RICHARD WAGNER

THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzled disciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute music must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an exclusively Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great geniuses produce this illusion. Wagner did not begin a movement: he consummated it. He was the summit of the nineteenth century school of dramatic music in the same sense as Mozart was the summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenth century school. And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition will assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected supersession of absolute music, it is sufficient to point to the fact that Germany produced two absolute musicians of the first class during Wagner's lifetime: one, the greatly gifted Goetz, who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolute musical endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace. Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the man of second-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic musician for mere brute musical faculty; but though his contempt was perhaps deserved by the Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds, and Elegies and Requiems in which Brahms took his brains so seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms' natural utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions, without rejoicing in his amazing gift. A reaction to absolute music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from such revivals of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas there is no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama than there was in the old attempts--or for the matter of that, the new ones--to make Handel the starting point of a great school of oratorio.

BAYREUTH

When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and opened in 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European society was compelled to admit that Wagner was "a success." Royal personages, detesting his music, sat out the performances in the row of boxes set apart for princes. They all complimented him on the astonishing "push" with which, in the teeth of all obstacles, he had turned a fabulous and visionary project into a concrete commercial reality, patronized by the public at a pound a head. It is as well to know that these congratulations had no other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyes to the fact that the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade the ordinary social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise, was a failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with his intentions in a vein which would be bitter if it were not so humorous. The precautions taken to keep the seats out of the hands of the frivolous public and in the hands of earnest disciples, banded together in little Wagner Societies throughout Europe, had ended in their forestalling by ticket speculators and their sale to just the sort of idle globe-trotting tourists against whom the temple was to have been strictly closed. The money, supposed to be contributed by the faithful, was begged by energetic subscription-hunting ladies from people who must have had the most grotesque misconceptions of the composer's aims-- among others, the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey! The only change that has occurred since then is that subscriptions are no longer needed; for the Festival Playhouse apparently pays its own way now, and is commercially on the same footing as any other theatre. The only qualification required from the visitor is money. A Londoner spends twenty pounds on a visit: a native Bayreuther spends one pound. In either case "the Folk," on whose behalf Wagner turned out in 1849, are effectually excluded; and the Festival Playhouse must therefore be classed as infinitely less Wagnerian in its character than Hampton Court Palace. Nobody knew this better than Wagner; and nothing can be further off the mark than to chatter about Bayreuth as if it had succeeded in escaping from the conditions of our modern civilization any more than the Grand Opera in Paris or London. Within these conditions, however, it effected a new departure in that excellent German institution, the summer theatre. Unlike our opera houses, which are constructed so that the audience may present a splendid pageant to the delighted manager, it is designed to secure an uninterrupted view of the stage, and an undisturbed hearing of the music, to the audience. The dramatic purpose of the performances is taken with entire and elaborate seriousness as the sole purpose of them; and the management is jealous for the reputation of Wagner. The commercial success which has followed this policy shows that the public wants summer theatresof the highest class. There is no reason why the experiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for Handel can support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and anti-Handelian as these choral monstrosities are, as well as annual provincial festivals on the same model, there is no likelihood of a Wagner Festival failing. Suppose, for instance, a Wagner theatre were built at Hampton Court or on Richmond Hill, not to say Margate pier, so that we could have a delightful summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the hours between the acts in the park or ontheriver before sunset, is it seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors? If a little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel towers, and dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief annual seasons as Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit would be far more certain and the social utility prodigiously greater. Any English enthusiasm for Bayreuth that does not take the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse in England may be set aside as mere pilgrimage mania.

Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the performances there are often far from delectable. The singing is sometimes tolerable, and some times abominable. Some of the singers are mere animated beer casks, too lazy and conceited to practise the self-control and physical training that is expected as a matter of course from an acrobat, a jockey or a pugilist. The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. It is true that Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with "ruchings," and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly modish copy of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous picture; but the mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains with her legs carefully hidden in a long white skirt, and looks so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter as Minerva that it is quite impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst looking at her. The ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen of the barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was at its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are sometimes disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half historical-pictorial attitude and gesture prevails. The most striking moments of the drama are conceived as tableaux vivants with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and life.

I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control attributed by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist. Prima donnas and tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as anywhere else. Casts are capriciously changed; stage business is insufficiently rehearsed; the public are compelled to listen to a Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when they have carefully arranged to see one of twenty-five, much as in any ordinary opera house. Even the conductors upset the arrangements occasionally. On the other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the stars out of account, we may safely expect always that in thoroughness of preparation of the chief work of the season, in strenuous artistic pretentiousness, in pious conviction that the work is of such enormous importance as to be worth doing well at all costs, the Bayreuth performances will deserve their reputation. The band is placed out of sight of the audience, with the more formidable instruments beneath the stage, so that the singers have not to sing THROUGH the brass. The effect is quite perfect.


The greatest composer of German opera, Richard Wagner, b. Leipzig, May 22, 1813, was the youngest of nine children of Friedrich and Johanna Wagner. His father, a police registrar, died 6 months after Wagner was born, and his mother was remarried the following year to Ludwig Geyer, an actor and portrait painter, who moved the family to Dresden.
Geyer died in 1821, and in 1827 the family returned to Leipzig. Wagner was attracted to the theatre at an early age.

His formal music training was brief - about 6 months in 1831-32 with the Leipzig cantor C.T. Weinlig. During the 1830s, Wagner held a series of conducting posts with small theatrical companies, and he wrote two operas, Die Feen (The Fairies, 1834) and Das Liebesverbot (Forbidden Love; after Shakespeare's Measure for Measure); His third opera, Rienzi, was conceived on a larger scale, and Wagner travelled to Paris in 1839 with the futile hope of having it performed there. Rienzi was finally accepted for performance in Dresden in 1842. Its success, coupled with that of Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) the following year, led to Wagner's appointment to an official conducting post in Dresden.

There he completed Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). This period of success ended in 1849, however, when his participation in revolutionary political activities forced him to flee to Switzerland. Wagner's exile from Germany, which lasted until 1860, marks the start of a new period in his career.

Wagner began composing the non-conventional opera-cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG) in 1848 and did not finish until 1874.
The last great turning point in Wagner's fortunes occurred in 1864 when he was called to Munich by the eccentric young king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, an ardent admirer of his works and theories. Ludwig's patronage continued for the last 20 years of Wagner's life, making possible the performance of all his mature works and eventually the construction in Bayreuth of a theatre of Wagner's own design. It was opened in 1876 with the first complete production of the Ring. Bayreuth soon became the centre for the promotion of Wagner's works and ideology. His last opera, Parsifal, was performed in 1882, with the ceremony normally accorded only to a religious event.

Following Wagner's death on Feb. 13, 1883, control of the Bayreuth festival passed to his second wife, Cosima (a daughter of Franz Liszt), and later to their children and grandchildren, a succession that has continued to the present.
The use of legendary sources and the gradual reduction in contrast between aria and recitative in these operas anticipate the new music drama that Wagner was to propose in the treatises written about 1850. The guiding principles of his theory were naturalism and dramatic truth, which he felt had been compromised by the musical conventions of contemporary opera.



He advocated a new synthesis of music, verse, and staging - what he called a Gesamtkunstwerk. The verse, which Wagner always wrote himself, was to be compressed, metrically free, and alliterative, dispensing with the end-rhyme that led to closed musical structures. The open-ended melody of the vocal line was to be supported by a symphonic accompaniment, continuously fluctuating with the sense of the text and unified by a web of motifs associated more or less directly with characters, things, ideas, or events.

Wagner called these motifs Grundthemen, but they have become better known as leitmotifs ("leading motifs").

This theoretical music drama was exemplified in its purest form in "Der Ring des Nibelungen".