The Spirit of French Music/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
WAGNER THE MUSICIAN
On Wagner's music I offer not an actual study but merely some notes. This music is so well known to-day that it is unnecessary to analyse it methodically. But it still lends itself to a number of observations which need not lack novelty. I shall consider it not so much by itself as from the point of view of the services that its influence has been able to render, and the harm that it has been able to do, to the art of our country.
I
WAGNER'S MUSICAL DOCTRINE
When Wagner first appeared, his music was labelled "revolutionary." The epithet is vague. A man is always revolutionary in respect of someone or some thing, if only he has a personality and talent.
In taking the word as meaning "anti-classical" we shall assuredly not be departing from the more or less confused sense in which criticism used it. Does Wagner deserve that the word in this sense should be applied to him? Do the principles of Wagnerian art contain the negation of classical principles?
If this be admitted, then we may say that Wagner did exactly the opposite of what he taught, and of what he held to be good. Here is what I find in his essay on the Application of Music to Drama (he is addressing his advice to young composers ambitious of imitating him:)
"I would above all warn these young people not to aim, in harmony and instrumentation, at effects, and only to place outstanding features of that kind just where there is some reason that fully justifies their employment. Effects without reason are useless. I have never met a young composer but was anxious to get my approval above all for his so-called 'audacities.' It was only thus that I came to see that the prudent conduct which I have so carefully set myself to adopt in my own works, as regards modulation and instrumentation, has been entirely overlooked. Thus in the instrumental introduction of the Rheingold, it was quite impossible for me to get away from the fundamental chord, because I found no motive for doing so. And as to the animated scene which follows between Alberich and the daughters of the Rhine, I could only introduce into it the tonalities that came nearest, because what passion there is at this point is expressed with an entirely primitive simplicity. On the other hand, I confess that in Mozart's place I should have given a stronger colouring to the first entry of Donna Anna when under the excitement of the strongest passion she dogs the steps of her criminal seducer."
He gives some other examples in the same vein, and one cannot fail to recognize the classical character of the doctrine that inspires him; to model the expression exactly on the idea without overloading or compromise; never to seek brilliant effects for their own sake; to regard as unhealthy all charm of form not taken purely from the richness and subtleties of the theme. I put in ordinary language what Wagner states partly in technical terms.
His object in the essay to which I refer is to define and contrast the characteristics of dramatic symphony and pure symphony respectively. What he says on this subject implies the principle of the separation of types in all its rigour a work must conform with the type to which it belongs not merely in general aspect, but in all its elements and all its details. It is not merely by the manner of developing the themes that symphonic style is differentiated from dramatic style, but also by the nature of the themes that suit it. Wagner's views on this point carry with them the affirmation of another rule no less general and classical.
"I cannot reasonably conceive a principal theme of symphonic development bristling with modulations, especially if beginning from its opening announcement it presents itself in this tangle of display."
In drama it may happen that a series of modulations each bolder than the last and following each other close is perfectly appropriate. There are emotions that call for these bold changes of expression, these vivid transformations of colour in musical speech. The procedure has in that case something so natural about it that though worked so hard it does not draw on itself the hearer's attention. The musician notices it when reading and wonders why he was not struck by it when listening. But the pedantry of narrow-minded professsors practises its censure on formulae of which it cannot see the reason through its spectacles. And yet if you look into it these professors are not so severe as Wagner himself would be in their place.
"It seems to me that in my dramatic music a great part of the public finds absolutely natural and frankly enjoys almost everything that evokes loud protests from our 'professors.' But if these professors were to let me occupy the chair I would give them cause for much greater astonishment when they saw how far I pushed counsels of caution and restraint as regards the employment of effects of harmony. The first rule that I should give the pupils would be never to leave a key as long as they have something to say to which the key is suited. If this rule were followed we should see, as in old days, the birth of symphonies worth talking about, whereas our modern symphonies deserve nothing but silence."
To demand of symphonic themes a well-defined tonal character, to banish from them, or only admit with infinite discretion, modulation and chromatics, is fine healthy doctrine; it makes Wagner a frank "reactionary" compared with musicians who have boasted themselves of his school; or whom the public's superficial judgment reckons among his followers. It is worth while to dwell upon the thought he expresses. Symphony as everyone knows is a play of music upon given themes—it develops and varies them in a thousand ways, making them pass from one key to another, ornamenting them, combining them, and constantly reshaping their physiognomy by all the resources of harmony and counterpoint, breaking them up and embroidering on their fragments one new fancy after another, bringing them back to view in their original form and key, and after that making them run through a second and third cycle of transformations. In this game—at least when it is animated by the living force of real inspiration and is not engineered by a chill mechanism of scholastic combinations—the expression grows richer and richer, and is constantly illuminated with fresh aspects, with a whole world of new shades, subtleties and features. But the value and pleasure of all this detail of the symphonic fabric are subject to one obvious condition: it is that the piece must present at the same time some general lines, a complete design, of which the hearer never ceases to be conscious and to which all the ornaments are subordinated. Without this condition of unity the most ingenious symphonic developments will not charm us in the least; they will give an effect of vain diffusion, of barren research. Now the lines which give shape to the whole are provided by the generated themes. These themes, therefore, must be simple and clear, of large and vigorous design, of clean-cut outline and of the most definite character, all things which presuppose a strong tonal and rhythmic determination. Let us imagine them with the opposite qualities: subtlety, complexity, ingenuity, fluidity, shifting tonality, vague rhythm. The result can be foreseen. We shall have shades of expression extracted from the development of an idea which itself expresses nothing but a shade, details engendered by the exploitation of an idea which itself has only a value of detail: these will have no charm save for those who love the amorphous, and even (a still more dreadful thing) the amorphous and prolonged. For all others they will be wearisome; they will be loaded with that special weariness which is given off by so many works of modern music chock-full (alas) of "science" and "craftsmanship." I call such weariness special in the sense that it is accompanied by a hope that is always disappointed: one keeps on hoping that so many sounds are going to produce at last a little music, and it never comes. The source of this weariness is to be found just where Wagner puts it, in the paradox that consists of wanting to construct symphonies of classical form on a basis of invention that has nothing classical about it, of wanting to make something great out of the puny and trivial. It is to be found in the strange oversight of those musicians who notice everything in the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven except one point—the nature of the fundamental ideas which are the very reason of the existence of their symphonic creations.
These views are of the most classical character, and it would be a good thing if the essay in which I find them expressed were translated into French. But it will be noticed that Wagner never learnt to apply them outside music; he cannot get back to the general truths from which they proceed, and which concern all the arts. Wagner's culture was healthy only in the realm of music; in everything else it was full of darkness and disorder, as will have been sufficiently proved by the analysis of his poems; the reading of his works, wherever musical art is not very specially the subject, would prove it still better. And yet someone has managed to discover in his works "a thinker!"
How were the two portions of his mind, so different and so unequal, able to collaborate in one and the same work?
How could music inspired with the classical doctrine associate itself with poetry in which assuredly it will occur to no one to find this characteristic? That is a question which can only be resolved by a somewhat detailed analysis of the relations between the music and the poetry of the Wagnerian operas.
II
CLASSIFICATION OF WAGNER'S WORKS
In the composition of the Wagnerian poems several distinct elements may be noted, and the special study which I have just devoted to them enables me, I think, to define these elements in a summary fashion.
I. Ideas. To be accurate, they are larvæ, phantoms of ideas: ideas social, political, cosmogonic, mystic, prophetic; a chaotic system picked up by Wagner in the intellectual grooves of the German nineteenth century and proving above all a complete inability to think, combined with an ardent ambition to do so.
II. A mythological realm of faëry, treated in the form of drama. The persons of the drama are in part the interpreters of the poet's ideologies, and as such they have no real existence. They might be called, after Victor Hugo, "shadow lips," and we might leave to none but the Wagnerian initiates (an intellectual race whom I have known very well, and in whom vivacity is not the quality that strikes me) the task of hearing what these shadowy lips say. But on the other hand, these persons of the drama have a soul. I do not assert that they have a character. Oh no, a character is something very complicated for fairy-tale heroes. But they have a soul, such as people have in fairy stories, a little soul that a little child can walk round, though it often animates an enormous body, the body of a giant, a dragon or a god.
III. Wagnerian drama contains another class of protagonists, which can only be so described by pure metaphor. They are, in reality, abstractions. But these abstractions are not hollow. They embrace realities. They are the names of the most general moral forces, whose conflicts have since the beginning of time engendered human events,—Fate and Freedom, Greed and Love, Ambition and Disinterestedness, Knowledge and Instinct. These are the powers that guide the drama. Not that the poet has personified them in figures of flesh and blood. But his heroes constantly mention them, refer to them as the principles and motives of their actions. By this substitution of the abstract for the personal, Wagner's works wear the aspect of mediæval Mysteries. On the other hand the concept of these forces and their part in humanity and history is mixed with ideologies that are purely modern, revolutionary, romantic and Germanic. It is this that gives to the Tetralogy something that it shares with Hugo's Legend of the Ages, and the symbolical novels of Zola.
IV. The setting and scenery must not be counted among the accessories of Wagner's dramatic poems, but among their constituent elements. One might even say that they are both important elements. They are assuredly the richest and most ornate. This scenery is always a blend of the fantastic with landscape, of fairyland with nature.
V. Lastly, there is a fifth and less conspicuous element; among all these large and opulent features it is the only delicate thing. I am thinking of those passages of lyric reverie for which Nietzsche in the midst of his anti-Wagnerian diatribes expresses a liking. In these it is Wagner himself who speaks through the mouth of his characters, attributing to them thoughts and sensations whose subtlety does not always accord with their usual simplicity; but touching poetry emanates from them. Thus Siegfried and Parsifal giving themselves up to recollection of their emotions in childhood—or Yseult enjoying with exquisite sensibility the beauty of the night, the murmur of the neighbouring stream, the sound of the distant horn. …
Apart from these five elements, we must pick out in Wagner's works two characteristics that largely contribute to give them their physiognomy.
First, their simplicity of construction. Their plot, disposition and arrangement are free from complication or overloading, and are easily surveyed. From every point one has a view of the whole. The author has shewn himself very clever in extracting from the rank growth of legend or old romances material for a clear and sharply-defined scenario. I am not speaking of that higher kind of simplicity that is proper to our classical theatre, where the action arises out of the natural movements of passion and of character, the hazard of events having only the smallest possible part in it, while "machines" have none at all, and where the theatrical effects themselves depend upon a moral cause. How could dramatic action in Wagner be thus developed, when his characters have, to say truth, no personality, or at most have only an elementary personality lacking fine shades, and bearing the same relation to the creations of Corneille and Racine that statuary of the dark ages bears to the figures of Donatello? The simplicity of Wagner's dramas is rather the simplicity of Perrault's tales, the simplicity of those happily conceived fairy stories, where little happens, but such events as there are are very strong in picturesqueness and colour, pleasant to the imagination, and connected with each other by a perfect logic—I mean of course fairyland logic.
It will be seen that my position is far removed from that of some critics who praise Wagner for having written "intimate" dramas. That is magnificent praise, but a grave illusion. It is true that these dramas are by no means overloaded with intrigue, and it is true that metaphysical clouds mingle with the development of their ingenuous plots. But a thing may be not overloaded with matter, and yet be materialistic, and what is cloudy is not necessarily "intimate," though many people do not distinguish as they should these two ideas. To my taste these dark portions of the theme make for superfœtation and cumbrousness. And when, at the theatre, I feel the pleasure which can, apart from the music, attach to Wagnerian spectacle, it is because I lose sight of them, I sweep them off my horizon, and am stupid enough to confine myself to what would have amused me when I was ten years old.
"Sir," said a Marseilles soap-boiler who was sitting next me at Bayreuth, "Why do the gods die at the end of the Tetralogy? I have never been able to understand that. You who appear to have studied these things will no doubt explain." "Sir," I replied, "my studies, which have borne chiefly on German philosophy and the exegeses of Wagner's disciples would I think enable me to give you a dozen explanations, if you were to address your kind question to me while holding a pistol at my head. As, however, you approach me in a milder manner, permit me to give no answer at all. That will be treating you as I treat myself, for I did not come here to yawn."
The soap boiler reminds me of an American who "had his leg pulled" by some young fellows, though they were Wagnerians of the strictest sect; it was they who told me about it. They laughed over it as seminarists might after allowing themselves some innocent though rather daring pleasantry on sacred subjects. The American wanted to know what was the evil, the "wound" from which King Amfortas suffers, and which betrays itself all through Parsifal by such violent physical manifestations of pain. "An ulcerated stomach," they told him. The reply satisfied him, for he could now see why Amfortas is unable to take part in a certain much desired meal, which is no other than the Lord's Supper. The joke is assuredly very irreverent, for Amfortas' suffering is no empty name, it is not connected with silly ideologies, like the famous despair of Wotan, longing to die because in his soul "Knowledge has ousted Love"; it is the suffering of sin, of moral taint, of remorse. Yet my Wagnerians ought to have realised that the mere possibility, were it only in the mind of this man from overseas, of believing their story, implied a sufficiently serious blemish in the work; namely an excess of materialism and of material detail in the manner in which this suffering, which postulates a higher degree of spirituality, is presented to our gaze. This does not prevent Amfortas from singing some very fine things in the second act of Parsifal: their accent is in places sublime.
The second point to pick out in Wagner's dramas is the abundance of repetitions. This feature might seem to be inconsistent with the last—for if the plots of Wagner's dramas are simple and clear, we may well wonder why the poet finds it necessary for one or another of his characters to be recurring at every opportunity to the recital of past events. Let us refer to the terrible scene between Fricka and Wotan in the second act of the Valkyrie, or to that in the third act between Wotan and Brünnhilde, where the ruler of the gods explains at interminable length to his wife, and then to his daughter, the origins and dark features of the situation. All that his speeches add to what we know already, to what has happened before our eyes, or to what we have been told, is a peculiar sort of obscure and barren commentary. Germans perhaps take pleasure in these passages of long drawn out sham profundity. Whatever power the heavy musical work expended on these passages may often possess, there is for Frenchmen nothing more oppressive.
Such then are the substance and basic arrangements that Wagner has set himself to express in music. It is obvious that the elements which we have found in them lent themselves very unequally to musical expression, and that some of them were quite incapable of moving or inspiring the imagination of a musician, whoever he might be. To have musical ideas it is first necessary to have genius; after that an exaltation of soul is required which mental pictures and sentiments alone can produce. Wagner's theogonic and cosmogonic conceptions, his theorising day dreams on the origins, history and future of humanity, society and civilisation:—all these "ideas" which embrace everything and grasp nothing, their vacillating system which varied according as he found himself under the influence of the revolution of 1848, or under the influence of a royal friendship,—according as he had been reading Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Gobineau or Gleizès (yes, Gleizès, a French vegetarian theorist who made Wagner a convinced vegetarian, as he has indicated symbolically in an episode of Parsifal)—all this rubbish heap of doctrine, pseudo-philosophy, and hermetism, was too vague, too feeble, too lacking in solidity to rouse any feelings, or to present itself in images carrying the strength of inspiration. All this has nothing in common with Wagner's creative genius, it belongs to the weak, or rather unformed portion of his brain. When he has had to translate its verbal expression into music, what has he done? He has put in second-hand music. He has applied to these cold spots musical forms taken from parts of the work that have the warmth of inspiration, forms created by a burst of direct inspiration, which he has adapted by clever though up-hill musical work, better calculated to rejoice the eye of the expert who reads than to touch or charm those who hear it. The Wagnerian ideologies are the wasted part of Wagner's literary invention. They have no part in the pulsing life of his music.
In view of the very peculiar substance of these dramas it is not surprising that the expression of human feelings does not hold the chief place in them. Among the panels of the Wagnerian monument it occupies neither the largest nor the richest in beauties. And yet magnificent specimens are not lacking.
There is no need to dwell at length on Wagner's love duets. Their charms and characteristics are well known.
If the impulse of a passionate and simple tenderness, the gift of two hearts, young and pure, still strangers to mistrust and vanity, opening to each other like expanding rosebuds, if divine and child-like playfulness of heart blending with chaste nobility of feeling,—if these are the things that can lend the finest and most inspiring charm to the expression of love, then Wagner has written no love scene that surpasses that of Lohen- grin, just as, speaking generally, he has written no fresher, more youthful or more sweetly radiant music than that of Lohengrin. What matters the presence of a few out of date musical forms when the thrill of genius animates them, and the ardour of the artist's happiest poetic period colours them?
As to the duet in the second act of the Valkyrs, while not denying its opulence, its extraordinary musical bloom, I confess that I am not so strongly affected by it. Its prelude is delicious poetry, and all music lovers remember that music of wood and harps unfolding its masterly harmonies while the door of the hut where the lovers are secretly to exchange their vows opens to the breath of the April night. Siegmund's song "Spring has routed Winter" is not unworthy of this opening. Some one has reproached it for being Mendelssohnian. Is the implication that Mendelssohn was a minor musician? What follows, though the movement is so spirited, seems to me richer in ravishing forms and sonorities than in accents that reach the heart. I am not speaking of the superb peroration of Siegmund as he wrenches the sword from the ash trunk, but of those long confidences about the past that take place between the young couple, in which there is a procession (and there are to be so many in the course of the work) of all the mythologies and all the leit-motiv of the Tetralogy. I prefer the pathetically caressing inflexions of the song with which the same Siegmund, in the second act, lulls the sleep of his unhappy mistress who has been entrapped with him in the depths of the woods.
The duet in the second act of Tristan has proportions that may be called formidable! I pass hastily over the first part, in which I have never been able to take an interest; indeed, as a listener at any rate, I could never clearly make it out. But beginning from a certain point on which all music lovers will be able to put their finger, what a flow of melody, what abundance, what rhythm, what outpouring! No matter that Tristan and Yseult are young, it is no longer love as we saw it in Lohengrin, it is no longer young love. It is autumnal love, an aftermath of passion,—love that has passed forty, such as Wagner was experiencing in his own life when he wrote these pages: love that feels the shortness of the time before it as keenly as it enjoys its exaltation, because it has come late, and because it is a guilty love: it holds itself closer than it holds the beloved one, in a sort of attitude of defence against all that threatens it, above all against death, already lurking in the background. It is this flight from death's power that is required to give its character of complete abandonment to the final scene of passion at once carnal and ethereal, in which the two lovers give themselves up utterly to the dream of floating on the upper air to realise the passionate union of the senses. How different all that is from the sentiment of the Latin races! If we aspire to the celestial region, it is not in the hope of becoming disembodied souls.
The reader will not expect here an index of the beauties of Wagner's music; I will give merely a rapid glance at their chief divisions. It was not in the expression of love alone that Wagner was the eloquent interpreter of human pathos. It is true that the domineering jealousy of Fricka, the conjugal lassitude of Wotan, brought no characteristic inspiration to the musician. These gross gods have gross feelings, and the rather heavy style of the leit-motiv suits in this sense the movements of their souls. But Wotan's paternal love, indignant, wounded, and raised by that very fact to a higher degree of affection, finds expression in cries and tones that are grand and moving. While considering this note of humanity let us not overlook in Wagner the gift of sombre and striking poetry for rendering moments of tragic suspense: see the end of the love scene in Lohengrin, the scene between Brünnhilde and Siegmund in the second act of the Valkyrs, and in the Crépuscule the scene of Gutruna distraught at the prolonged absence of Siegfried and the mysterious signs of misfortune. The use of affecting harmonies, of very low notes brought into prominence, of silent pauses, at these points is incomparable.
But all these tragic and poetic elements are not what most strike the eye when taking a general view of Wagner's works. They occupy a place to one side, as it were, because the human element itself occupies a side place, one might almost say an episodic position. Symbolism, mythology, fantasy, and landscape form the principal mass; they are what the building presents to view when seen from a distance. By the symbolic I mean those entities representing abstract powers who are the real protagonists of the Tetralogy,—Gold, Power, Knowledge, Love. Mythology personifies them, converts them into great figures, and the genius of the poet too shows itself creative and inventive to the same purpose. These figures ally themselves by a thousand affinities with the varied spectacles of nature, they mingle with the thousand pictures of field and forest, mountain and river, and it is the impression of this blending that excites to the highest pitch Wagner's creative imagination; from this come the musical forms that bear the strongest stamp of his individuality, and one may say the greater part of his leit-motiv.
What most markedly distinguishes these forms is their extraordinary plastic quality. The idea of musical plasticity, of trends of melody and harmony which by their picturesqueness and poetry offer a strongly significant relief and seem to stand out like sculpture in space, may seem paradoxical. The fact is that Wagner, alone indeed among German musicians of all ages, and alone of all European musicians in the nineteenth century, has realised that idea. But on the other hand there is an age and a country in which this type of music had flourished and had become familiar—the eighteenth century in France. In my study of Rameau I have already compared in this respect Rameau and Wagner, and I will not go back to it. But I would add that Rameau was only the highest and most glorious representative of a style that was once traditional and classical with us: I will not call it descriptive (the concept would be too small and narrow), but objective music, music used rather as the sonorous voice of beings and things than as the voice of the individual soul, rather as the carillon of the universe than as the essential expression of inward lyricism.
This second conception is German. According to the German aesthetes music has as its dominant and almost specific property the expression of the inward dreamland of the soul and the states through which the soul passes when closed to the world and wandering in its own bypaths. Many Frenchmen indeed have adopted with docility this Germanic idea, as they have a hundred other Germanic ideas, but the strength and health of French music have gained nothing thereby. In contrast with that conception we set the Wagnerian music as being of a different nature and flowing from a different source. Do we mean then that the music of this German is not German? We do at any rate mean that in certain of its characteristics, and those precisely the most distinctive ones, it is in fact not German. Compare it with Schumann's music. It seems to me that if anything is Germanic it is Schumann's lyricism. Now nothing in the world is further removed from the inspiration of Schumann, than the inspiration of Wagner. For Schumann, Nature is poetic as the agent that excites vague states of feeling, vague hopes, vague delirium, vague melancholy and other moods, intense of course, of a sensibility that is occupied with itself alone and feeds only on itself. For Wagner Nature is poetic in herself, as a divine machine whose working and phenomena give the mind and the imagination their greatest delights. I certainly will not go so far as to make him a Frenchman on account of this feature; that would be to overlook huge differences of taste and style. With Frenchmen the musical rendering of things is subtle, sober, dainty, vibrant, lively, stripped and free from excess of matter, full of rhythm. With Wagner it is startling, opulent, sumptuous, streaming with colour; it makes far less call on rhythmic invention (which is not Wagner's strong point) than on forms, on harmony and instrumentation. But its spirit is not German. Wagner, who was so German, so pitiably German in his ideas and literary lubrucations is very little of a German at root in his musical genius, nor am I the first person to have noticed the fact. Some critics have even thought it their duty to point out in this connection that his father after the flesh, who must not be confused with his legal father, and whose name was Geyer (an actor and painter of talent) was of Jewish race. I mention the point, and confine myself to saying that if a certain "oriental splendour" which as M. J. Marnold justly observes, distinguishes Wagner's music may be plausibly traced to Semitic blood, we have also to reckon with his incontestable and entire sincerity of expression, which comes from another source.[1]
What on the other hand belongs to German origin and formation in Wagner's music is the workmanship, the massive technique, the florid polyphony, the powerful and heavy tramp of the harmony, that has no caprices or jumps.
III
ORCHESTRATION AND THE "LEIT-MOTIV"
Wagner introduced into the musical theatre two novelties of far-reaching importance; they have made in the figurative no less than in the literal sense of the words a great noise in the world. These novelties are the enrichment of the orchestration and the leit-motiv. Some reflections on these two matters will be useful. They may have the advantage of emphasising the rule of extreme precaution which is necessarily imposed on young French musicians when they feel tempted to imitate the Wagnerian procedure.
The question of orchestration has a technical side, and it may be laid down generally that it is a very delicate matter exactly to appreciate novelties brought into the technique of the art by a musician, a school, or a period.
Such novelties are of two kinds. Some constitute progress. Others are changes. The former correspond to a perfecting of music's means of expression, the latter to modifications of taste and sensibility.
The former class have the character of discoveries; they are produced in the course of the period elapsing between the beginnings of modern music and the moment when the language and laws of this music find themselves completely established. From that moment there is no further occasion for them. The latter class are merely a new fashion of employing elements already in use, and crop up whenever new shades of feeling call for new shades of expression.
This distinction is easily made theoretically, but its application might give rise to a great many controversies. What is the moment at which the technique of modern music is to be considered to have reached such a degree of perfection that nothing important could be, and in fact nothing was, added to it? And on what ground are we to decide whether such and such modern musician, who has charmed some and irritated others, but has left no one indifferent by the unprecedented sonorities of his music, how, I ask, are we to decide whether he has merely used the traditional language plus refinements and peculiarities of his own, or whether on the other hand he has not revolutionised the very basis of the language?
It would need a whole treatise to explain oneself thoroughly on these problems. I will confine myself to indicating the principles to which I adhere on this subject with all the stronger certainty because they depend closely on general truths of which I have no doubt whatever. A comparison will help me to define my thought.
No educated man worthy of the name will deny that there exists a classical French language which became fixed in the period of Malherbe, Pascal, Descartes, and the foundation of the Academy, and which has remained essentially unchanged ever since. The most recent in date of our good writers wrote it, or are still writing it. It shines in all the brilliance of its purity in Renan, Anatole France, Lemaître. The common doctrine of the great writers is that everything can be expressed in this admirable language, that there is no subtlety so fine that it cannot be rendered by it in luminous characters, when it is well handled: and that what one cannot, even by twisting it, make it say is not worth saying. The intellects for whom that language does not suffice, should blame some impotence, some deformity of their own thought. Whenever, in the last three centuries it has served as instrument to a new genius (I am speaking of real, not sham genius, a human and universally intelligible genius, not the presiding genius of a literary sect) it has recovered, has this old language of Bossuet and Voltaire, aspects of wonderful youth. What style gives contemporaries a more attractive impression of novelty than Renan's?—and he is thoroughly classical at any rate in his finest passages. Whereas the "writing audacities" of naturalism and impressionism, which in the eyes of competent critics were old at birth, are to-day as everyone admits utterly decayed.
An analogous state of things exists in music. There is a classical musical language. Its fixation has been more progressive and has taken a longer time to attain its realisation, but none the less it was completed a long time ago. It is the language that Rameau, Couperin, Haydn and Mozart wrote. It suffices for all healthy and normal needs of expression. If ever the day comes when it begins to fall into neglect, then European music will be starting down the road of decadence, and will fall more or less rapidly to the level of Arab or Chinese music, the level of Cairo Street. It is in the musicians who are called classical that this language presents itself in the character of the most perfect generality; they remain therefore its immortal initiators, it is they who may be imitated without peril to a composer's personality. But at bottom Wagner's musical vocabulary, though far more individual and not admitting of direct imitation, is the same as theirs. I leave out of consideration for the moment the orchestration, which is, of all elements of expression, the most external. I shall speak of it later. I am now concentrating on the musical writing in itself—melody, harmony, composition.
There is nothing more permanent than this classical writing, but there is also nothing that lends itself to greater variety. It constitutes a very rich fabric, and in this fabric it only needs that the relative importance of certain elements be modified for its general coloration to give effects hitherto unknown. The chord of the ninth led up to in conformity with the most fixed laws of harmony only figures in the style of the classical composers in a transitory and fugitive state; it merely occurs in passing. In Wagner this rich chord is promoted to a more brilliant destiny; it takes up room, it flaunts itself, communicating to the whole of the style in which it plays this part its fine flamboyant character. At the present day we have had more than enough of the ninth, we will have nothing more to do with it; too many musicians have overwhelmed us with it, not stopping to think that it was specifically suited to Wagner's class of creation, and to no one else's. An analogous remark may be made on the very subtle and delicate harmonies of such men as Ernest Chausson and Gabriel Faure. They depict the soul of a sensitive and highly strung French period, the period from 1880 to 1900, the period that saw itself in Verlaine. They will always charm, and these masters are assured of immortality by the purity of their manner of writing. But France's coming generations will not meet their like again except in a more vigorous and simpler art, a more open style.
The question of orchestration has its part in all these general observations, but with one reservation. Of all the elements of technique this one is affected by a condition peculiar to itself. Its progress does not depend only on discoveries of the mind and the ear as to properties of sounds in general. It depends also on the inventions of the instrument maker, on the instruments available at a given period. It would have been impossible for Lulli to introduce colour into his orchestra by means of horns, since the harmonic horn did not exist in his day; Rameau was the first (in France) to employ it. We will admit for the sake of definiteness that the material basis of modern instrumentation appears complete in the symphonic orchestra of Beethoven, and that such as we find it there it suffices for all natural and human modes of expression by sound-character. What has been added since is of very limited application, and is only capable of giving certain special and episodic picturesque effects. We may say then that the four great musicians who have, since the days of Beethoven, progressively brought new features into orchestration—Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner—have arrived at this result far less by the introduction of new instruments than by a new manner of employing instruments already available. That is far more interesting. But we must emphasise the fact that this new use depended above all on the increase of the number of instruments, the enlargement of the orchestral mass. The realisation of the sound-colours that suited the imaginations of these artists depended essentially on this point; they had to have at their disposal a great increase of sound-material.
No one has so much enriched instrumental material as Wagner. Those who marvel (without being altogether right or altogether wrong) at the splendour of his orchestra should pay attention to this very important detail. These splendours have a cause that is partly mechanical. Wagner provided for his contemporaries the enchantment, no negligible one, of a mass of sound colours such as the human ear had not till then enjoyed. But the operation by which he arrived at this result has in itself nothing of magic or genius about it. It is an arithmetical operation. What was required more than anything else was to assemble the instruments of each group in sufficient number to draw from them effects to which in less numbers they did not lend themselves. As all musicians know (but it must be said for the benefit of the profane), this was not by way of making them sound louder, which would be a result of no interest in itself, but of making them produce, by their harmonic agglomeration, new sonorities. In the old orchestration the wood and the brass came in to add touches of colour on the practically permanent basis of the quartet. In the Wagnerian orchestration they provide of themselves completely fixed and startling colours, self-sufficient and capable of filling the whole picture. Certainly taste is required for the right employment of these colours when once one has them on the palette. But creating them was only a question of mass. Let us not confuse the effects of the big gun with the conceptions of strategy. And one may speak here of the big gun without the comparison being too forced. For besides the multiplication of the brass instruments already in use, Wagner added to the orchestra brasses of unheard of size which were manufactured for him, the tuba, the saxotromba, the double-bass trombone, which are really instrumental big guns.
Yes, it is a question of mass as well as a question of taste, a question of arithmetic as well as a question of poetry. These torrents and overflows of brilliance, this sparkling and incandescence, these azures and hyper-azures of orchestral colour, this phenomenal bigness, both "quantitative" and "qualitative" of the orchestra, were called for by the workings of Wagner's imagination just as the body calls for a garment that will fit it. There was fitness in the association of this form with this basis. The one required the other. It is unreasonable therefore to criticise, in itself and taken separately, Wagner's style of orchestration, as though Wagner, conceiving what he did conceive and feeling as he felt, could have been free to adopt any other manner of orchestration. His orchestration is what it had to be.
But surely everyone can see that such a remark, so far from enslaving our taste to the seductions of the Wagnerian orchestration, absolutely sets it free and restores to it in this respect its full liberty. It provides us with the surest rule for appreciating at their true worth the influence exercised by this part of Wagner's art over the musicians who succeeded him, and the imitation and frequent attempts to go one better to which it has been subject on their part. It is not denied that for the detail of orchestral technique, and of the employment of instruments, an artist of the present day has a great deal to learn from Wagner, but that is not the point. There are methods discovered by Wagner as a great master of orchestral technique which may perfectly well be incorporated in an orchestral whole whose features will yet be not in the least Wagnerian. We are considering here these general features, we are considering, not the recipes of orchestration, but taste in orchestration; in particular we are enquiring whether there ought to be a tendency to augment Wagner's orchestral mass, or only to preserve it, or on the other hand to aim at restraining and lightening it. The reply is not in doubt. The Wagnerian type of orchestration is closely bound up with the nature of Wagner's ideas, and it is a profound mistake to orchestrate in the same spirit or to wish to go one better than him in the same direction, when one has not—when it is impossible one should have—ideas to express that have any kinship with his. That is impossible not only to Frenchmen, but to sincere artists of any nation. Wagner's dramatic and poetic ideas taken as a whole make a blend of extremely singular, and even entirely individual quality, full of artificiality and far removed from nature.
Wagner's extraordinary power of imagination (and never before was such imaginative power set working, stirred and fired, by objects less natural), and the magnificence of some of his music, have gained for his literary inventions a certain fictitious reputation. But let us look at them by themselves. How foreign they are to all that is distinctive in ourselves, to all that our own culture has handed down to us, to all that appeals to us in whatever way! And in their exaggerated bigness, what a defect of real richness, what poverty of substance there often is! Is it not madness and servitude to insist on clothing creations of French literature and poetry in the same thick and heavy musical drapery? Our musical poetry, our musical drama, require a lighter garment that allows the luminous body of thought to shine through. Consider the class of subjects that Wagner has to translate into music: the slow and elementary thought of his monumental and childish gods, the violent but short-lived humanity of his heroes with their lack of real characterisation; consider above all the subjects and the spectacles of his mythological and cosmic fairyland, the gallop of the Valkyrs across the clouds, the games of the Germanic water sprites in the depths of the river, the splendours of the divine palace built in the sky, the dragon guardian of the gold, the barrier of fire leaping from the ground at a sign from Wotan, Valhalla falling in ruins through space, the magic lance, the enchanted sword, the giants, the dwarfs, the Norns! All these things really required the twenty to twenty-five brass instruments, and the whole heavy artillery of his orchestra. But for our part we are concerned only with the general expression of human subjects; we have also an old tradition of the picturesque in music; but our picturesque is quick-witted, refined, salted with intelligence, thoroughly rhythmical, and what should we want with these tyrannous paraphernalia? An orchestra that bears resemblance to speech, not to a tempest, is what suits us. "Oh," cried Nietzsche, "that orchestration of Wagner, I call it the sirocco!"
If, nevertheless, too many of our musicians have allowed themselves to be drawn by Wagner's example into this clumsy debauch of an orchestration that is overloaded, intrusive, ruthless, "obese" as someone has called it, which draws all attention on itself, crushing the dramatic and moral element, crushing the intellectual charm, crushing all grace, then what follows is inevitable. As far as general culture, reason and taste are concerned these artists have fallen far below the level that becomes French artists; French nature, which is either cultivated or ceases to exist, has become atrophied in them, and there is left nothing natural about them.
The stories that they will be able to put into music will be stories that have nothing human in them. The men and women whom they will put on the stage will have nothing of humanity but its outward shape; they will be phantoms, phantoms that speak and move it is true, but without any motive for doing so that could appeal to us. The kind of thing that Wagner sings, and sings with sincerity and eloquence, we cannot sing with sincerity because of our civilisation. I would deal in exactly the same way with the question of the leit-motiv. It is a big question, but is completely elucidated by what I have just said. Wagner's claim to have invented the leit-motiv has been disputed. That is an error. Musicians have always made more or less use of the repetition of formulae; but no one previously had done so (this is absolutely certain) in a continuous and systematic way. The essential feature of the leit-motiv lies in these two characteristics; it is a fixed musical formula attached to a person, a sentiment, an idea or a situation, and reappearing every time they reappear on the stage or in the words. In the Tetralogy it often has a wonderful effect: often also it has a very heavy one. In any case the possibility of applying it presupposes a dramatic composition of a very special kind, one in which the characters have no natural life, and are personified abstractions or walking images rather than really animated beings. The fixity of the formula cannot be made to suit the expression of living beings or things in action or movement. It is therefore utterly absurd to employ the Wagnerian leit-motiv in the music of a drama of normal quality, I mean one that aims at giving us the impression of life and nature. A young musician not fanatically devoted to Wagner, once told me that whatever might be the case with other elements of his art he had at least found in the leit motiv the only possible means of giving musical unity to composition. I do not believe anything of the kind. The greatest dramatic musicians of the past left something still to be discovered in this respect; Wagner has the very great merit of having posed this problem of unity, but the solution which he adopted cannot pretend to have a general validity. The problem perhaps still awaits solution, at any rate in part. But sooner or later a genius will arise who will easily fill this gap, almost unconsciously, and certainly without having recourse to these gross and glaring methods.
IV
CONCLUSION
I do not think I have denied to Wagner any of his charms. I have owed to his art much enjoyment which I am very far from disdaining. But if I am asked what our art (apart from technical lessons, as I have said before) might advantageously borrow from him, according to my very humble opinion, I reply at once, "Nothing." Our life-giving streams are elsewhere.
Is that to say that his effect on French musicians has had no beneficial quality? Not at all! He administered a salutary shock. When he came on the scene French music was at a very low ebb. The period which extends from 1820 or 1825 to about 1865 was that of its lowest depression since it first began. Except for Berlioz, who had fine talent but was an ineffective musician, and some delightful comic operas by Auber, it was a period of utter emptiness, that is if one admits that replicas in plaster and sham glories based on successes of coarse quality are really equivalent to emptiness. It is possible, that our art would have recovered itself quite well, (and I believe it would have done so) without the help of Wagner. Still, the universal attention that he attracted by works of which the least one can say is that they gloriously raised again the fallen flag of true music, brought comfort and support to that generation of young French musicians, who were proposing to undertake the same restoration. They included Bizet, Lalo, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, César Franck. But these were hardly the men to wish to imitate him.
I have pointed out in what direction Wagner may lead our artists astray, and in what direction he has in fact led some astray. But speaking generally our music has remained independent of his. It has been since his arrival more French than in the immediately preceding period. People who, as some still do, set off Meyerbeer, Adolphe Adam, or Ambrose Thomas against Wagner as representing national music, are utterly wrong. The music of those composers had few French features. They were makers of Italian music, but they were weaker than the Italians; sometimes they were makers of German music, as it only can be made by those who are not Germans.
Moreover the wisest course is not to worry ourselves at all as to whether the music of our musicians conforms or does not conform to the national type. Let us ask only whether it is fine music, whether it is alive. If it possesses those qualities, we may make our minds easy, it is French. For one can create nothing living but with one's own nature. A Frenchman of France who has real talent has a French talent. For the last fifty years our country has shewn in the realm of music the most brilliant fecundity. Since Wagner's death its rank in music is the highest in the world. The half century which has seen the birth of the generation which is at present our pride, in succession to that whose most illustrious representatives I have named, cannot fail to have been French in music.
Let us however lay down a restrictive hypothesis. Let us suppose that considered under its most general aspect, the music—the good music—of this recent and contemporary period does not altogether satisfy us. Let us suppose that with its admirable qualities of nobility, style, sincerity, delicacy, expressive sublety, learned ingenuity, sound work, it yet does not appear up to now to realise the idea or the dream that we cherish of the true song of our race. Let us suppose that on hearing a choir piece of Josquin des Près or Jeannequin, a comic opera of Grétry or Monsigny, a tragedy or ballet of Rameau, an instrumental piece by Daquin or Couperin, we find occasion to ask ourselves what has become of that health and vigour, that simple charm, that liveliness of mind and senses, that youth and enthusiasm, tenderness and simplicity of heart; and to ask on the other hand why there should be this persistent odour of melancholy, this painful and somewhat numbing complexity of sentiment, this thrill of nervosity, these checks and hesitations of the lyric outpouring. Let us suppose, I say, that there are these gaps, these shadows on the picture. Are we to blame our musicians themselves for them? Are we to put these things down to their peculiar formation or to the fact of some unlucky influence, of an artistic or professional kind, that it has been their lot to undergo? Certainly not. We must seek a more general cause. And where shall we find it if not in the present and passing condition of French sensibility and French character, in the state of national life?
Art is the child of its time. The time that is being brought to a close by the present terrible events was for our country a time of moral and civil depression, little suited to strong and abundant life of the soul, to energy of imagination. These events lead us, nay force us, to hope for better days. The French race has proved on the field of battle and in the trench that in the midst of the long and slow testing of the time before the war, and beneath its apparent lethargy, it had at least not allowed its heart to degenerate. The experience of so much bloodshed and ruin will bring back (but at what price?) its heedless mind to the right path. The stoutness of heart that France has never lost, the mental balance that she has found again, the contentment that victory will bring, will restore her old-time joyfulness. And with her joy she will find again her Music.
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- ↑ I have elsewhere called Geyer Wagner's stepfather. His mother had in fact taken him as her second husband when the future musician was still a child. Geyer's actual paternity may be deduced from a thinly veiled indication given by Wagner himself.