Haydn and Mozart could have seen in their youth; for he showed him Beethoven. But this would not help Wagner to feel that contemporary music was really a great art; indeed it could only show him that he was growing up in a pseudo-classical time, in which the approval of persons of “good taste” was seldom directed to things of vital promise. Again, he began with far greater facility in literature than in music, if only because a play can be copied ten times faster than a full score. Wagner was always an omnivorous reader, and books were then, as now, both cheaper than music and easier to read. Moreover, the higher problems of rhythmic movement in the classical sonata forms are far beyond the scope of academic teaching, which is compelled to be contented with a practical plausibility of musical design; and the instrumental music which was considered the highest style of art in 1830 was as far beyond Wagner's early command of such plausibility as it was obviously already becoming a mere academic game. Lastly, the rules of that game were useless on the stage, and Wagner soon found in Meyerbeer a master of grand opera who was dazzling the world by means which merely disgusted the more serious academic musicians of the day.
In Rienzi Wagner would already have been Meyerbeer's rival, but that his sincerity, and his initial lack of that musical savoir faire which is prior to the individual handling of ideas, put him at a disadvantage. Though Meyerbeer wrote much that is intrinsically more dull and vulgar than the overture to Rienzi, he never combined such serious efforts with a technique so like that of a military bandmaster. The step from Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer is without parallel in the history of music, and would be inexplicable if Rienzi contained nothing good and if Der fliegende Holländer did not contain many reminiscences of the decline of Italian opera; but it is noticeable that in this case the lapses into vulgar music have a distinct dramatic value. Though Wagner cannot as yet be confidently credited with a satiric intention in his bathos, the fact remains that all the Rossinian passages are associated with the character of Daland, so as to express his vulgar delight at the prospect of finding a rich son-in-law in the mysterious Dutch seaman. Meanwhile the rest of the work (except in the prettily scored “Spinning Song,” and other harmless and vigorous tunes) has more affinity with Wagner's mature style than the bulk of its much more ambitious successors, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. The wonderful overture is more highly organized and less unequal than that of Tannhäuser; and although Wagner uses less Leit-motif than Weber (see Opera, ad fin.) and divides the piece into “numbers” of classical size, the effect is so continuous that the divisions could hardly be guessed by ear. Moreover, the work was intended to be in one act, and is now so performed at Bayreuth; and, although it is very long for a one-act opera, this is certainly the only form which does justice to Wagner's conception.[1]
Spohr's appreciation of Der fliegende Holländer is a remarkable point in musical history; and his criticism that Wagner's style (in Tannhäuser) “lacked rounded periods” shows the best effect of that style on a well-disposed contemporary mind. Of course, from Wagner's mature point of view his early style is far too much cut up by periods and full closes; and its prophetic traits are so incomparably more striking than its resemblance to any earlier art that we often feel that only the full closes stand between it and the true Wagner. But Spohr would feel Wagner's works to be an advance upon contemporary romantic opera rather than a foreshadowing of an unknown future. When we listen to the free declamation of the singers at the outset of Der fliegende Holländer—a declamation which is accompanied by an orchestral and thematic texture as far removed from that of mere recitative as it is from the forms of the classical aria—the repetition of a whole sentence in order to form a firm musical close has almost as quaint a ring as a Shakespearean rhymed tag would have in a prose drama of Ibsen. To Spohr the frequency of these incidents must have produced the impression that Wagner was perpetually beginning arias and breaking them off at once. With all its defects, Der fliegende Holländer is the most masterly and the least unequal of Wagner's early works. As drama it stood immeasurably above any opera since Cherubini's Medée. As a complete fusion between dramatic and musical movement, its very crudities point to its immense advance towards the solution of the problem, propounded chaotically at the beginning of the 17th century by Monteverde, and solved in a simple form by Gluck. And as the twofold musical and dramatic achievement of one mind, it already places Wagner beyond parallel in the history of art.
Tannhäuser is on a grander scale, but its musical execution is disappointing. The weakest passages in Der fliegende Holländer are not so helpless as the original recitatives of Venus in the first act; or Tannhäuser's song, which was too far involved in the whole scheme to be ousted by the mature “New Venusberg music” with which Wagner fifteen years later got rid both of the end of the overture and what he called his “Palais-Royal” Venus. It is really very difficult to understand Schumann's impression that the musical technique of Tannhäuser shows a remarkable improvement. Not until the third act does the great Wagner arbitrate in the struggle between amateurishness and theatricality in the music, though at all points his epoch-making stagecraft asserts itself with a force that tempts us to treat the whole work as if it were on the Wagnerian plane of Tannhäuser's account of his pilgrimage in the third act. But the history of mid-19th-century music is unintelligible until we face the fact that, when the anti-Wagnerian storm was already at its height, Wagner was still fighting for the recognition of music which was most definite just where it realized with ultra-Meyerbeerian brilliance all that Wagner had already begun to detest. No contemporary, unaided by personal knowledge, could be expected to trust in Wagner's purity of ideal on the strength of Tannhäuser, which actually achieved popularity by such coarse methods of climax as the revivalistic end of the overture, by such maudlin pathos as O du mein holder Abendstern, and by the amiably childish grand-opera skill with which half the action is achieved by processions and a considerable fraction of the music is represented by fanfares. These features established the work in a position which it will always maintain by its unprecedented dramatic qualities and by the glory reflected from Wagner's later achievements; but we shall not appreciate the marvel of its nobler features if we continue at this time of day to regard the bulk of the music as worthy of a great composer.
After even the finest things in Tannhäuser, the Vorspiel to Lohengrin comes as a revelation, with its quiet solemnity and breadth of design, its ethereal purity of tone-colour, and its complete emancipation from earlier operatic forms. The suspense and climax in the first act is so intense, and the whole drama is so well designed, that we must have a very vivid idea of the later Wagner before we can see how far the quality of musical thought still falls short of his ideals. The elaborate choral writing sometimes rises to almost Hellenic regions of dramatic art; and there is no crudeness in the passages that carry on the story quietly in reaction from the climaxes—a test far too severe for Tannhäuser and rather severe for even the mature works of Gluck and Weber. The orchestration is already almost classically Wagnerian; though there remains an excessive amount of tremolo, besides a few lapses into comic violence, as in the yelpings which accompany Ortrud's rage in the night-scene in the second act. But the mere tone-colours of that scene are enough to make a casual listener imagine that he is dealing with the true Wagner: the variety of tone never fails, and depends on no immoderate paraphernalia; for, far-reaching as are the results of the systematic increase of the classical pairs of wind-instruments to groups of three, this is
- ↑ The subsequent division into three acts, as given in all the published editions, has been effected in the crudest way by inserting a full close in the orchestral interludes at the changes of scene, and then beginning the next scene by taking up the interludes again. The true version can be recovered from the published score as follows: In act I skip from the last bar but four to the 41st bar of the introduction to the 2nd act; and at the end of the 2nd act skip from the last bar but five to the 8th bar of the entr'acte to the 3rd act.
