did, viewed from the standpoint of literature, was to create a national
music-drama, based upon ancient Germanic traditions and legends,
about which he threw the gorgeous mantle of his harmonies. In
addition to the beauty of the poetic conceptions, the literary artist
appears in the perfect adaptation of each phrase and word and vowel,
not only to the dramatic expression of the thought but to the needs
of the human voice as well. His method of treating themes asso-
ciates them inseparably with certain thoughts, so that the words
come involuntarily to the mind: and in the midst of all the action,
the orchestra speaks an articulate language; suggests, warns, alarms,
melts, threatens, or moves to tears of sympathy or joy, — produces in
short that "demonic^* emotion, the effect beyond all for which the
reason can account, the effect which Goethe considered the highest
achievement of all art. Indeed, the music will not yield the whole
secret of its charm until the words, the poetic thought, and the entire
dramatic conception, have become completely a part of the hearer's
mental equipment. To this quality of Wagner's works the art of the
poet contributed as much as the genius of the composer.
For the material through which to give national expression to the
culture of the German people, Wagner turned, like a true poet of
Romanticism, to the heroic traditions of his race. In the < Flying
Dutchman* it is a sombre legend of the sea; in ^Tannhauser* it is
the famous contest of the thirteenth century when the Minnesingers
strove together in song in the hall of the Wartburg ; in < Lohengrin '*
and < Parsifal * it is the mediaeval tradition of the Holy Grail ; in
*• Tristan und Isolde ' it is the most popular love tale of the Middle
Ages ; and finally in < Der Ring des Nibelungen * (The Nibelungs'
155°^
RICHARD WAGNER
Ring), Wagner has combined in a colossal work of wonderful unity
and beauty the most ancient poetic legends of the Germanic peoples,
the legends out of which seven centuries before Wagner's time some
unnamed poet created Germany's most national epic, — the < Nibe-
lungenlied.* To have created anew these splendid conceptions of
the poetic past, is not the least of Wagner's merit. His works, in
addition to their aesthetic value, have a value of the moral sort as
well : in them speaks the deep soul of a historic people, with its moral
earnestness, its childlike love of song and legend, its martial strength
and its manly tenderness.
The central theme of all these poems is love. It is through Sen-
ta's love, faithful unto death, that the curse is removed from the Fly-
ing Dutchman. Through the power of Elizabeth's pure passion and
incessant prayers, Tannhauser is at last delivered from the bondage
of the Venusberg. In ^ Lohengrin, > love is the manifestation of the
Divine mercy; and a knight of the Holy Grail comes, swan-drawn,
from his inaccessible temple to rescue a maiden in distress. He
becomes her husband and protector, but Elsa, tempted of evil, puts
the fatal question : her faith was insufficient, and her lord returns to
the service of the Grail.
< Tristan und Isolde ^ is the apotheosis of earthly passion. Into this
Celtic legend, of which Gottfried von Strassburg in the thirteenth
century had made a German epic, Wagner has introduced a modern
psychology; and he has given the poem a new significance. He
has retained the love potion, but he has not made it the cause of
the lover's passion. They loved before, but Tristan is resolutely
faithful to King Mark; and Isolde is wounded to the quick that
Tristan should have wooed her in another's name. The potion sym-
bolizes the irresistible power of a love that bears down all obstacles
and stifles all considerations. The triumph, the reconcilement, the
nirvana of their passion, is attained only in death. This work must
be numbered among the greatest love poems of literature.
And so too in the < Nibelungen * trilogy, love is not only the theme,
but in the end the force that conquers even in death. In ^ Rhein-
gold ' the power of love is contrasted with the lust for gold ; and
here the keynote is struck, and the tragedy set in motion. The love
and faithfulness of Siegmund and Sieglinde in the *â– Walkiire ^ show
Briinnhilde for the first time what love can do; and when Siegfried,
in the idyllic fairy tale that bears his name, awakens her from her
long sleep, she throws aside her Walktiren nature for the joy of
human love. Siegfried is the free fate-defying man, triumphing
over the powers of darkness and destinj^; to him Wotan, ever seek-
ing guidance from the mother of wisdom, is forced to yield. In the
< Gotterdammerung > the god awaits the fullness of time, while the
RICHARD WAGNER I5503
guileless Siegfried falls a victim to the wiles of man. But the end
towards which Wotan blindly strove is attained by Siegfried's death.
Briinnhilde, to whom the counsels of the gods are known, restores
the symbolic ring to the daughters of the Rhine, and in twilight the
ancient reign of the gods comes to an end. The reign of love is
proclaimed as Briinnhilde immolates herself upon Siegfried's funeral
pyre. But the symbolism which it is so easy to find in these operas,
and so easy to exaggerate, is unimportant, if not wholly negligible.
The Nibelung poems are fairy tales; it is the buoyant spirit of the
young German race that revels here in the poetry and legends of its
childhood, and as fairy tales these works should be enjoyed.
Wagner died in Venice on February 13th, 1883. In the preced-
ing year he had seen his life work crowned by the performance
of ^ParsifaP at Bayreuth. Wolfram von Eschenbach's <Parzifal,> the
finest courtly epic of the Middle Ages, Wagner has wrought into
a music-drama of even greater moral significance and beauty. Wolf-
ram's salvation of Parsifal through self-renunciation, as in < Faust,*
has in Wagner's work become the salvation of humanity through all-
saving pity. This is love sublimated into its most unselfish form.
The central thought is announced by an invisible chorus from the
dome of the temple of the Holy Grail : —
«Made wise through pity
The guileless fool:
Wait for him.
My chosen tool.®
And Parsifal, once foimd wanting, attains at last, through paths of
pain and error, the wisdom of pity. He is the chosen tool of the
Divine power for the salvation of suffering sinners.
One great opera remains to be mentioned, and that which is
probably destined to be Wagner's most popular work, — <The Master-
singers of Nuremberg.* This, unless we include * Siegfried,* as Wag-
ner once did, is his only comic opera; and that in a sense widely
different from the ordinary. 'The Mastersingers * gives a wonderful
picture of German life in the early sixteenth century. The humor-
ous and serious elements are so artistically woven around the central
story of Walther's and Eva's love, that as a play this poem must be
pronounced the finest example of Wagner's dramatic power. With
a blending of satire and genial appreciation, Wagner has herein set
forth his own theories of musical art and ridiculed the formalists.
Hans Sachs is one of the most winning of all his creations, and
through him the poet expresses his own philosophy. Walther, in his
exquisite song before the Mastersingers in the first act, attempts to
conform to the rules, but the marker scores countless mistakes against
1^204 RICHARD WAGNER
him ; it is only under the instruction of Hans Sachs in the last act
that he really composes his master-song.
And as through this opera the golden age of Nuremberg has been
made to live again, so have the ancient gods and heroes and myth-
ical happenings of early German legend been impressed upon the
modern imagination, as not all the critical texts of the original poems,
nor all the efforts of the other Romantic poets, have been able to
impress them. They have passed not into the national consciousness
only, but these fine old fairy tales and mediaeval pictures have be-
come an indispensable part of the culture of the world. If this be
to create a national art, Wagner has accomplished his purpose. There
is an inscription under a bust of the poet-composer in Leipzig, which
in the old alliterative form that he used in the ^ Nibelungenring *
sums up the genius which has wrought a greater artistic revolution
than any other force of this century: —
«Denker und Dichter
Gewaltigen Willens,
Durch Worte und Werke
Wecker und Meister
Musischer Kunst.»
(Thinker and poet of powerful will, by words and by works awakener and
master of musical art.)
BESIDE THE HEARTH
BESIDE the hearth, when days were short,
And snow shut in the castle court;
How spring once smiled on mead and brabe.
And how she soon would reawake —
A book I read, of ancient make,
Which these good tidings brought me:
Sir Walther of the Vogelweid',
He was the master who taught me.
Then when the snow has left the plain,
And summer days are come again,
RICHARD WAGNER 15505
What I on winter nights have read.
And all my ancient book hath said,
That echoed loud in forest glade, —
I heard it clearly ringing;
In woodlands on the Vogelweid',
'Twas there I learnt my singing.
What winter night,
What forest bright.
What book and woodland told me;
What through the poet's magic might
So subtly did infold me, —
The tramp of horse
In battle course.
The merry dance
In war's romance, —
I heard in music ringing:
But now the stake is life's best prize,
Which I must win by singing;
The words and air, if 't in me lies,
And genius shall but speed me.
As mastersong I'll improvise:
My masters, pray you, heed me.
Translated by Charles Harvey Genung.
THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTIST
From the < Opera and Drama >
TO RAISE the strangely potent language of the orchestra to
such a height, that at every instant it may plainly manifest
to feeling the unspeakable of the dramatic situation, — to do
this, as we have already said, the musician inspired by the poet's
aim has not to haply practice self-restraint ; no, he has to sharpen
his inventiveness to the point of discovering the most varied
orchestral idioms, to meet the necessity he feels of a pertinent,
a most determinate expression. So long as this language is in-
capable of a declaration as individual as is needed by the infinite
variety of the dramatic motives themselves; so long as the mes-
sage of the orchestra is too monochrome to answer these motives'
individuality, — so long may it prove a disturbing factor, because
not yet completely satisfying: and therefore in the complete
XXVI — 970
lecQg RICHARD WAGNER
drama, like everything that is not entirely adequate, it would
divert attention toward itself. To be true to our aim, however,
such an attention is absolutely not to be devoted to it; but
through its everywhere adapting itself with the utmost close-
ness to the finest shade of individuality in the dramatic motive,
the orchestra is irresistibly to guide our whole attention away
from itself, as a means of expression, and direct it to the subject
expressed. So that the very richest dialect of the orchestra is
to manifest itself with the artistic object of not being noticed, —
in a manner of speaking, of not being heard at all; to wit, not
heard in its mechanical but only in its organic capacity, wherein
it is one with the drama.
How must it discourage the poet-musician, then, were he to
see his drama received by the public with sole and marked
attention to the mechanism of his orchestra, and to find himself
rewarded with just the praise of being a ^Wery clever instru-
mentalist *M How must he feel at heart, — he whose every
shaping was prompted by the dramatic aim, — if art-literarians
should report on his drama, that they had read a text-book and
had heard, to boot, a wondrous music-ing by flutes and fiddles
and trumpets, all working in and out ?
But could this drama possibly produce any other effect, under
the circumstances detailed above ?
And yet ! are we to give up being artists ? Or are we to
abandon all necessary insight into the nature of things because
we can draw no profit thence ? Were it no profit then to be
not only an artist, but a man withal; and is an artificial know-
nothingness, a womanish dismissal of knowledge, to bring us
more profit than a sturdy consciousness, which, if only we put
all seeking-of-self behind us, will give us cheerfulness, and hope,
and courage above all else, for deeds which needs must rejoice
ourselves, how little soever they be crowned with an outward
success ?
For sure ! Even now, it is only knowledge that can prosper
us; whilst ignorance but holds us to a joyless, divided, hypochon-
driacal, scarcely will-ing and never can-ing make-believe of art,
whereby we stay unsatisfied within, unsatisfying without.
Look round you, and see where ye live, and for whom ye
make your art! That our artistic comrades for the representment
of a dramatic art work are not forthcoming, we must recognize at
once, if we have eves the least whit sharpened by artistic will.
RICHARD WAGNER
15507
Yet how greatly we should err, if we pretended to explain this
by a demoralization of our opera-singers due entirely to their
own fault; how we should deceive ourselves if we thought neces-
sary to regard this phenomenon as accidental, and not as condi-
tioned by a broad, a general conjuncture ! Let us suppose for an
instant that in some way or other we acquired the power of so
working upon performers and performance, from the standpoint
of artistic intelligence, that a highest dramatic aim should be
fully carried out, — then for the first time we should grow actively
aware that we lacked the real enabler of the art work: a public
to feel the need of it, and to make its need the all-puissant
fellow-shaper. The public of our theatres has no need for art
work: it wants to distract itself, when it takes its seat before the
stage, but not to collect itself; and the need of the seeker after
distraction is merely for artificial details, but not for an artistic
unity. If we gave it a whole, the public would be blindly driven
to tear that whole to disconnected fragments, or in the most
fortunate event it would be called upon to understand a thing
which it altogether refuses to understand; wherefore, in full
consciousness, it turns its back on any such artistic aim. From
this result we should only gain a proof why such a performance
is absolutely out of the question at present, and why our opera
singers are bound to be exactly what they are and what they
cannot else be.
To account to ourselves for this attitude of the public towards
the performance, we must necessarily pass to a judgment on this
public itself. If we cast a look at earlier ages of our theatric
history, we can only regard this public as involved in an advan-
cing degradation. The excellent work, the pre-eminently fine work
that has been done already in our art, we surely cannot consider
as dropped upon us from the skies; no, we must conclude that it
was prompted withal by the taste of those before whom it was
produced. We meet this public of fine taste and feeling at its
most marked degree of active interest in art production, in the
period of the Renaissance. Here we see princes and nobles not
only sheltering art, but so engrossed with its finest and its bold-
est shapings that the latter must be taken as downright sum-
moned into being by their enthusiastic need. This noble rank, —
nowhere attacked in its position; knowing nothing of the mis-
ery of the thralls whose life made that position possible; holding
itself completely aloof from the industrial and commercial spirit of
15508
RICHARD WAGNER
the burgher life ; living away its life of pleasure in its palaces,
of courage on the field of battle, — this nobility had trained its
eyes and ears to discern the beautiful, the graceful, nay, even the
characteristic and energetic; and at its commands arose those
works of art which signal that epoch as the most favored art-
istic period since the downfall of Greek art. The infinite grace
and delicacy in Mozart's tone-modelings — which seem so dull and
tedious to a public bred to-day on the grotesque — were delighted
in by the descendants of that old nobility; and it was to Kaiser
Joseph that Mozart appealed, from the mountebankish shameless-
ness of the singers of his *â– Figaro. ^ Nor will we look askance at
those young French cavaliers whose enthusiastic applause at the
Achilles aria in Gluck's ^ Iphigenia in Tauris * turned the waver-
ing balance in favor of that work; and least of all will we
forget that whilst the greater courts of Europe had become
the political camps of intriguing diplomats, in Weimar a German
royal family was listening with rapt attention to the loftiest and
most graceful poets of the German nation.
But the rulership of public taste in art has passed over to the
person who now pays the artists' wages, in place of the nobil-
ity which erstwhile recompensed them; to the person who orders
the art work for his money, and insists on ever novel variations
of his one beloved theme, but at no price a new theme itself:
and this ruler and this order-giver is — the Philistine. As this
Philistine is the most heartless and the basest offspring of our
civilization, so is he the most domineering, the crudest and
foulest, of art's bread-givers. True, that everything comes aright
to him; only, he will have nothing to do with aught that might
remind him that he is to be a man, — either on the side of
beauty, or on that of nerve. He wills to be base and common,
and to this will of his has art to fit herself; for the rest — why!
nothing comes to him amiss. Let us turn our look from him as
quickly as may be !
Are we to make bargains with such a world ? No, no ! For
even the most humiliating terms would leave us sheer outside
the pale.
Hope, faith, and courage can we only gain, when we recognize
even the modern State Philistine not merely as a conditioning,
but likewise as a conditioned, factor of our civilization; when we
search for the conditionments of this phenomenon, too, in a con-
juncture such as that we have just examined in the case of art.
RICHARD WAGNER ICCoq
We shall not win hope and nerve until we bend onr ear to the
heart-beat of history, and catch the sound of that sempiternal
vein of living waters, which, however buried under the waste-
heap of historic civilization, yet pulses on in all its pristine fresh-
ness. Who has not felt the leaden murk that hangs above us in
the air, foretelling the near advent of an earth upheaval ? And
we who hear the trickling of that well-spring, shall we take
affright at the earthquake's sound ? Believe me, no ! For we
know that it will only tear aside the heap of refuse, and pre-
pare for the stream that bed in which we soon shall even see its
living waters flow.
Where now the statesman loses hope, the politician sinks his
hands, the socialist beplagues his brain with fruitless systems,
yea, even the philosopher can only hint, but not foretell, — since
all that looms before us can only form a series of un-willful hap-
penings, whose physical show no mortal man may pre-conceive,
•^ there it is the artist whose clear eye can spy out shapes that
reveal themselves to a yearning which longs for the only truth,
the Jmman being. The artist has the power of seeing before-
hand a yet unshapen world, of tasting beforehand the joys of a
world as yet unborn, through the stress of his desire for growth.
But his joy is in imparting; and if only he turns his back on the
senseless herds who browse upon the grassless waste-heap, and
clasps the closer to his breast the cherished few who listen with
him to the well-spring, so finds he too the hearts — ay, finds the
senses — to whom he can impart his message. We are older
men and younger: let the elder not think of himself, but love
the younger for sake of the bequest he sinks into his heart for
new increasing; — the day will come when that heirloom shall be
opened for the weal of brother men throughout the world!
We have seen the poet driven onward by his yearning for a
perfect emotional expression, and seen him reach the point where
he found his verse reflected on the mirror of the sea of harmony,
as musical melody: unto this sea was he compelled to thrust; only
the mirror of this sea could show him the image of his yearning:
and this sea he could not create from his own will; but it was
the Other of his being, that wherewith he needs must wed him-
self, but which he could not prescribe from out himself, nor sum-
mon into being. So neither can the artist prescribe from his own
will, nor summon into being, that life of the future which once
shall redeem him: for it is the Other, the antithesis of himself,
jccio RICHARD WAGNER
for which he yearns, toward which he is thrust; that which, when
brought him from an opposite pole, is for the first time pres-
ent for him, first takes his semblance up into it, and knowably
reflects it back. Yet again, this living ocean of the future can-
not beget that mirror image by its unaided self: it is a mother
element, which can bear alone what it has first received. This
fecundating seed, which in it alone can thrive, is brought it by
the poet, — /. r. , the artist of the present: and this seed is the
quintessence of all rarest life-sap which the past has gathered
lip therein, to bring it to the future as its necessary, its fertiliz-
ing germ; for this future is not thinkable, except as stipulated
by the past.
Now the melody which appears at last upon the water-mirror
of the harmonic ocean of the future, is the clear-seeing eye
wherewith this life gazes upwards from the depth of its sea abyss
to the radiant light of day. But the verse, whose mere mirror-
image it is, is the own-est poem of the artist of the present,
begotten by his most peculiar faculty, engendered by the fullness
of his yearning. And just as this verse, will the prophetic art
work of the yearning artist of the present once wed itself with
the ocean of the life of the future. In that life of the future,
will this art work be what to-day it yearns for, but cannot actu-
ally be as yet; for that life of the future will be entirely what it
can be, only through its taking up into its womb this art work.
The begetter of the art work of the future is none other than
the artist of the present, who presages that life of the future, and
yearns to be contained therein. He who cherishes this longing
within the inmost chamber of his powers, he lives already in a
better life; but only one can do this thing, — the artist.
Translation of William Ashton Ellis.
FROM <THE ART WORK OF THE FUTURE >
WHERESOEVER VnQ folk made poetry, — and only by the folk, or
in the footsteps of the folk, can poetry be really made, —
there did the poetic purpose rise to life alone upon the
shoulders of the arts of dance and tone, as the head of the full-
fledged human being. The lyrics of Orpheus would never have
been able to turn the savage beasts to silent, placid adoration, if
the singer had but given them forsooth some dumb and printed
RICHARD WAGNER ^55 1 1
verse to "read: their ears must be enthralled by the sonorous
notes that came straight from the heart ; their carrion-spying eyes
be tamed by the proud and graceful movements of the body, — in
such a way that they should recognize instinctively in this whole
man no longer a mere object for their maw, no mere objective
for their feeding powers, but for their hearing and their seeing
powers, — before they could be attuned to duly listen to his moral
sentences.
Neither was the true folk-epic by any means a mere recited
poem: the songs of Homer, such as we now posse^ss them, have
issued from the critical siftings and compilings of a time in
which the genuine epos had long since ceased to live. When
Solon made his laws and Pisistratus introduced his political
regime, men searched among the ruins of the already fallen epos
of the folk, and pieced the gathered heap together for reading
service, — much as in the Hohenstaufen times they did with the
fragments of the lost Nibelungenlieder. But before these epic
songs became the object of such literary care, they had flourished
mid the folk, eked out by voice and gesture, as a bodily enacted
art work; as it were, a fixed and crystallized blend of lyric song
and dance, with predominant lingering on portrayal of the action
and reproduction of the heroic dialogue. These epic-lyrical per-