greifluence over the art to which it had given birth. The hat Opera Buffa' of Naples, the Intermezzo,' became the andacestors to our more degenerate musical comedy. The rercadian Metastasio, called after his death the Italian hisophocles, was the last to sing the beauties of the hepherds and the shepherdesses of the old literature. Mozart, however, followed the sprightly 'intermezzi,' nd it was only later in his short life that he produced a ferman national opera in 'Zauberflöte.' Weber took p the theme of German nationalism and tried to mould an operatic school; but the ridiculous nature of his libretti took away from the character of his operas. He stands, however, at the threshold of our modern music drama, for Wagner took from him the torch.

When Wagner appeared on the scene he had, it is true, Beethoven and Weber to lead him, the one towards E music, the other towards opera; but on all sides there was nought but discouragement. The Italian tradition persisted and continued its evil example. Only the poorest type of literature was set to music, and the musicians in consequence considered their melodies of supreme importance. The libretto writer was a mere scenario writer, whilst the singers resembled the famous Harlequins or Pantaloons of old, ready to interrupt the action with their musical 'lazzi.' The singers, in fact, inherited all the arrogance and a great deal more from the old improvisers, and opera afforded an opportunity for their acrobatic feats of voice. It needed a giant to clear away these grotesque excrescences of the baroque, and that giant was Wagner. Though Wagner's early writings were, as he calls them, a cry of indignation against modern conditions of art, his early opera, Rienzi,' is in the old style of Meyerbeer or Rossini. If he had continued in that vein he would have made a fortune and, probably, have become a prosperous civic composer. But Wagner's thoughts in those years were not set on a life of ease. His mind was full of thoughts of regeneration, of the art of drama. His next opera, 'The Flying Dutchman,' with its folk legend and its idea of renunciation, is the first step in his evolution towards 'Tristan and Isolde.'

Mr Ernest Newman says that it took Wagner a long time to be conscious of his true goal in art, that he

sh

ice

NOW

江

t

120 RICHARD WAGNER AND THE MUSIC DRAM fumbled and groped his way to it in a fashion that ha no parallel in the history of music. In Wagner of those early years the swelling forces of all Europe seemed to find their expression. Music did not satisfy him in his passionate quests, and so we find him writing article after article, book after book, in impetuous haste. His case resembles slightly that of Victor Hugo, also a Titan, who, after laying aside the poet's wand, stepped on to the political platform. Wagner, like so many of the writers of the 1848 period, had all the catchwords on his lips. But it is interesting to note that he has no praise for the chaos of modern civilisation,' no belief in 'progress." In spite of his fiery words and energetic temperament, he had none of the optimism of the author of 'Plein Ciel.' 'I was able to tell this world,' he says, with all its sanctimonious concern for art and culture, that I despised it from the bottom of my heart, that in its veins there flowed not one drop of true artistic blood, that it was incapable of giving out one breath of human excellence, one breath of human beauty.' Throughout his life Wagner expressed this feeling of disdain for modern civilisation; but we must ascribe this disdain o partly to his histrionic temperament. Throughout his life he regarded himself as a Byronic hero on whose brow God had branded the words: 'Genius and Misfortune.'

'Vous aviez lu Lara, Manfred et le Corsaire, et vous aviez écrit sans essuyer vos pleurs ; le souffle de Byron vous soulevait de terre, et vous alliez à lui, porté par ses douleurs.' Filled with these thoughts that were agitating the world, it is no wonder that Wagner, by an incomprehensible paradox, laid almost least store by his greatest talent, music, and only looked on it as one of the means towards his mighty scheme of regeneration for the human race. Romain Rolland, in 'Jean Christophe,' has described minutely the life of such a man whose brain is an impassioned tangle of ideas.' Wagner in the 1848 period resembles Jean Christophe 'in Germany when he revolted against his own people and their insincerity: He saw German art stripped naked: every man, great and foolish alike, displaying his soul with attentive complacency. Emotion flowing over, moral nobility

JE

he

if

TE

Sc

SIC

STE

ishing forth, hearts melting in frenzied effusions, the uices open to appalling German super-sensibility: the rength of the strongest diluted with it, the weaker rowned by its drab floods, it was a deluge.' Jean hristophe resembles Wagner by this sentiment of revolt, ut Wagner had many of those faults of histrionism nd sentimentality which were anathema to Rolland's ugged hero who was inspired by Beethoven. He had 11 that fondness and foolish propensity of good Germans the or noisily unbosoming themselves in public.

has

150

As a result of his participation in the Revolution of 1848, Wagner had to fly from Dresden, and went to live Fat Zurich, where the Swiss people were in favour of a German Revolution. It was in Switzerland that he penned his two famous treatises—'Art and Revolution' and Art-Work of the Future.' He was at that time under the influence of Feuerbach and acknowledged him as master. Then, for the first time, he advocates that the drama should unite together all the arts and become a full expression of the people as it had been in the time of the Greeks. New art, said the impassioned composer, requires that man should return to nature. The strong man must give his strength and beauty to creating new art. Greek tragedy was witnessed by the whole population of a city with the greatest reverence. Nowadays it is only the rich who can enjoy art, and art is placed in the same category as 'artistic handicraft.' Drama in the days of the Greeks or in Shakespeare's day flourished because it appealed to the conscience of every situation. Nowadays drama does not make great appeal, and this is because it does not express the conscience of the State or that of private individuals. Wagner thus I looked on all ancient drama as conservative, because it was the mouthpiece of this public conscience. But in the days of the Romantic Movement the artist had to be the misunderstood genius whose brow was furrowed by hidden sorrows-'l'homme fatal'—in a word, true art must always be revolutionary. Wagner's views are those of Victor Hugo in 1848; but he was even more voluble than the great French poet. The essay Art and Revolution' is written in a mood of passionate exaltation, and, long after the Revolution and his flight, he remembered it and made it a basis for his maturer

views. As Mr Newman says, he clung desperately to see dreams of a social revolution which would bring the s artistic revolution. Many of the passages in Art and Revolution' and Art-Work of the Future' are spoiledom by his habit of mixing up politics with his æsthetic All theories. Besides, Wagner's style is so diffuse, cumbersome, the digressions are so frequent, that the t reader becomes intensely weary. But these prose works i were necessary to the development of his genius. His intellect needed a purgation so that his emotion might function freely.' The most striking example of this is 'Opera and Drama,' which was written in the winter of 1850-51. He had been brooding in his mind over 'Siegfried's Death,' the great theme which was to occupy him for the next twenty years of his life; and yet he cast it aside in order to produce a theoretical book. We can dismiss the idea that it was despair at the futility of bringing so vast an opera before the public: Wagner rarely suffered from fits of despair when he had any works to produce. The best explanation is that he wanted to make the examination of his artistic conscience and reach bedrock principles. His idea in writing la it must have been the same as that of Victor Hugo in writing the preface to 'Cromwell.'

الله

0

In 'Opera and Drama' Wagner starts off by showing th that the error of opera lay in the fact that music which was a means of expression was made an end, and drama which was the end was made a means. By drama Wagner did not mean any particular branch of literature, or even the union of various kinds of art; but the complete art which springs from a poet who is 'inventor and fashioner.' Wagner looked on the drama as the source of all art because it fashions life with the aid of all the senses and every means of expression. Drama must, therefore, be as Wagner says 'purely human,' and if it is to achieve this humanity, it must be freed from convention and historic formality.

Wagner was not the first to evolve the doctrine that the arts should combine in harmony so as to produce drama. Schiller also considered that his own poetic ideas proceeded from a certain musical mood and felt a faith in opera, hoping that tragedy might spring nobler from such a source. Goethe, who, as Emerson said,

0

are

pa sees at every pore,' tried to unite together poetry, music, painting, song, acting. Lessing also went even urther when he said that poetry and music rather than combining together should be one and the same art. is All these German writers had so saturated their thoughts, dtheir emotions, with the beauties of the Mediterranean art that they had caused a conflict to spring up within themselves-the conflict between reason and the senses. As a Spanish writer, José Ortega y Gasset, has said in his 'Meditaciones,' the Mediterranean art is a d perpetual justification for the appearance, the surface of a thing, the fugitive impressions that things cause on in our sensitive nerves. It is Italy that has taught clearthinking men from the misty north to see clearly.

100

In the relation between music and drama Wagner has many interesting points for us. He considers that music stands apart from the other arts, because its action is contrary to logical understanding, acting as it does like 'a power of Nature which men perceive but do not understand.' Houston Stewart Chamberlain considers that only a musician could have recognised the law of the most perfect drama, because music alone of all arts is purely human, for it can only express what is common to all, the purely human. It does not express the passion, the love, the longing of an individual in this or that situation, but passion, love, longing in themselves. This knowledge of the supreme nature of music is not confined to Wagner, for we find it in the majority of the German poets and philosophers at that time. Heinrich Von Kleist regarded it as the root of all the other arts, and E. T. A. Hoffmann says that 'Music opens to men an unknown realm, a world which has nothing in common with the outer world of the senses.' Wagner symbolises the great effort made by the Germans to give music its place as the 'root of the arts.' He continued the thought of Goethe that 'music is all form and substance,' and he dealt a blow against those æstheticians who limit the functions of music to the rules of single and double counterpoint and refuse to allow it any higher significance. It is for this reason that the romantic school of thought in Germany was called a musical school by French critics, who remarked how many works possessed titles borrowed from the