HISTORY OF MUSIC. 



men's ears with that still more poetic music of 

 which Wagner is the greatest exponent, and to 

 which we must now turn. 



THE MUSICAL DRAMA WAGNER. 



The great movement in favour of a more inti- 

 mate connection between poetry and music with 

 which the name of Richard Wagner is for ever 

 indissolubly associated will, we believe, be looked 

 upon by historians of music as the great glory of 

 this century. Notwithstanding this, it is a move- 

 ment which has excited both opposition and ridi- 

 cule ; the first mostly from those who could not 

 or would not understand it, and the latter from 

 the still larger class who did not understand it 

 Wagner is a writer and thinker as well as a 

 musician, and has been the author of a number of 

 books, in some of which he sets forth his own 

 musical theories in no measured terms ; while 

 in others he extends his criticisms to political 

 matters with equal dogmatism. In Germany it 

 is probably these books, more than anything else, 

 which have prejudiced so many musicians against 

 him for it must be acknowledged that he uses 

 his pen in most unsparing fashion upon every- 

 thing and everybody with whom he does not 

 happen to agree. In England, however, this can- 

 not have been the reason, for only two or three of 

 his numerous works have been translated, and these 

 only within the last two or three years ; while, 

 until the starting of the Wagner Society in Lon- 

 don, his music was scarcely ever performed. It 

 must be regretfully acknowledged, then, that the 

 great mass of people who have thought it well in 

 this country to sneer at the ' Music of the Future,' * 

 have done so in absolute ignorance of what the 

 thing was that they were criticising ; ignorance 

 so absolute as to be absurd sometimes, as when it 

 has been gravely asserted that Wagner was wanting 

 in melody, or that his orchestration was noisy ! 



It is of course impossible here to enter into 

 the matter controversially ; we can only give in 

 a few sentences a summary of the leading ideas 

 in Wagner's reform movement. Wagner takes 

 Beethoven's ninth symphony (the choral) as his 

 starting-point. Here, he says, the greatest of the 

 world's musicians exhausted all the resources of 

 his art ; developed pure orchestral music to the 

 highest point which it can reach ; then having 

 done all this, and being able to go no farther in 

 the same direction, completed and crowned his 

 work by combining poetry and music in the 

 last, the choral, movement. The central idea of 

 Wagner's reform grows out of this : he wishes to 

 bring poetry and music into the closest connec- 

 tion to make each one the exponent of the other 

 believing that each has been developed separ- 

 ately to the highest point which it can reach with- 

 out union with its sister art. The spoken drama 

 has long ago reached a perfection which may 

 indeed be again reached, but which we cannot 

 expect to see exceeded. The only hitherto exist- 

 ing musical drama, the opera, in which the music 

 was everything, and the poetry nothing where 

 the librettist was compelled to torture his verses 

 to make them fit the ' Procrustean bed of aria, 



* This epithet, ' in the sense of music that is ugly to us, but may 

 possibly sound all right to our grandchildren, is a bugbear in- 

 vented by an ingenious critic ' it does not come from Wagner or 

 his friends, nor does it in any way indicate the drift of their 

 wished-for reformation. 



scena, vrAfinalel the conventional forms in which 

 alone the musicians chose to write has shewn 

 itself incapable of further progress, has indeed 

 developed itself into Robert on the one side, and 

 La Grande Duchesse on the other. Wagner 

 wishes to combine poetry and music into what he 

 has called the 'art-work of the future' the 

 musical drama. Here he would have first of 

 all a poetic groundwork a real drama in itself 

 and not a mere collection of jingling nonsense, 

 which is only listened to for a moment because it 

 is not understood. For the subject of this drama 

 he chooses the myth., as that which is on every 

 ground the most suitable The verse must be 

 such as is best adapted for musical declamation ; 

 and for this purpose, neither rhyme nor blank 

 verse is well suited. Wagner adopts the old 

 alliterative verse of the Edda in his later works, 

 and, we think, with great success. Here, for 

 instance, are a few lines from Die Walkure (the 

 translation is from one printed for private circu- 

 lation), which are sufficient to shew how well such 

 verse can adopt itself to musical accents : 



Was rechtes je ich rieth, 

 andern dunkte es arg ; 

 was schlimm inuner mir schien, 

 andre gahen ihm Gunst. 



In Fehde fiel ich 



wo ich mich fand ; 



Zorn traf mich 



wohin ich zog ; 



gehrt ich nach Wonne, 



weckt ich nur Weh' ; 

 drum muszt ich mich Wehwalt 



nennen ; 

 des Wehes wallet* ich nur. 



The rule I counted right, 

 others reckoned for wrong : 

 the same deed I deemed false. 

 Others found it was fair ; 



and war was with me 



over the world ; 



rage rose on 



every road; 



prayed I to pleasure, 



woe was awake ; 

 I called myself Wehwalt there- 

 fore ; 

 for woe was left me alone. 



The music is to be neither more nor less 

 important than the poetry, but to stand beside it, 

 and to give to it its highest possible expression in 

 the 'universal language' of sound. No conven- 

 tional forms no supposed necessity for solos, or 

 duets, or concerted pieces must stand in the way 

 of this. This has proved a sad stumbling-block to 

 Wagner's critics, who forthwith condemn him at 

 once for ' want of melody.' Such a charge proves 

 only in what a narrow sense that word has come 

 to be used. By a strange contradiction, that 

 music which cbntains one tune only, with nothing 

 more than a rhythmic accompaniment, positively 

 barbarous, is called melodious ; while music in 

 which every voice and every instrument is simul- 

 taneously singing its own beautiful song, is said 

 to have ' no melody ! ' A beautiful simile of Wag- 

 ner's gives some idea of the nature of the higher 

 form of orchestral melody it is as follows : A 

 solitary visitor to a great forest upon a summer 

 night leaves behind him the town noise, and 'over- 

 come by the total impression, rests to collect his 

 thoughts, and then, gradually straining the powers 

 of his soul, distinguishes more and more clearly, 

 as it were with new senses, the multitudinous 

 forest voices. He hears songs such as he 

 believes himself never to have heard before- 

 multiplied they gain in strange power, louder and 

 louder they grow ; and however many voices or 

 separate songs he hears, the overpowering clear 

 swelling sound appears as the one great forest 

 melody. . . . This melody will never cease to 

 haunt him ; but repeat or hum it he cannot ; to 

 hear it again, he must return to the woods on a 

 summer night Would it not be folly if he were 

 to catch a sweet wood-bird, so as to train it at 

 home to whistle a fragment of that great forest 



