The scene then changes to the hall of the Gibichungs by the Rhine. It is
night; and Gutrune, unable to sleep, and haunted by all sorts of vague
terrors, is waiting for the return of her husband, and wondering
whether a ghostly figure she has seen gliding down to the river bank is
Brynhild, whose room is empty. Then comes the cry of Hagen, returning
with the hunting party to announce the death of Siegfried by the tusk of
a wild boar. But Gutrune divines the truth; and Hagen does not deny it.
Siegfried's body is brought in; Gunther claims the ring; Hagen will
not suffer him to take it; they fight; and Gunther is slain. Hagen then
attempts to take it; but the dead man's hand closes on it and raises
itself threateningly. Then Brynhild comes; and a funeral pyre is raised
whilst she declaims a prolonged scene, extremely moving and imposing,
but yielding nothing to resolute intellectual criticism except a very
powerful and elevated exploitation of theatrical pathos, psychologically
identical with the scene of Cleopatra and the dead Antony in
Shakespeare's tragedy. Finally she flings a torch into the pyre, and
rides her war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches
fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middle
of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize the
excessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows its
banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried's
finger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so.
Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drown
him; and in the distant heavens the Gods and their castle are seen
perishing in the fires of Loki as the curtain falls.




FORGOTTEN ERE FINISHED

In all this, it will be observed, there is nothing new. The musical
fabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous; but you cannot say, as you
must in witnessing The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and the first two acts
of Siegfried, that you have never seen anything like it before, and that
the inspiration is entirely original. Not only the action, but most
of the poetry, might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The
situation of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without
being bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musical
expression. The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the impossibility
of any credible scenic presentation of the incidents, and the extreme
staginess of the conventions by which these impossibilities are got
over, are no doubt covered from the popular eye by the overwhelming
prestige of Die Gotterdammerung as part of so great a work as The Ring,
and by the extraordinary storm of emotion and excitement which the music
keeps up. But the very qualities that intoxicate the novice in music
enlighten the adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer's technical
accomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of harmony and
instrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the work which moves
us as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries, nor is anything but
external splendor added to the life and humor of Siegfried.

In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the pyre of
Siegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on the efficacy of
the Love panacea. "My holiest wisdom's hoard," she says, "now I make
known to the world. I believe not in property, nor money, nor godliness,
nor hearth and high place, nor pomp and peerage, nor contract and
custom, but in Love. Let that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in
weal or woe." Here the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the
saviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the
Free Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even
Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly significant
of the extent to which this uxorious commonplace lost its hold of Wagner
(after disturbing his conscience, as he confesses to Roeckel, for years)
that it disappears in the full score of Night Falls On The Gods, which
was not completed until he was on the verge of producing Parsifal,
twenty years after the publication of the poem. He cut the homily out,
and composed the music of the final scene with a flagrant recklessness
of the old intention. The rigorous logic with which representative
musical themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandoned
without scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he selects a
rapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of The Valkyries
when Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high destiny as the
mother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic logic whatever in the
recurrence of this theme to express the transport in which Brynhild
immolates herself. There is of course an excuse for it, inasmuch as both
women have an impulse of self-sacrifice for the sake of Siegfried; but
this is really hardly more than an excuse; since the Valhalla theme
might be attached to Alberic on the no worse ground that both he and
Wotan are inspired by ambition, and that the ambition has the same
object, the possession of the ring. The common sense of the matter is
that the only themes which had fully retained their significance in
Wagner's memory at the period of the composition of Night Falls On The
Gods are those which are mere labels of external features, such as
the Dragon, the Fire, the Water and so on. This particular theme of
Sieglinda's is, in truth, of no great musical merit: it might easily
be the pet climax of a popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushing
effect which is its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that
it is hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the
entire tetralogy. Yet, since it undoubtedly does gush very emphatically,
Wagner chose, for convenience' sake, to work up this final scene with it
rather than with the more distinguished, elaborate and beautiful themes
connected with the love of Brynhild and Siegfried.

He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no consequence had
he finished the whole work ten years earlier. It must always be borne
in mind that the poem of The Ring was complete and printed in 1853,
and represents the sociological ideas which, after germinating in the
European atmosphere for many years, had been brought home to Wagner,
who was intensely susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 at
Dresden. Now no man whose mind is alive and active, as Wagner's was to
the day of his death, can keep his political and spiritual opinions,
much less his philosophic consciousness, at a standstill for quarter
of a century until he finishes an orchestral score. When Wagner first
sketched Night Falls On The Gods he was 35. When he finished the score
for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had turned 60. No wonder he
had lost his old grip of it and left it behind him. He even
tampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of theatrical effect when
stage-managing it, making Wotan pick up and brandish a sword to give
visible point to his sudden inspiration as to the raising up of a
hero. The sword had first to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblung
treasures and thrown away by him as useless. There is no sense in this
device; and its adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original
intention which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the
Gods. [*]

     * Die Gotterdammerung means literally Godsgloaming. The
     English versions of the opera are usually called The Dusk of
     the Gods, or The Twilight of the Gods. I have purposely
     introduced the ordinary title in the sentence above for the
     reader's information.




WHY HE CHANGED HIS MIND

Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a great
philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the theme
still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history of Germany
from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried and Wotan transposed
into the key of actual life Night Falls On The Gods would have been the
logical consummation of Das Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the
operatic anachronism it actually is.

But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck did.
Roeckel was a prisoner whose imprisonment made no difference; Bakoonin
broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which ended in an
undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The Siegfrieds of 1848
were hopeless political failures, whereas the Wotans and Alberics and
Lokis were conspicuous political successes. Even the Mimes held their own
as against Siegfried. With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle,
there was no revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist
in practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic
and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a titanic
oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great majority of the
working classes were not ready to join him, and that the minority who
were ready did not understand him. The International, founded in 1861
by Karl Marx in London, and mistaken for several years by nervous
newspapers for a red spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It
achieved some beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing
English workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and
recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea to
defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side it was a
romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune, one of the
most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness with which capable
practical administrators and soldiers are forced by the pressure of
facts to destroy romantic amateurs and theatrical dreamers, made an end
of melodramatic Socialism. It was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers
as the most execrable of living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the
brand that still makes him impossible in French politics as it was for
Victor Hugo to bombard Napoleon III from his paper battery in Jersey.
It was also easy to hold up Felix Pyat and Delescluze as men of much
loftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that could not
be denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it was Gallifet who
got Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got Gallifet shot, and that
when it came to administering the affairs of France, Thiers could in
one way or another get it done, whilst Pyat could neither do it nor stop
talking and allow somebody else to do it. True, the penalty of following
Thiers was to be exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the
penalty of following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get
sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.

To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring back
again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with it. He had
thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and Loki. He had
found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and that if he wanted to
live handsomely and safely, he must not only allow Wotan and Loki to
organize society for him, but pay them very handsomely for doing it. He
wanted splendor, military glory, loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism;
and his greed and gluttony were wholly unable to create them, whereas
Wotan and Loki carried them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in
1871, when Wagner himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch,
which sounded much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the
Carmagnole.

How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his idealization of
Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously in Siegfried slaying
the dragon and charging through the mountain fire, when the immediate
foreground was occupied by the Hotel de Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly
discussing the principles of Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were
already battering the Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of
the Champs Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous Communist
Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest at the historic laws
and predestined end of our capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet
Wagner, like Marx, was too inexperienced in technical government
and administration and too melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain
conception of the class struggle, to foresee the actual process by which
his generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by the
classes involved?

Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung legend
first becomes irreconcilable with Wagner's allegory. Fafnir in the
allegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the legend is a mere
hoarder. His gold does not bring him in any revenue. It does not even
support him: he has to go out and forage for food and drink. In fact,
he is on the way to his drinking-pool when Siegfried kills him. And
Siegfried himself has no more use for gold than Fafnir: the only
difference between them in this respect is that Siegfried does not waste
his time in watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereas
Fafnir sacrifices his humanity and his life merely to prevent anybody
else getting it. This contrast is true to human nature; but it shunts
The Ring drama off the economic lines of the allegory. In real life,
Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, comfortable life, and
admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only means of procuring
these is to restore the gold to Alberic in exchange for scrip in
Alberic's enterprises. Thus fortified with capital, Alberic exploits his
fellow dwarfs as before, and also exploits Fafnir's fellow giants who
have no capital. What is more, the toil, forethought and self-control
which the exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem
which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic's own character
which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen. He discovers that
to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded money-grubber is not the way to make
money on a large scale; for though greed may suffice to turn tens
into hundreds and even hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into
hundreds of thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather
than to pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make
himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must create
towns and govern markets. In the meantime, Fafnir, wallowing in
dividends which he has done nothing to earn, may rot, intellectually
and morally, from mere disuse of his energies and lack of incentive to
excel; but the more imbecile he becomes, the more dependent he is upon
Alberic, and the more the responsibility of keeping the world-machine in
working order falls upon Alberic. Consequently, though Alberic in 1850
may have been merely the vulgar Manchester Factory-owner portrayed by
Engels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp of Essen
or Carnegie of Homestead.

Now, without exaggerating the virtues of these gentlemen, it will
be conceded by everybody except perhaps those veteran German
Social-Democrats who have made a cult of obsolescence under the name
of Marxism, that the modern entrepreneur is not to be displaced and
dismissed so lightly as Alberic is dismissed in The Ring. They are
really the masters of the whole situation. Wotan is hardly less
dependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits their work, acclaims
them in stirring speeches, and casts down their enemies; whilst Loki
makes commercial treaties for them and subjects all his diplomacy to
their approval.

The end cannot come until Siegfried learns Alberic's trade and shoulders
Alberic's burden. Not having as yet done so, he is still completely
mastered by Alberic. He does not even rebel against him except when he
is too stupid and ignorant, or too romantically impracticable, to see
that Alberic's work, like Wotan's work and Loki's work, is necessary
work, and that therefore Alberic can never be superseded by a warrior,
but only by a capable man of business who is prepared to continue his
work without a day's intermission. Even though the proletarians of all
lands were to become "class conscious," and obey the call of Marx by
uniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory in
which all capital should become common property, and all Monarchs,
Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common citizens, the
triumphant proletarians would have either to starve in Anarchy the next
day or else do the political and industrial work which is now being
done tant bien que mal by our Romanoffs, our Hohenzollerns, our Krupps,
Carnegies, Levers, Pierpont Morgans, and their political retinues. And
in the meantime these magnates must defend their power and property
with all their might against the revolutionary forces until these
forces become positive, executive, administrative forces, instead of the
conspiracies of protesting, moralizing, virtuously indignant amateurs
who mistook Marx for a man of affairs and Thiers for a stage villain.
But all this represents a development of which one gathers no forecast
from Wagner or Marx. Both of them prophesied the end of our epoch, and,
so far as one can guess, prophesied it rightly. They also brought its
industrial history up to the year 1848 far more penetratingly than the
academic historians of their time. But they broke off there and left
a void between 1848 and the end, in which we, who have to live in that
period, get no guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for years
in this void, striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the
Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic party was
lost, were trying to find the path by the light of contemporary history
instead of vainly consulting the oracle in the pages of Das Kapital.
Marx himself was too simpleminded a recluse and too full of the
validity of his remoter generalizations, and the way in which the rapid
integration of capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to be
conscious of the void himself.

Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man. It is
possible to learn more of the world by producing a single opera, or even
conducting a single orchestral rehearsal, than by ten years reading in
the Library of the British Museum. Wagner must have learnt between Das
Rheingold and the Kaisermarsch that there are yet several dramas to be
interpolated in The Ring after The Valkyries before the allegory can
tell the whole story, and that the first of these interpolated dramas
will be much more like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If
anyone doubts the extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to the
administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of
the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on the
barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 1870 under Thiers'
mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that scandalous burlesque
in which the poet and composer of Siegfried, with the levity of a
schoolboy, mocked the French republicans who were doing in 1871 what he
himself was exiled for doing in 1849. He had set the enthusiasm of the
Dresden Revolution to his own greatest music; but he set the enthusiasm
of twenty years later in derision to the music of Rossini. There is
no mistaking the tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik,
Republik, Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to William Tell is there as
plainly as if it were noted down in full score.

In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this volte-face
as mere jingoism produced by Germany's overwhelming victory in the
Franco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against the Parisians for the
Tannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause for personal spite against
his own countrymen than he ever had against the French. No doubt his
outburst gratified the pettier feelings which great men have in common
with small ones; but he was not a man to indulge in such gratifications,
or indeed to feel them as gratifications, if he had not arrived at a
profound philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who were
trying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner's own
art than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one. Wagner had by
that time done too much himself not to know that the world is ruled by
deeds, not by good intentions, and that one efficient sinner is worth
ten futile saints and martyrs.

I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all men of
genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional respect for facts,
exceptional freedom from the hypnotic influence of sensational popular
movements, exceptional sense of the realities of political power as
distinguished from the presences and idolatries behind which the real
masters of modern States pull their wires and train their guns. When he
scored Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfried
and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He had
given up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions, and had
conceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he announced, not as
a hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with a sword which cut
irresistibly, but with a spear which he held only on condition that he
did not use it; and who instead of exulting in the slaughter of a
dragon was frightfully ashamed of having shot a swan. The change in the
conception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete. It reflects
the change which took place in Wagner's mind between the composition
of The Rhine Gold and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains why
he dropped The Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante by
Lohengrinizing.

If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper basket
and rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must reply that the
time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner nor anyone else then
living knew enough to achieve it. Besides, what he had already done had
reached the limit of even his immense energy and perseverance and so
he did the best he could with the unfinished and for ever unfinishable
work, rounding it off with an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of
his religious compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions
wrote in his score "Excusez du peu," but Wagner left us to find out the
change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really followed his
meaning.




WAGNER'S OWN EXPLANATION

And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give Wagner's
explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not by any means
accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has passed since the
tetralogy was written; and in that time the purposes of many half
instinctive acts of genius have become clearer to the common man than
they were to the doers. Some years ago, in the course of an explanation
of Ibsen's plays, I pointed out that it was by no means certain or even
likely that Ibsen was as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All
the stupid people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw nothing
in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant self-conceit
of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself. Fortunately, in taking
exactly the same position now with regard to Wagner, I can claim his own
authority to support me. "How," he wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August
1856, "can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should
be perfectly realized by others, seeing that he himself feels in the
presence of his work, if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a
riddle, about which he, too, might have illusions, just as another
might?"

The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we deify the
creative force of the universe, by attributing to logical design what
is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner meant by "true Art" is the
operation of the artist's instinct, which is just as blind as any other
instinct. Mozart, asked for an explanation of his works, said frankly
"How do I know?" Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as
a composer, was always looking for moral explanations of what he had
created and he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the
same way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very brilliantly
about the circulation of his own blood without getting as near the truth
as Harvey did long after his death.

None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional interest. To
begin with, there is a considerable portion of The Ring, especially the
portraiture of our capitalistic industrial system from the socialist's
point of view in the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic,
which is unmistakable, as it dramatizes that portion of human activity
which lies well within the territory covered by our intellectual
consciousness. All this is concrete Home Office business, so to speak:
its meaning was as clear to Wagner as it is to us. Not so that part
of the work which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it
happened, Wagner's recollection of what he had been driving at was
completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of The
Ring poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as Will and
Representation." So obsessed did he become with this masterpiece of
philosophic art that he declared that it contained the intellectual
demonstration of the conflict of human forces which he himself had
demonstrated artistically in his great poem. "I must confess," he writes
to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a clear understanding of my own
works of art through the help of another, who has provided me with the
reasoned conceptions corresponding to my intuitive principles."

Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner's
determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all along
without knowing it only shows how completely the fascination of the
great treatise on The Will had run away with his memory. It is easy to
see how this happened. Wagner says of himself that "seldom has there
taken place in the soul of one and the same man so profound a division
and estrangement between the intuitive or impulsive part of his nature
and his consciously or reasonably formed ideas." And since Schopenhaur's
great contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear
consciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a fanciful
way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence, but afterwards
swamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it was inevitable that
Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur's metaphysiology (I use a word less
likely to be mistaken than metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But
metaphysiology is one thing, political philosophy another. The political
philosophy of Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosophy
of Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological distinction
between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and his reasoning faculty
(dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is insisted on in both. The difference
is that to Schopenhaur the Will is the universal tormentor of man, the
author of that great evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that
is finally to overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its
abnegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana. This is
the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, a
most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoning
faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and
full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious
Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving
that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most
sensible and worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold.

Sometimes he faces the change in his opinions frankly enough. "My
Niblung drama," he writes to Roeckel, "had taken form at a time when I
had built up with my reason an optimistic world on Hellenic principles,
believing that nothing was necessary for the realization of such a world
but that men should wish it. I ingeniously set aside-the problem why
they did not wish it. I remember that it was with this definite
creative purpose that I conceived the personality of Siegfried, with the
intention of representing an existence free from pain." But he appeals
to his earlier works to show that behind all these artificial optimistic
ideas there was always with him an intuition of "the sublime tragedy of
renunciation, the negation of the will." In trying to explain this, he
is full of ideas philosophically, and full of the most amusing
contradictions personally. Optimism, as an accidental excursion into the
barren paths of reason on his own part, he calls "Hellenic." In others
he denounces it as rank Judaism, the Jew having at that time become for
him the whipping boy for all modern humanity. In a letter from London
he expounds Schopenhaur to Roeckel with enthusiasm, preaching the
renunciation of the Will to Live as the redemption from all error and
vain pursuits: in the next letter he resumes the subject with unabated
interest, and finishes by mentioning that on leaving London he went to
Geneva and underwent "a most beneficial course of hydropathy." Seven
months before this he had written as follows: "Believe me, I too was
once possessed by the idea of a country life. In order to become a
radically healthy human being, I went two years ago to a Hydropathic
Establishment, prepared to give up Art and everything if I could once
more become a child of Nature. But, my good friend, I was obliged to
laugh at my own naivete when I found myself almost going mad. None of
us will reach the promised land: we shall all die in the wilderness.
Intellect is, as some one has said, a sort of disease: it is incurable."

Roeckel knew his man of old, and evidently pressed him for explanations
of the inconsistencies of The Ring with Night Falls On The Gods. Wagner
defended himself with unfailing cleverness and occasional petulances,
ranging from such pleas as "I believe a true instinct has kept me from a
too great definiteness; for it has been borne in on me that an absolute
disclosure of the intention disturbs true insight," to a volley of
explanations and commentaries on the explanations. He gets excited and
annoyed because Roeckel will not admire the Brynhild of Night Falls On
The Gods; re-invents the Tarnhelm scene; and finally, the case being
desperate, exclaims, "It is wrong of you to challenge me to explain it
in words: you must feel that something is being enacted that is not to
be expressed in mere words."




THE PESSIMIST AS AMORIST

Sometimes he gets very far away from Pessimism indeed, and recommends
Roeckel to solace his captivity, not by conquering the will to live at
liberty, but by "the inspiring influences of the Beautiful." The next
moment he throws over even Art for Life. "Where life ends," he says,
very wittily, "Art begins. In youth we turn to Art, we know not why; and
only when we have gone through with Art and come out on the other side,
we learn to our cost that we have missed Life itself." His only comfort
is that he is beloved. And on the subject of love he lets himself loose
in a manner that would have roused the bitterest scorn in Schopenhaur,
though, as we have seen (Love Panacea), it is highly characteristic of
Wagner. "Love in its most perfect reality," he says, "is only possible
between the sexes: it is only as man and woman that human beings can
truly love. Every other manifestation of love can be traced back to that
one absorbingly real feeling, of which all other affections are but an
emanation, a connection, or an imitation. It is an error to look on this
as only one of the forms in which love is revealed, as if there were
other forms coequal with it, or even superior to it. He who after the
manner of metaphysicians prefers UNREALITY to REALITY, and derives the
concrete from the abstract--in short, puts the word before the fact--may
be right in esteeming the idea of love as higher than the expression
of love, and may affirm that actual love made manifest in feeling
is nothing but the outward and visible sign of a pre-existent,
non-sensuous, abstract love; and he will do well to despise that
sensuous function in general. In any case it were safe to bet that such
a man had never loved or been loved as human beings can love, or he
would have understood that in despising this feeling, what he condemned
was its sensual expression, the outcome of man's animal nature, and
not true human love. The highest satisfaction and expression of the
individual is only to be found in his complete absorption, and that is
only possible through love. Now a human being is both MAN and WOMAN: it
is only when these two are united that the real human being exists; and
thus it is only by love that man and woman attain to the full measure
of humanity. But when nowadays we talk of a human being, such heartless
blockheads are we that quite involuntarily we only think of man. It is
only in the union of man and woman by love (sensuous and supersensuous)
that the human being exists; and as the human being cannot rise to the
conception of anything higher than his own existence--his own being--so
the transcendent act of his life is this consummation of his humanity
through love."

It is clear after this utterance from the would-be Schopenhaurian, that
Wagner's explanations of his works for the most part explain nothing but
the mood in which he happened to be on the day he advanced them, or
the train of thought suggested to his very susceptible imagination and
active mind by the points raised by his questioner. Especially in his
private letters, where his outpourings are modified by his dramatic
consciousness of the personality of his correspondent, do we find him
taking all manner of positions, and putting forward all sorts of cases
which must be taken as clever and suggestive special pleadings, and
not as serious and permanent expositions of his works. These works must
speak for themselves: if The Ring says one thing, and a letter written
afterwards says that it said something else, The Ring must be taken to
confute the letter just as conclusively as if the two had been written
by different hands. However, nobody fairly well acquainted with Wagner's
utterances as a whole will find any unaccountable contradictions in
them. As in all men of his type, our manifold nature was so marked in
him that he was like several different men rolled into one. When he had
exhausted himself in the character of the most pugnacious, aggressive,
and sanguine of reformers, he rested himself as a Pessimist and
Nirvanist. In The Ring the quietism of Brynhild's "Rest, rest, thou God"
is sublime in its deep conviction; but you have only to turn back the
pages to find the irrepressible bustle of Siegfried and the revelry of
the clansmen expressed with equal zest. Wagner was not a Schopenhaurite
every day in the week, nor even a Wagnerite. His mind changes as
often as his mood. On Monday nothing will ever induce him to return to
quilldriving: on Tuesday he begins a new pamphlet. On Wednesday he
is impatient of the misapprehensions of people who cannot see how
impossible it is for him to preside as a conductor over platform
performances of fragments of his works, which can only be understood
when presented strictly according to his intention on the stage: on
Thursday he gets up a concert of Wagnerian selections, and when it is
over writes to his friends describing how profoundly both bandsmen and
audience were impressed. On Friday he exults in the self-assertion
of Siegfried's will against all moral ordinances, and is full of a
revolutionary sense of "the universal law of change and renewal": on
Saturday he has an attack of holiness, and asks, "Can you conceive a
moral action of which the root idea is not renunciation?" In short,
Wagner can be quoted against himself almost without limit, much as
Beethoven's adagios could be quoted against his scherzos if a dispute
arose between two fools as to whether he was a melancholy man or a merry
one.




THE MUSIC OF THE RING

THE REPRESENTATIVE THEMES

To be able to follow the music of The Ring, all that is necessary is to
become familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out of which it
is built to recognize them and attach a certain definite significance
to them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman recognizes and attaches a
definite significance to the opening bars of God Save the King. There is
no difficulty here: every soldier is expected to learn and distinguish
between different bugle calls and trumpet calls; and anyone who can
do this can learn and distinguish between the representative themes or
"leading motives" (Leitmotifs) of The Ring. They are the easier to learn
because they are repeated again and again; and the main ones are so
emphatically impressed on the ear whilst the spectator is looking for
the first time at the objects, or witnessing the first strong dramatic
expression of the ideas they denote, that the requisite association is
formed unconsciously. The themes are neither long, nor complicated, nor
difficult. Whoever can pick up the flourish of a coach-horn, the note of
a bird, the rhythm of the postman's knock or of a horse's gallop, will
be at no loss in picking up the themes of The Ring. No doubt, when it
comes to forming the necessary mental association with the theme, it
may happen that the spectator may find his ear conquering the tune more
easily than his mind conquers the thought. But for the most part the
themes do not denote thoughts at all, but either emotions of a quite
simple universal kind, or the sights, sounds and fancies common enough
to be familiar to children. Indeed some of them are as frankly childish
as any of the funny little orchestral interludes which, in Haydn's
Creation, introduce the horse, the deer, or the worm. We have both the
horse and the worm in The Ring, treated exactly in Haydn's manner, and
with an effect not a whit less ridiculous to superior people who decline
to take it good-humoredly. Even the complaisance of good Wagnerites
is occasionally rather overstrained by the way in which Brynhild's
allusions to her charger Grani elicit from the band a little rum-ti-tum
triplet which by itself is in no way suggestive of a horse, although a
continuous rush of such triplets makes a very exciting musical gallop.

Other themes denote objects which cannot be imitatively suggested by
music: for instance, music cannot suggest a ring, and cannot suggest
gold; yet each of these has a representative theme which pervades the
score in all directions. In the case of the gold the association is
established by the very salient way in which the orchestra breaks into
the pretty theme in the first act of The Rhine Gold at the moment when
the sunrays strike down through the water and light up the glittering
treasure, hitherto invisible. The reference of the strange little
theme of the wishing cap is equally manifest from the first, since the
spectator's attention is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magic
when the theme is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The sword
theme is introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan's hero
inspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable, when it
came to practical stage management, to forego the appeal to the eye as
well as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a sword and brandish
it, though no such instruction appears in the printed score. When this
sacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to the reality of any appeal to an
audience that is not made through their bodily sense is omitted, the
association of the theme with the sword is not formed until that point
in the first act of The Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by
Hunding's hearth, weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to
fight for his life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his father
promised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a flicker
from the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the sword in the
tree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam through the quiver of
sound from the orchestra, and only dies out as the fire sinks and the
sword is once more hidden by the darkness. Later on, this theme, which
is never silent whilst Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword,
leaps out into the most dazzling splendor the band can give it when
Siegmund triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists of
seven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like a simple
flourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of catching a tune
can easily miss it.

The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of the gods
first appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the second scene
of The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too, has a memorable
rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from presenting those novel or
curious problems in polyphony of which Wagner still stands suspected by
superstitious people, are just those three simple chords which festive
students who vamp accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find
sufficient for nearly all the popular tunes in the world.

On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle through
the third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be referred to any
special feature in the general gloom and turmoil of the den of the
dwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the displaced metric accent which
musicians call syncopation, rung on the notes of the familiar chord
formed by piling three minor thirds on top of one another (technically,
the chord of the minor ninth, ci-devant diminished seventh). One soon
picks it up and identifies it; but it does not get introduced in the
unequivocally clear fashion of the themes described above, or of that
malignant monstrosity, the theme which denotes the curse on the gold.
Consequently it cannot be said that the musical design of the work is
perfectly clear at the first hearing as regards all the themes; but
it is so as regards most of them, the main lines being laid down as
emphatically and intelligibly as the dramatic motives in a Shakespearean
play. As to the coyer subtleties of the score, their discovery provides
fresh interest for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian
inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.

The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped on the
memory easily by the simple association of the sound of the theme with
the appearance of the person indicated. Its appropriateness is generally
pretty obvious. Thus, the entry of the giants is made to a vigorous
stumping, tramping measure. Mimmy, being a quaint, weird old creature,
has a quaint, weird theme of two thin chords that creep down eerily one
to the other. Gutrune's theme is pretty and caressing: Gunther's bold,
rough, and commonplace. It is a favorite trick of Wagner's, when one
of his characters is killed on the stage, to make the theme attached
to that character weaken, fail, and fade away with a broken echo into
silence.




THE CHARACTERIZATION

All this, however, is the mere child's play of theme work. The more
complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label attached
to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations identified with
special representative themes as they come into play in the drama; and
the chief merit of the thematic structure of The Ring is the mastery
with which the dramatic play of the ideas is reflected in the
contrapuntal play of the themes. We do not find Wotan, like the dragon
or the horse, or, for the matter of that, like the stage demon in
Weber's Freischutz or Meyerbeer's Robert the Devil, with one fixed theme
attached to him like a name plate to an umbrella, blaring unaltered
from the orchestra whenever he steps on the stage. Sometimes we have the
Valhalla theme used to express the greatness of the gods as an idea of
Wotan's. Again, we have his spear, the symbol of his power, identified
with another theme, on which Wagner finally exercises his favorite
device by making it break and fail, cut through, as it were, by the
tearing sound of the theme identified with the sword, when Siegfried
shivers the spear with the stroke of Nothung. Yet another theme
connected with Wotan is the Wanderer music which breaks with such a
majestic reassurance on the nightmare terror of Mimmy when Wotan appears
at the mouth of his cave in the scene of the three riddles. Thus not
only are there several Wotan themes, but each varies in its inflexions
and shades of tone color according to its dramatic circumstances. So,
too, the merry ham tune of the young Siegfried changes its measure,
loads itself with massive harmonies, and becomes an exordium of the most
imposing splendor when it heralds his entry as full-fledged hero in the
prologue to Night Falls On The Gods. Even Mimmy has his two or three
themes: the weird one already described; the little one in triple
measure imitating the tap of his hammer, and fiercely mocked in the
savage laugh of Alberic at his death; and finally the crooning tune in
which he details all his motherly kindnesses to the little foundling
Siegfried. Besides this there are all manner of little musical blinkings
and shamblings and whinings, the least hint of which from the orchestra
at any moment instantly brings Mimmy to mind, whether he is on the stage
at the time or not.

In truth, dramatic characterization in music cannot be carried very far
by the use of representative themes. Mozart, the greatest of all masters
of this art, never dreamt of employing them; and, extensively as they
are used in The Ring, they do not enable Wagner to dispense with the
Mozartian method. Apart from the themes, Siegfried and Mimmy are still
as sharply distinguished from one another by the character of their
music as Don Giovanni from Leporello, Wotan from Gutrune as Sarastro
from Papagena. It is true that the themes attached to the characters
have the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music: for
example, neither the Valhalla nor the spear themes could, without the
most ludicrous incongruity, be used for the forest bird or the unstable,
delusive Loki; but for all that the musical characterization must
be regarded as independent of the specific themes, since the entire
elimination of the thematic system from the score would leave the
characters as well distinguished musically as they are at present.

One more illustration of the way in which the thematic system is worked.
There are two themes connected with Loki. One is a rapid, sinuous,
twisting, shifty semiquaver figure suggested by the unsubstantial,
elusive logic-spinning of the clever one's braincraft. The other is the
fire theme. In the first act of Siegfried, Mimmy makes his unavailing
attempt to explain fear to Siegfried. With the horror fresh upon him of
the sort of nightmare into which he has fallen after the departure
of the Wanderer, and which has taken the form, at once fanciful and
symbolic, of a delirious dread of light, he asks Siegfried whether he
has never, whilst wandering in the forest, had his heart set hammering
in frantic dread by the mysterious lights of the gloaming. To this,
Siegfried, greatly astonished, replies that on such occasions his heart
is altogether healthy and his sensations perfectly normal. Here Mimmy's
question is accompanied by the tremulous sounding of the fire theme with
its harmonies most oppressively disturbed and troubled; whereas with
Siegfried's reply they become quite clear and straightforward, making
the theme sound bold, brilliant, and serene. This is a typical instance
of the way in which the themes are used.

The thematic system gives symphonic interest, reasonableness, and unity
to the music, enabling the composer to exhaust every aspect and quality
of his melodic material, and, in Beethoven's manner, to work miracles
of beauty, expression and significance with the briefest phrases. As a
set-off against this, it has led Wagner to indulge in repetitions that
would be intolerable in a purely dramatic work. Almost the first thing
that a dramatist has to learn in constructing a play is that the persons
must not come on the stage in the second act and tell one another at
great length what the audience has already seen pass before its eyes
in the first act. The extent to which Wagner has been seduced into
violating this rule by his affection for his themes is startling to
a practiced playwright. Siegfried inherits from Wotan a mania for
autobiography which leads him to inflict on every one he meets the
story of Mimmy and the dragon, although the audience have spent a whole
evening witnessing the events he is narrating. Hagen tells the story
to Gunther; and that same night Alberic's ghost tells it over again to
Hagen, who knows it already as well as the audience. Siegfried tells
the Rhine maidens as much of it as they will listen to, and then keeps
telling it to his hunting companions until they kill him. Wotan's
autobiography on the second evening becomes his biography in the mouths
of the Norns on the fourth. The little that the Norns add to it is
repeated an hour later by Valtrauta. How far all this repetition is
tolerable is a matter of individual taste. A good story will bear
repetition; and if it has woven into it such pretty tunes as the Rhine
maidens' yodel, Mimmy's tinkling anvil beat, the note of the forest
bird, the call of Siegfried's horn, and so on, it will bear a good deal
of rehearing. Those who have but newly learnt their way through The Ring
will not readily admit that there is a bar too much repetition.

But how if you find some anti-Wagnerite raising the question whether the
thematic system does not enable the composer to produce a music drama
with much less musical fertility than was required from his predecessors
for the composition of operas under the old system!