Richard Wagner, Composer of Operas. John F. Runciman
demonstrated just the contrary: I have never seen anything else occur.
Wagner wrote so much about himself and his art, and appeared so fully satisfied with his explanations of why he became just what he became and of why his art was just what it was, that naturally for nearly a generation his critics fell into one or other of two errors. Either they accepted his theorisings unreservedly or as unreservedly they rejected them. In the second case they had to face the difficulty of coining, shaping, a theory of their own; in either case shipwreck nearly always promptly ensued; and on the whole, if Wagner had to be theorised about, one would prefer to have it done by Wagner. He himself knew the tiny value of his theorisings about his art, for he declared that when he wrote Tristan and Isolda he found he had already left his theories far behind. This discovery might well have served as a warning both to Wagner and to the hosts of his commentators. Unluckily Wagner was far too fond of theorising, moralising and generally talking of himself and his works, and he reckoned he had a big propagandist work to do; so he went on scribbling to the end. As for the commentators, they neglected the warning and took Wagner's later doings as an example, with the result that the library shelves of Europe are stopped and blocked with as big a heap of rubbish as ever was provoked by great works of art since the world began to turn round. For Wagner there is an ample excuse: he honestly thought it necessary to spread his ideas abroad; his aims and intentions had been so misunderstood, and so stupidly, wickedly, recklessly misrepresented, that he did not believe his music-dramas would ever find acceptance until he had cleared the way by explaining himself. Little good came of it—in fact, the only good result was that some of his writings fell into the hands of Ludwig II of Bavaria, and thus led to the ending of his days of misery, and indirectly to Bayreuth. For the commentators no word of extenuation can be said. Those, perhaps, of the period 1867–77 were justified in pressing their master's claims on the public at large, for the support of the public at large had to be won, and the best way of winning it seemed to lie in advocating those claims, in season and out of season, through the agency of the newspaper-press; but the rest of the herd have proved themselves an unqualified nuisance and a hindrance to a right understanding of Wagner.
This herd I would not willingly join. In the following pages no general theory concerning Wagner will be found. I shall indulge in no theorisings whatever, but stick to the facts, facts which can now be ascertained with certainty. My endeavour will be to tell a plain, unvarnished tale of what Wagner did and of what he suffered, of the environment amidst which he grew up and laboured and struggled: with all that he said and wrote I shall deal as briefly as may be, regarding his endless loquacity of mouth and pen as of interest only when it throws real light on the artist. Least of all shall I waste the reader's patience on the morals that may be drawn from his musical works. The moral to be drawn from his prose works is simply that a man, even a stupendously great man, may write far too much; the moral to be drawn from his musical works every man may find out for himself: for myself, I have found none, any more than I could ever find a moral in a play of Æschylus or Sophocles or Shakespeare.
There are plenty of authorities for the statements now to be made. We have the exhaustive Life by Glasenapp and W. Ashton Ellis; then there is Wagner's own work, My Life, lately translated into English; finally there are the Letters. Many of these are of no interest or value whatever, dealing only with details concerning scores and proof-sheets and petty money matters. Many, on the other hand, notably those to Uhlig, are invaluable to every one who wishes to understand Wagner. Extensive use is made of them in this book, though, as they are easily accessible, I have forborne to quote more than is absolutely necessary. My Life I think but little of, and have not relied greatly on it.
Wagner the reformer will receive no lengthy consideration. He did not "reform" the opera form—the opera form of Mozart and Weber needed no reforming—he simply developed it. He did reform operatic performances by insisting on precision and intelligence in place of slovenliness and stupidity, on enthusiasm for art in place of stolid indifference; and he did as much in the concert-room. I shall not theorize about these matters, but point out what he achieved by making a continuous appeal to indubitable, indisputable facts.
I am indebted to Messrs. H. Grevel & Co. for kind permission to print extracts from Mr. Shedlock's translation of Wagner's Letters, and to Messrs. Novello for similar permission regarding quotations from the libretti of the operas. Two words may be said about the quotations, both words and music, of the operas: in some cases, when I could neither find nor make an adequate translation of verses, I have stuck to the original German; with regard to the music, I have given as little as possible. Both musical and verbal citations are meant for reference—there is only one exception, the Sailors' Song from the opening of Tristan. Catalogues of Wagner's themes have for long been issued by several publishers; but they are of small assistance in helping one to understand Wagner.
J.F.R.
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE
I
As the springtide of 1813 was melting into early summer the poet and musician of spring days and summer nights was born at the house of the Red and White Lion on the Brühl in old Leipzig. The precise date was May 22; and owing to many causes the 16th of August came round before, at the church of St. Thomas, the child was christened Wilhelm Richard Wagner. The events and circumstances of the period have furnished the imaginative with many striking portents with regard to the future mighty composer; and, to do the prophets full justice, after the event—long after the event—they have widely opened their mouths and uttered prophecies. Thus the name of the house, describing a beast such as never was on sea or land, distinctly warned a drowsy people that the monstrous dragon of Siegfried was about to take the road leading from Nowhere to Bayreuth. The spring foretold the songs in Tannhäuser and the Valkyrie; the summer, the nights in King Mark's Cornish castle-garden and amongst the fragrant lime-trees in the streets of ancient Nuremberg; the horrors of the war raging at the very gates of Leipzig and Napoleon's flight, the advent of the preacher who was to earn a long exile by advising the Saxon soldiers not to shoot their brethren. Events provided material for these and many another score of prognostications: only, fortunately, no one read events rightly at the time, and something fresh was left for the biographers to expend their ingenuity upon.
Richard Wagner came of a German lower middle-class stock. There is not amongst his ancestry a single man distinguished in letters or any art. His uncle Adolph, of whom some Bayreuth gentlemen make much, would not be remembered had he not been Wagner's uncle. Only by patient research has it been discovered that one or more of his forebears could so much as play the organ. His father was an amateur theatrical enthusiast, and he too would have been utterly forgotten had he not been Wagner's father. His stepfather—though this seems hardly to the point—was an actor and portrait-painter; and his one claim to remembrance is that he was Wagner's stepfather. So, however scientifically minded we may be, however strongly disposed to account for the sudden appearance of a stupendous genius by the cheap and easy method of pointing to some distinguished ancestor and talking pompously of the laws of heredity, in Wagner's case we are baffled and beaten. He came like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. We must be content with the fact that he came. His father and grandfather were state or municipal officials both; and bearing in mind Wagner's frank detestation of officialdom, the scientist can scarcely draw much comfort from that.
The grandfather, Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, was born in 1736, only a few years later than Haydn. In 1769 he married the daughter of a charity-school master or caretaker; and in 1770, the year of Beethoven's birth, his first child, christened Carl Friedrich Wilhelm, was born. Four years later Adolph arrived. Gottlob was a douanier, an exciseman, at the Rannstadt gate of