on the stage has been known to repel others who are beyond suspicion of prejudice. But the greatness of the art is, like its subject, worlds away from material impressions; and a wide consensus regards Wagner's last work as his loftiest, both in music and poetry. Certainly no poet would venture to despise Wagner's imaginative conception of Kundry. In his letters to his, friend Mathilde Wesendonck, it appears that while he was composing Tristan he already had the inspiration of working out the identification of Kundry, the messenger of the Grail, with the temptress who, under the spell of Klingsor, seduces the knights of the Grail; and he had, moreover, thought out the impressively obscure suggestion that she was Herodias, condemned like the wandering Jew to live till the Saviour's second coming. The quiet expression of these startling ideas is more remarkable than their adoption; for smaller artists live on still more startling ideas; but most remarkable of all is the presentation of Parsifal, both in his foolishness and in the wisdom which comes to him through pity. The chief excuse for doubting whether Wagner's last work is really his greatest is that most of its dramatic subtleties are beyond musical expression, since they do not lead to definite conflicts and blendings of emotion. Where the orchestra shows that Parsifal is becoming half-conscious of his quest while Kundry is beguiling him with memories of his mother,—and also during the two changes of scene to the Hall of the Grail, where the orchestra mingles the agony of Amfortas and the sorrow of the knights with the tolling of the great bells,—the polyphony is almost as dramatic as in Tristan, while the prelude and the Charfreitagszauber are among the clearest examples of the sublime since Beethoven. But elsewhere there are few passages in which the extremely recondite harmonic style can be with certainty traced to anything but habit. This style originated, indeed, in a long experience of the profoundest dramatic impulses; but as a habit it does not seem, like the greatest things in art, the one inevitable treatment of the matter in hand. But, whatever our doubts, we may safely regard Parsifal as a work which, like Beethoven's last fugues, invites attack rather from those critics who demand what flatters their own vanity than from those who wish to be inspired by what they could never have foreseen for themselves.
In Wagner's harmonic style we encounter the entire problem of modern musical texture. Wagner effected vast changes in almost every branch of his all-embracing art, from theatre-building and stage-lighting to the musical declamation of words. Most of his reforms have since been intelligently carried out as normal principles in more arts than one; but, shocking as the statement may seem to 20th-century orthodoxy, Wagnerian harmony is a universe as yet unexplored, except by the few composers who are so independent of its bewildering effect on the generation that grew up with it, that they can use Wagner's resources as discreetly as he used them himself. The last two examples at the end of the article on Harmony show almost all that is new in Wagner's harmonic principles. The peculiar art therein is that while the discords owe their intelligibility and softness to the smooth melodic lines by which in “resolving” they prove themselves but transient rainbow-hues on or below the surface, they owe their strangeness to the intense vividness with which at the moment of impact they suggest a mysteriously remote foreign key. Wagner's orthodox contemporaries regarded such mixtures of key as sheer nonsense; and it would seem that the rank and file of his imitators agree with that view, since they either plagiarize Wagner's actual progressions or else produce such mixtures with no vividness of key-colour and little attempt to follow those melodic trains of thought by which Wagner makes sense of them. There is far more of truly Wagnerian harmony to be found before his time than since. It was so early recognized as characteristic of Chopin that a magnificent example may be seen at the end of Schumann's little tone-portrait of him in the Carnaval: a very advanced Wagnerian passage on another principle constitutes the bulk of the development in the first movement of Beethoven's sonata Les Adieux; while even in the “Golden Age” of music, and within the limits of pure diatonic concord, the unexpectedness of many of Palestrina's chords is hardly less Wagnerian than the perfect smoothness of the melodic lines which combine to produce them.
Wagnerian harmony is, then, neither a side-issue nor a progress per saltum, but a leading current in the stream of musical evolution. That stream is sure sooner or later to carry with it every reality that has been reached by side-issues and leaps; and of such things we have important cases in the works of Strauss and Debussy. Strauss makes a steadily increasing use of avowedly irrational discords, in order to produce an emotionally apt physical sensation. Debussy has this in common with Strauss, that he too regards harmonies as pure physical sensations; but he differs from Strauss firstly in systematically refusing to regard them as anything else, and secondly in his extreme sensibility to harshness. We have seen (in the articles on Harmony and Music) how harmonic music originated in just this habit of regarding combinations of sound as mere sensations, and how for centuries the habit opposed itself to the intellectual principles of contrapuntal harmony. These intellectual principles are, of course, not without their own ground in physical sensation; but it is evident that Debussy appeals beyond them to a more primitive instinct; and on it he bases an almost perfectly coherent system of which the laws are, like those of 12th-century music, precisely the opposite of those of classical harmony. The only illogical point in his system is that the beauty of his dreamlike chords depends not only on his artful choice of a timbre that minimizes their harshness, but also on the fact that they enter the ear with the meaning they have acquired through centuries of harmonic evolution on classical lines. There is a special pleasure in the subsidence of that meaning beneath a soothing sensation; but a system based thereon cannot be universal. Its phenomena are, however, perfectly real, and can be observed wherever artistic conditions make the tone of a mass of harmony more important than the interior threads of its texture. This is of constant occurrence in classical pianoforte music, in which thick chords are subjected to polyphonic laws only in their top and bottom notes, while the inner notes make a solid mass of sound in which numerous consecutive fifths and octaves are not only harmless but essential to the balance of tone. In Debussy's art the top and bottom are also involved in the antipolyphonic laws of such masses of sound, thus making these laws paramount.
The irrational discords of Strauss are also real phenomena in musical aesthetics. They are an extension of the principle on which gongs and cymbals and all instruments without notes of determinate pitch, are employed in otherwise polyphonic music.
But it is important to realize that both these types of modern harmony are radically non-Wagnerian. Haydn uses a true Straussian discord in The Seasons, in order to imitate the chirping of a cricket; but the harshest realism in Götterdämmerung (the discord produced by the horns of Hagen and his churls in the mustering-scene in the second act) has a harmonic logic which would have convinced Corelli. And of Debussy's antipolyphonic art there is less in Wagner than in Beethoven. The present influence of Wagnerian harmony is, then, somewhat indefinite, since the most important real phenomena of later music indicate a revolt both from it and from earlier classical methods. It has had, however, a marked effect on weaker musical individualities. Musical public opinion now puts an extraordinary pressure on the young composer, urging him at all costs to abandon “out-of-date” styles however stimulating they maybe to his invention. It is no exaggeration to say that a parallel condition in literature would be produced by a strong public opinion to the effect that any English style was hopelessly out of date unless it consisted exclusively of the most difficult types of phrase to be found in the works of Browning and Meredith. The brilliant success of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, in which Wagnerian technique is applied to the diatonic style of nursery songs with a humorous accuracy undreamed of by Wagner's imitators, points a moral which would have charmed Wagner himself; but until the revival of some rudiments of musical common sense becomes widespread, there is little prospect of the influence of Wagner's harmonic style being productive of anything better than nonsense.
