idea of the secondary nature of art, of its value
only as the expression of something else, of a human or moral purpose
only fully expressible in the drama, is the nucleus of all Wagner's
theoretical writing. In private conversation and in his letters he
often spoke very emphatically. "I would joyfully sacrifice and destroy
everything that I have produced if I could hope thereby to further
freedom and justice."[1]

[Footnote 1: The episode which gave rise to this remark is too long to
relate in the text, but is highly characteristic and instructive for
Wagner's attitude towards art. It will be found in the sixth volume of
Glasenapp's biography, p. 309.]

Let us clearly keep in mind the distinction here involved between the
two elements of every work of art: matter and form, substance and
technique, [Greek: onta] and [Greek: gignomena], Brahm and Mâyâ, Wille
und Vorstellung, the emotional and the intellectual life of man, or,
untechnically, what he feels and his communication of those feelings
to others as a social being. With the first of these the critic has
nothing to do; the matter is given; all he has to consider is whether
it has found adequate expression--that is, to try to understand the
language, that when he has mastered it he may help others to do so
according to his ability. I do not say that the matter is one to which
we are indifferent. On the contrary, it is far the more important of
the two, since the thing expressed is prior to its expression. Only it
is no concern of the critic, because we may fairly assume that if the
technical expression is correct and intelligible the artist has
already told us what he wishes to convey in the most perfect language
of which that idea is susceptible, and that any attempt to put it into
the lower and more prosy language of the critic would only weaken and
distort the thought.

It does not seem to me that passions have abated very much, or
judgments have become much more sober, since Wagner has left us. In
England at least the ignorance and indifference which prevail among
the ordinary public are still profound. In truth the seed which he
sowed has fallen upon evil soil; his fate has been a cruel one. He,
the most sincere and transparent of men, whose only wish was to be
seen as he actually was, has perhaps more than any other great man
been the victim of misrepresentation, alike from his senseless
persecutors and from his equally senseless adulators. While he lived,
every imaginable calumny, plausible and unplausible, was invented to
besmirch his character and his art. Now it is, in Germany at least, no
longer safe to revile him on the ground of his technical artistic
style. The days are long past when the terms "charlatan," "amateur,"
"artistic anarchist" could be applied to him with impunity, and it is
fully recognized by all who have any title to speak that Wagner, so
far from being a revolutionary destroyer, was, like all true
reformers--Luther, for example, or Jeremiah or Sokrates--an extreme
conservative. Those who like Walt Whitman preach libertinism in the
name of democracy do not want reform; they are satisfied with things
as they are. Wagner battled, both in music and in literature, for
_der reine Satz_--purity of diction as against the untidy licence
which was then and still is fashionable among weak-kneed artists and a
thoughtless public.[2]

[Footnote 2: It is perhaps still necessary to produce some warrant for
these statements. The deep-rooted conservatism of Wagner's character
is a prominent feature of all his literary work, and especially
noticeable in his educational schemes, as, for example; the report on
a proposed Munich school of music, with its text: "The business of a
Conservatory is to conserve." On his musical diction the testimony of
Prof. S. Jadassohn will probably be considered sufficient by most
people. He writes: "Wagner's harmonies are clear and pure; they are
never arbitrary, nor coarse nor brutal, but throughout conscientious
and clean according to the strict rules of pure diction (_des reinen
Satzes_). Consequently the sequences and combinations of the chords
and the course of the modulation are easily followed by those who know
harmony. Similarly, his polyphonic style is easily intelligible to the
trained contrapuntist"--and more to the same effect, Jadassohn is here
only expressing what every competent musician knows. Before the first
performance at Bayreuth in 1876 Wagner's last word to the artists was:
_Deutlichkeit_--"clearness"--a word which sums up all his
technical teaching throughout his life.]

Mr. Hadow has truly observed that we have not yet learned to treat
genius frankly, and either starve it with censure or smother it with
irrational excess of enthusiasm. If the malicious misrepresentations
and persecutions which Wagner endured during his lifetime were the
outcome of ignorance, assuredly the hysterical raving of our day is no
less ignorant and contemptible. I hear it said that in England
"Wagnerism" is an attitude, and can only reply that it is so in
Germany too. Among the cosmopolitan audiences who crowd the theatres
of Dresden and Munich on a Wagner night and greet his works with
thundering applause, there is probably not one person in a hundred who
really knows what he sees and hears. Not that these people are not
perfectly sincere; _something_ they have undoubtedly taken in;
the marvellous euphony and balance of Wagner's orchestra under the
conductors we now have, the exquisite grace of the melodic and
harmonic structure, and the lyric beauty of so many scenes are
apparent to all, and will always awaken the boundless enthusiasm of
those who go only to be diverted. But these are only the ornaments of
the drama; to understand the drama itself requires a serious effort on
the part of the hearer which few are prepared to make, a moral
sympathy with the composer and receptive understanding of his aims of
which few are capable.

We in England seem content to remain in darkness. I am not, of course,
referring to the many competent men who have given serious attention
to the works of Wagner; I am speaking of the general public. The
English people has plenty of poetry in its heart, but our attitude
towards German literature and art is not creditable to us as a nation.
We who possess the finest literature ever produced by any people,
whose Chaucers and Shakespeares and Popes and Byrons are the models on
which the poets of other nations endeavour to form their style,
scarcely think their literature worthy of serious consideration. A
German boy when he leaves school has generally a pretty close
acquaintance with Shakespeare, and knows at least something of other
English authors and poets. An English boy at the same stage of his
education has perhaps heard of Goethe and Schiller, but has rarely
read any of their works. At the Universities it is no better. I really
believe that in England Gounod's _Faust_ is better known than
Goethe's! It would be impossible that such travesties of _Faust_
as appear from time to time upon the English stage would be endured if
our scholars and intellectuals were better informed. Towards ancient
languages, except the two which are fashionable, we are just as
indifferent. It was no less a person than Sir Richard Maine who
asserted that, except the blind forces of nature, nothing exists in
the world which is not Greek in its origin! Truly more things are
dreamed of in our philosophy than are in heaven and earth! When great
scholars make such statements as this it is scarcely surprising that
ordinary people should care little for the origins of their own
language. The parents of modern English are not Greek but Anglo-Saxon
and Scandinavian or Icelandic. Both these languages have a literature
of the very highest rank, but are little studied in this country. The
eighth-century English lyrics are amongst the finest in the language.
As for Scandinavian, not every one in England is aware that the
Icelanders are, and have been for a thousand years, the most literary
people in the world;[3] that in one important branch of literature,
that of story-telling, they are absolutely without a rival, except in
the Old Testament. From these Scandinavian sources we have received
the heritage which has grown into our magnificent language and
literature, but we trouble our heads little about them and leave them
to foreigners to study. Ignorance may perhaps be excusable; what is
wholly inexcusable is the habit of some Englishmen of criticising and
censuring the work of foreigners which they dislike because they
cannot understand it. There is a certain section of the English people
who seem to think that it shows patriotism and a becoming national
pride to belittle the work of other nations and speak of it in an
insolent tone of contempt. They habitually misrepresent the
achievements of foreigners in order to make them appear ridiculous.
Over twenty years ago a writer in one of our high-class magazines
informed an astonished world that "the Wagner-bubble has burst!" and
the preposterous nonsense has been repeated again and again in one
form or another ever since. Quite recently we read in one of our
leading English dailies the following sentences: "... Among many of
the best-known critics there is a general consensus of opinion that
with the completion of Strauss' important work [_Elektra_],
Wagnerism will diminish in popularity.... 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.

[Footnote 3: Feeling some doubt as to whether this statement were not
an exaggeration, I have submitted it before publication to my friend
Mr. Eirikr Magnússon of Cambridge, whose profound knowledge of
European literature, ancient and modern, needs no attestation from me.
He replies that, except for the two centuries succeeding the Black
Death in 1402-4, the statement in the text is quite correct. With that
reservation therefore I allow it to stand.]

There is another and a graver charge to be brought against some
writers whose works are popularly read in England, to which it will be
my duty to return. I have said enough here to show the state of Wagner
criticism in this country. Abroad it is little better. Wagner is
indeed fashionable. His works are regularly performed in every capital
in Europe, and he has probably saved the existence of the costly
_Hoftheater_ in Germany. But success, in the sense in which he
understood it, he has not yet achieved. It is very questionable
whether his influence has on the whole been for good, either upon
musicians and dramatists, or upon the public. It is not his fault.
Nothing would show more convincingly the utter inability of the modern
public to appreciate the highest and best in art than the literature
which has gathered round the great name of Wagner. In all the vast
mass how much is there which was worth the writing, or can be read
with any profit by reasonable people? I think that, putting aside
purely technical works on music, stage-management, etc., the number of
really good books could be counted on the fingers. The rest is feeble
rhapsody on the one hand, malicious misrepresentation on the other. Of
works of first-rate importance, works that really add anything solid
to our knowledge, I only know one: Nietzsche's _Geburt der
Tragödie_. Of others the best are mostly in French. Lichtenberger's
_R. Wagner_ is admirable so far as it goes, but treats the
subject exclusively from the literary standpoint. The small treatise
of our marvellous countryman, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain, _Le drame
wagnérien_[4] (Paris, 1894), is thoughtful and suggestive, and
quite worthy of close attention, as are also the works of Kufferath,
Golther, etc. There may be a few more, mostly of small compass, but
not many. Glasenapp's great biography, a work of astounding industry,
and invaluable to the student, can scarcely be included among the good
books because of its terrible literary style and its fulsome
sentimentality. The magnificent work begun by the Hon. Mrs. Burrell,
of which there is a copy in the British Museum, would have been a
monumental biography had she lived to complete it, but it stops when
Wagner is about twenty. Of the rest, the less said the better. Of
works against Wagner I know of none that are even worth reading,
except Hanslick, to whom I shall have occasion to return. It is much
to be regretted that none of Wagner's opponents have ever stated their
case fairly and soberly. There is much to be said, but assuredly it
has not been said by men of the stamp of Nordau, who cites disgusting
accounts from French medical journals in order to show his abhorrence
of what he considers Wagner's immorality! Tolstoi is a writer of wide
authority among his followers, and might be expected to feel some
responsibility for his utterances; yet he thought it right to publish
his verdict to the world after having witnessed _one_ very
inferior performance of a _portion_ of Siegfried! He is often
appealed to as if he were an authority by the opponents of Wagner, but
his utterances have no more weight than the thoughtless expressions of
a Ruskin or a William Morris, which their biographers have thought fit
to drag from the privacy of private letters or conversation and
publish as their deliberate judgments. From Nietzsche at least
something better might have been expected, but I can find little in
his anti-Wagnerian writings except coarse vituperation and low
scandal. There is no anti-Wagnerian literature worthy of the name.
There are plenty of highly musical and artistic natures who honestly
dislike his art, and I am so far able to sympathize with them as to
believe that an inestimable benefit would be conferred upon all of us
if they would publish their objections in sober and reasoned form. But
they do not; or if they do speak, they descend to the slums.

[Footnote 4: Not his _Richard Wagner_, which is a more popular
work.]

Such has been the response of the public through its literature to the
man who expressly did not wish to be worshipped, but only to be
understood. Assuredly there is yet plenty of room for good work to be
done! The purpose of the following pages is criticism, not as judging,
but as selecting. In choosing certain characteristics to show them in
a different perspective from an altered point of view the critic may
hope to help others to a better understanding of the art. I have
endeavoured to do this for English readers in respect of Wagner's
dramatic works through one of the most characteristic and
representative of them. The problem resolves itself into two. First
there is the general technical one, so fully treated by Wagner himself
in his theoretical writings, whether music is capable of being used as
a means of dramatic expression; and secondly, how far the endeavour
has been successful in the particular work selected for illustration.
To treat these problems satisfactorily it will be necessary for me to
go far beyond the limits of music and dramatic art, and to enter
rather fully into questions of psychology and metaphysics, which I
fear may discourage some readers, but which cannot be shirked by those
who wish to form a judgment based upon a more solid foundation than
their own personal taste. The mistake made by nearly all writers on
Wagner hitherto has been to suppose that the mere assertion of an
individual opinion has any value at all, however illustrious the
person who holds it, however able his exposition. Of what use can be
the assertion that a certain progression of chords is acceptable and
pleasing to the healthy ear (even with the usual addition that all who
do not think so are blockheads), when some other person equally
competent asserts the contrary? Or how am I to persuade my readers
that _Tristan und Isolde_ is what I hold it to be, the loftiest
paean of pure and holy love ever conceived by a poet, when others see
in it only a "story of vulgar adultery," steeped in sensuality? The
moral law is the same to all men, and differences of judgment upon
moral acts are due to imperfect understanding. But I cannot hope to
make my own position clear without descending to the foundations of
all art, of all life, without asking: what is drama? what are its
aims, and how does it express them? what is human life which it
reflects? Wagner felt this very strongly, and soon realized that an
ontological basis was required for his own theories; that to reform
art he must reform human life. "Oh ye men," he exclaims passionately
in a letter: "feel rightly, act as you feel! be free!--then we will
have art."

We may learn the true principles of criticism from Wagner himself.
Truthfulness in literature is what correctness is in _Vortrag_.
They are objectivity, the art of seeing things as they really are,
clearness of vision, right understanding. The truthful representation
of an artist as he really is does not preclude, but rather stimulates,
enthusiasm, for we may believe that the true artist and the true work
of art as he intended it are superior to the flattering creations of
our own fancy.

Lessing observes that of ten objections raised by the critic, nine
will probably have occurred to the author; that he himself will read a
passage twenty times rather than believe that the writer contradicted
himself. Some of our critics seem to proceed upon an opposite
principle and to reject a thought at once if it does not seem to agree
with what they themselves have thought, and they observe little
restraint in expressing their authoritative judgment. One critic
speaks of Wagner meditating on problems "which any clear-headed
schoolboy could quickly have settled for him"; we are not surprised to
find the same critic sneering at Kant and Plato! Such writers there
will always be, but a nation which tolerates them cannot expect to
maintain an honourable place in the intellectual commonwealth.




CHAPTER II

WAGNER AS MAN


The distinction so often made with a genius between the "man" and the
"artist" has been justly ridiculed by Wagner himself. For the truest
individuality of an artist is in his art, not when he leaves his own
proper sphere and enters one that is foreign to him. Beethoven is the
writer of symphonies and sonatas, not the suspicious friend and
unmannerly plebeian. The _man_ is the same in both relations,
_i.e._ his character remains the same, only it manifests itself
differently under changed conditions, and the difference lies not in
him, but in the point of view from which we regard him. Let us bear
this in mind in considering Wagner as he appeared away from his art.

A genius has been aptly likened to an astronomical telescope, which is
able to scan the heavens, but is useless for things close at hand. To
some extent this is true of Wagner, but less so than with most, and
not in the sense in which it has been often asserted. The attacks
which have been made upon Wagner's private character show little
discrimination, for it is a simple truth that the particular vices of
which he has been accused are just those from which he was singularly
free. No charge has been more audaciously or persistently brought by
ignorant writers or believed by an ill-informed public in England and
America than that of morbid sensuality. Just as Wagner's dramas have
been called licentious, so his character has been described as
sensual, in defiance of easily ascertainable facts. Not long ago the
discovery was made that his health had been undermined by loose living
when he was young. It is easy to invent such charges, for which there
is not a particle of evidence, and unfortunately the reader is not
always in a position to verify the authorities, and naturally thinks
that the writer must have some ground for what he says. As a rule
these statements have originated with Ferdinand Praeger's book
_Wagner as I knew him_, a book which I am astonished to see still
quoted in England, as if it were an authority. I have not seen it, and
do not know what it contains. Its character was exposed by two
Englishmen, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain and Mr. Ashton Ellis, soon after its
publication in 1892, and it was consequently withdrawn from
circulation in Germany by its publishers, Messrs. Breitkopf und
Härtel. In England and America it still seems to be widely read, and
is, more than any other single work, responsible for the false notions
that are abroad about Wagner. Sensuality, that is in the morbidly
sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner's character, nor could
it be of the man who justly claimed that no poet had ever glorified
women as he had done. His Sentas, Elsas, Brünnhildes, and I must add
his Isoldes, rightly understood, afford the best answer to such
accusations.

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