If the drama of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is clear, so is the music. Wagner's powers were now at their fullest and ripest; in invention, technical skill, mastery of the colours of the orchestra, he towers far above every composer born in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche, in one of his many quarrelsome diatribes, says Wagner determined to be a musician and made himself one by sheer will-power. But not by taking much thought, nor by determination, nor by exercise of will-power, does any man become an artistic inventor, as Nietzsche would have perceived had he himself been capable of more than spasmodic, fragmentary thought.
Tristan is full of great melodies: gigantic themes, like that which is played while Isolde awaits Tristan's entrance; tender ones, like the music given to Brangaena; passionate and intolerably sweet, like the duet of the pair after the drinking of the philtre. The other acts contain even more amazing things, and to them we shall come in due time. First let us note how Wagner sustains his background and atmosphere throughout the first act. At times, when our attention has to be concentrated on the personages on the opening stage, the sea song theme, with its smell of the pungent, salt sea air, disappears; then, as I have remarked, it gradually creeps in again, so that we do not realize that it has ever been absent; or, again, as during the conversation between Isolde and Brangaena, it breaks in abruptly, with the roar of the seamen's voices and Kurvenal's savage orders. It is managed with the most consummate skill. Though the tent blots out a view of the ocean, yet the mast and bellying sail (which ought to be visible), and the miraculous music, preserve an ever-present sense of the sea, and in that atmosphere of keen freshness and ozone the characters begin to work out their destiny.
To understand Wagner's real greatness and the personal quality that differentiates his art from the art of all other musicians, let us try to realize what this means. Weber and Mendelssohn had written picturesque music; they gave us landscapes, the rolling sea, black woods, moaning winds; and having done that, they were satisfied. But where they left off Wagner began; their completed picture was for him nothing more than a background. Against it he placed his characters, with their different thoughts and emotions fully expressed. Now, in music you cannot express two or more conflicting emotions, even if you have two themes, each of which shows its own emotion when played separately, and set them going together. However many parts a piece of music may be written in, it is the mass of tone reaching our ears, it is the ensemble, that makes the effect.
It is obvious, then, that when Wagner puts a shrieking female on the deck of a ship which is shouldering its way through a gently-rolling sea, the same music must serve for the lady and the sea: it must suggest the sea and express the lady's emotions. He could not give picturesque music to the orchestra and let the female indulge in real screams, or even musical imitations of real screams. That would be to step beyond the boundaries of art; for neither real screams nor their imitations are beautiful, and—if a truism may be pardoned to complete a nice sentence — without beauty there can be no art. In spite of much nonsense that has been written and talked, Wagner never sacrificed beauty. Those foolish tales which I used to read in my youth — of how Wagner appropriately, if daringly, sustained discords through long discordant situations — what are they but the blatherskite of long-tongued persons who could talk faster than they could think?
Wagner would not sacrifice beauty. He made the characters say, in notes as well as words, what they had to say; he always got the colour and atmosphere of the scenic surroundings into the music. By inspiration and marvellous workmanship he made each phrase serve a double purpose: it expresses the emotion of the person who sings, it gives the atmosphere in which the person is singing. More than anything else, it is this that gives his music its individual character. Such music is bound to remain for ever fresh. So long as trees and grass, rain and sunshine, running waters and flying cloud-scud are things sweet to man's thought, so long will the music of Wagner's operas remain green, always new and refreshing, full and satisfying. He often achieved the task, or helped himself to achieve it, by showing us Nature in sympathy with the human mood of the moment (see the second scene in Tannhäuser, the last act of Tristan, the whole of the last act of The Valkyrie); but he succeeds equally well without these touches of his unrivalled stage-craft.
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde continued...
