UO 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



operas. What rush, triumph, aspiration, about 

 the large outlines and tramping measures of the 

 overture — what elan and rugged dignity in the 

 choruses — what elevation in Rienzi's prayer, 

 "God of Light!" — what fervor and inexhaust- 

 ible faith in the phrase, " Thou hast placed me 

 as a pilot on a treacherous and rocky strand ; " 

 what imagery, as of vast buildings and ranged 

 towers dimly seen athwart the dull-red dawn, in 

 the music of " Scatter the night that reigns above 

 this city," and what chastened exaltation, free 

 from all Italian flourish or ornament, of " Rise, 

 thou blessed sun, and bring with thee resplendent 

 liberty ! " 



But in 1S39, which saw the text and the com- 

 pletion of the first two acts, we are far indeed 

 from the production of " Rienzi ; " it struck) 

 however, the key-note of a most important and 

 little understood phase in Wagner's career — the 

 political phase. 



IV. 



Musicians, poets, and artists, are not, as a 

 rule, politicians. Their world is the inner world 

 — the world of emotion and thought, which be- 

 longs to no special age or clime, but is eternal 

 and universal. Goethe and Beethoven cared lit- 

 tle for revolutions, and have even been deemed 

 wanting in patriotism. But Wagner was a hot 

 politician. He was at one time a mob orator, 

 and was seduced by his illustrious friend Rockel, 

 who was afterward put in prison, to throw him- 

 self at Dresden into the rise of Saxony and the 

 agitations of 1848. He was proscribed and 

 banished from German soil, and years afterward, 

 when he had, if not recanted, at all events ac- 

 quiesced in things as they were, he was obliged 

 to fly from Munich, warned by the friendly king 

 that his life was in danger. The title of but one 

 of his numerous semi-political pamphlets, "Art 

 and the Revolution," gives us the real clew to all 

 this. People have accused Wagner of time-serv- 

 ing and change in politics, but the fact was, that 

 he favored social revolution because he thought it 

 needful to art revolution. Conventionality and 

 stagnation in art seemed to him the natural out- 

 come of conventionality and stagnation in so- 

 ciety ; the world must be recalled to feeling and 

 reality before art could again become the ideal 

 life of the people, as it was once in Greece. But 

 when, through royal patronage later on, all im- 

 pediments to the free development of his art- 

 work disappeared, his revolutionary tendencies 

 also disappeared. He too was, first and foremost, 

 Artist, and he came to realize his vocation, which 



had to do with art, and with "the Revolution" 

 only in so far as it affected "Art." 



But, in fact, no ardent soul could escape the 

 romantic and revolutionary contagion that swept 

 over France, Germany, and even England, be- 

 tween 1830 and 1850. Europe seemed to breathe 

 freely once more after the iron hand of Napo- 

 leon I. had been lifted from her oppressed bosom 

 — but then, like a wayward child, she burst into 

 all kinds of excesses. 



The atheism of the first Revolution, the bru- 

 tality of Napoleon Bonaparte's administration, 

 the dullness of Louis Philippe's, the revived taste 

 for Greek art combined with the inflexible dog- 

 matism of the papal creed — all these conspired 

 to fill the ardent youth of the period with a deep 

 revolt against things as they were. With this 

 came a settled longing for a return of some sort 

 to Nature and freedom, and a vague but intense 

 aspiration toward the ideal and immaterial world, 

 which in other times might have taken the form 

 of a religious revolution, but in 1830 broke out 

 in what has been called " Romanticism " in Art. 

 It was seen in the writings of Mazzini and the 

 mutterings of Italian freedom, in the insatiable 

 and varied developments of Madame Sand's gen- 

 ius, in the wild and pathetic cries of Alfred de 

 Musset, in the sentimentalism of Lamartine, in 

 the vast scorn and bitter invective of Hugo, in 

 the heart-broken submission of Lacordaire, and 

 in the despair of De Lamennais. Byron, Shel- 

 ley, and Tennyson, caught both the most earthly 

 and the most heavenly echoes of the romantic 

 movement in England ; while its inner life and 

 genius have found, after all, their most subtile 

 expression in the music of Beethoven, Mendels- 

 sohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, 

 and Rubinstein. 



" It seems, indeed," writes Wagner, in one of 

 those veins of flashing perception in which he so 

 abounds, " that human sentiment, as if intensified 

 by the pressure of conventional civilization, had 

 sought an outlet for asserting itself according to 

 its own laws of expression. The astounding pop- 

 ularity of music in our time proves the correctness 

 of the supposition that the modern development 

 of this art has met an innate desire of the human 

 spirit." l 



Wagner had left Magdeburg for Riga, but he 

 soon came to the end of his tether there. A 

 stupid little provincial town was not likely to 

 become then what Wagner has made Baireuth 



i Letter to Villot, p. 30. 



