Page images
PDF
EPUB

should be able to come back and resume their positions at home without loss of prospects. By so doing the universities themselves will be enriched. They will have among their residents men with a wider outlook, who have seen life under different conditions, who are better fitted to play their parts both as scholars and as citizens. Above all, they will be taking their share in a movement which is wider and greater than the progress of scholarship and the life of universities. They will be promoting, more perhaps than they will themselves realise, that co-operation between the English-speaking peoples on which depends so much of good for our common humanity. The fuller the intercourse, alike in work and in sport and in all social and intellectual relations, between old and new universities, the better it will be for all of them. From the small but rapidly growing movements of to-day, if only we will embrace our opportunities, generations to come will benefit, and both England and America will be better equipped to do their share in leading the destinies of the world.

FREDERIC G. KENYON.

[merged small][ocr errors]
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

Art. 8.-RICHARD WAGNER AND THE MUSIC DRAMA.

1. Richard Wagner, a Critical Biography. By George Ainslie Hight. Two vols. Arrowsmith, 1925.

2. Richard Wagner. By Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Translated (from the German) by George Ainslie Hight. Dent, 1900.

3. Richard Wagner, as Man and Artist. By Ernest Newman. Dent, 1914.

THE name of Richard Wagner like that of Napoleon has become a legend: no other writer of music has managed to absorb so completely the attention of the world before and after his death. And it is not simply the devotees of music that are held by the romantic spell of Wagnerism: the painters, the men of letters, the dramatists have all bowed down before him. The innermost recesses of his complex life have been revealed pitilessly to a cruel, sensation-loving world; and yet to-day the battle over his body rages just as fiercely as thirty years ago. The moment a writer produces a new interpretation of the master's complex personality, the critics, like the cat Rodilardus, pounce readily on their prey and rend it. The latest life of Wagner, written by Mr Ainslie Hight, must be welcomed because it affords an opportunity of making our examination of conscience with regard to Wagnerism. Though countless books have been written, though libraries have been ransacked, there is yet no final Wagner tradition. The reason of this must be ascribed to the fact that the writers on Wagner have inherited their master's polemical activities and are rarely able to write without the most extreme partisanship, whether of hatred or love. In later years, the struggle between the musicians has died down in order to give place to the battle between those who consider Wagner in his life the glorious symbol of his music, and those who are only too ready to stress his many faults as a member of society. To the former class of critics, Mr Hight, with certain reservations, belongs; to the second Mr Ernest Newman, to whom the world owes a deep debt of gratitude for his critical writings on Wagner's life work, is inclined.

The real Wagner is very difficult to disentangle from

he

the complications and contradictions which have revealed themselves in his life and music. No musician has ever left such a mass of autobiographical documents, and these documents have been interpreted in every way possible by the hosts of admirers or enemies that surround the master's legendary figure. Mr Hight, in the introduction to his book, attacks the writers who have reproduced scurrilous gossip in order to besmirch Wagner's character. Mr Newman, on the other hand, has fewer illusions about Wagner the man: he makes full use of the testimonies of friends and their letters in order to construct the many-sided personality of the master. 'The well-meaning thurifers,' he says, 'who try to impose him upon us in a single formula as one of the greatest and best of mankind, do but raise him to their own moral and reduce him to their own intellectual level, making their god in their own image, as is the way of primitive religious folk.'

It is best, from the outset, to separate Wagner's artistic from his personal conscience. No artist ever kept his artistic conscience more free from stain, and throughout his life he trod the narrower path of duty and self-sacrifice whenever his art was at stake. But this belief in his star, in his own genius, made him intensely egotistical in the life of the world. He always resembled one of those semi-divine poets that Plato speaks of, who utter the celestial truths by intuition without knowing that they are the mouthpiece of the gods. Nature, anticipating the slings and arrows he would have to face in the world, gave him a thick epidermis. He had such vitality, such imperviousness, that he was for ever wishing to override the opinions of others and mould them to his will. Nothing could be more characteristic than his attitude towards friends, even towards his nearest companion Franz Liszt. He exacted from them entire submission and never missed an opportunity of playing the tyrant. He was also so convinced of his own purity of purpose that he never scrupled to distort facts to his advantage. Mr Newman has proved conclusively with what caution his autobiography must be accepted by students, for his chief idea in writing it seems to have been to whiten his own character at the expense of others. We must not look on him as a profoundly

e

[ocr errors]

tter

of

vericked or vicious man: nothing could be farther from nhbe case. Living in a period of mutability and stress, enthen the old world was finally disappearing, he mirrored his character and art the tendencies of the times. He Tould be charming at one moment and disdainful at henother. He was generous with his money, but yet no he shopkeeper was paid if he could help it. In religion and berpolitics he vacillated continually between extremes. All those tendencies give that peculiarly cosmopolitan, manysided aspect to his music. His character was not only changeable and inconsistent to the highest degree: he had the temperament of a strolling actor and lost no opportunity of making histrionic gestures, and this habit communicated itself to his music. How often the flow of inspiration is checked by passages full of rhetoric! There was much in his character that was morbid and abnormal. He could never work in later life unless he was surrounded by soft lines and colours and perfumes. He was so fond of the scent of attar of roses that he used to get his barber to order it specially from Paris. His tastes in dress were fastidious, his rooms were furnished with the taste of an effeminate. He could not endure to see books in his room, and the windows had to be curtained to prevent his looking out at the garden, for it distracted him. At Munich, which in those days had the reputation of being a sober and austere city, Wagner displayed a profusion that must have shocked the townsfolk. He had his Grail room hung in the richest yellow satin, and in that sanctum he composed. Abnormally sensitive to colour and smell, he recalls nobody so much as Gabriele D'Annunzio by his histrionic attitude and his desire for luxurious splendour. Like so many great artists he was able to create for himself an outer personality which had nothing to do with the inner man. When we study his operas and read his letters to Liszt and his autobiography, we imagine him as the apostle of that characteristic doctrine of the 19th century, renunciation. The word ' renunciation' is ever on his lips, and Wolfram hovers in the background. But there was not one tittle of renunciation in his egotistical character. He was the most intolerant of men; and it was perhaps this intolerance which enabled him to carry out his reforms in the face

of harsh opposition. We must, therefore, agree with Mo Ernest Newman's statement when he says that Wagner p the man is an incomprehensible paradox, a paradox that ce will not diminish as the mists of legend envelop him. ca Nowadays, when there is a reaction against his mighty pl influence, we may leave Wagner the man with his vices and virtues alone, and attempt to take a general view of his work for music and the drama.

In recent years, when dramatic art has made great progress in technical perfection, it behoves us to look back at the development and evolution of Opera which culminated in the master of Bayreuth. It took over two centuries for the art of opera to perfect itself, and during that time the conflicts which raged round the conventions of the art were ceaseless. As critics have pointed out, the Music Drama, when it revived in Europe after the dark ages, passed through the same development as in the time of the Greeks: it became the handmaiden of religion. But there were two types-the 'Maggi' or May play of the Folk, and the religious drama which produced the 'Sacre Rappresentazioni.' The Sacre Rappresentazioni' at Florence, which were sung, are directly antecedent to our modern opera. In those old operas, the play was the thing; the music merely helped the people to concentrate on the poem. In the 'Orfeo' of Monteverde, however, we find a genuine attempt made to write music and drama in the Greek manner, but, unfortunately, this attempt failed, and dramatists tended more and more, in 17th-century Italy, to produce pageant shows. As M. Romain Rolland shows, in his 'Musiciens d'Autrefois,' the scene of Music Drama changed from Italy to France when Lully, a Florentine, created the national school. Lully stands out as one of the landmarks in the evolution of Music Drama, for he did not limit his attention to the music, but paid close attention to the libretto. His method of trying to give music the rhythm of the spoken word, has influenced French opera even down to our days. His ideas were followed by Gluck, who consecrated them, making music intertwine with the libretto. Music drama did not, however, develop unilaterally in accordance with the French theories. Italy never lost its deep

E

90

SC

« PreviousContinue »