Further back I referred to Richard Wagner's earlier and later use of the leit-motif. In its naive, primitive simplicity the device is certainly not highly artistic. When our academic gentry use it in their festival oratorios, they are supposed to show themselves very advanced. But what purpose, musical or other, is subserved by arbitrarily allying a musical phrase to a personage or an idea and blaring it out whenever that personage or idea comes to the front? Wagner early realized the uselessness of the proceeding, and, as I pointed out, in Tannhäuser there are no leit-motifs, though passages and parts of passages are repeated. In Lohengrin it is used rather for a dramatic than a musical purpose. By the time he wrote Tristan he had learnt the splendid artistic uses to which a rather commonplace device could be put.
The differences between the leit-motif in Lohengrin and the leit-motif in Tristan are two: in Tristan they are more significant — indeed, they are pregnant to bursting — and more fully charged with energy and colour; also they are not stated and restated in their elementary form as in Lohengrin, but continually subjected to a process of metamorphosis.
This last mode of developing a theme Wagner probably learnt from Liszt, and without it both Tristan and the Ring would be very different. But while these are the most striking characteristics of Wagner's later leading themes and mode of using them, it must be remembered that he was now absolute master of every device of operatic art previously known, and of many he invented as he went along. The same theme in Tristan has a dozen functions to fulfil; it may be changed almost out of recognition to suit a particular occasion, and a few minutes later, for a dramatic purpose, it may be stated in all its original plainness.
I advise all who wish to understand Tristan not to fret themselves with those rascally and stupid guide books which merely addle the brain with their interminable lists of motives. Throughout the opera new matter is continually introduced, with old themes, changed or unchanged, woven into the tissue; and to go hunting for these old themes, to try to recognise them whenever they crop up, is not only to lose one's enjoyment of the music, but to run a fair risk of misapprehending it altogether, and the drama as well. This jack-fool twaddle about there being not a single phrase in an opera which has not grown out of another is manifestly absurd — for out of what does the first one grow? — and utterly untrue.
In every scene of Tristan an enormous amount of new material is added; it is the richest thematically of all the operas. But this labelling of nearly every phrase as the This, That, or the Other motive has confused thousands of people; they fatigue themselves by incessantly trying to remember the significance of a phrase which resembles one that has been heard before; and instead of letting the music make its natural and proper effect, they grow bewildered, and blame Wagner for what is in reality the fault of the analysis-makers. To follow Tristan, one need not know more than the few fragments I have quoted above; in fact, without any knowledge whatever it can be followed.
The themes have no arbitrary significance attached to them; they are expressive music and tell their own tale. But, of course, when one has heard the opera many times—and twenty performances, supplemented by a study of Von Bülow's incomparable piano arrangement of the score, are hardly enough to enable us to begin to comprehend the real richness and vastness of Tristan — then gradually new features are found, new lights are thrown by the use of leit-motifs, and slowly the music yields us that multiplicity of complex delights — delights intellectual, emotional, or purely sensuous — that only the greatest works of art can give. Take, for example, the theme which Isolde sings when she perceives death to be the only cure for her woes. Later, when she is compelling Tristan to drink the poison-cup, the sailors break out into "Yo-heave-ho!" and he says, "Where are we?" "Near to the end!" she says, to the accompaniment of this same theme. To one who barely remembers the phrase the effect is marked enough, but to one who knows every phrase and its associations the double meaning is almost horrifying.
It is idle to search out such points as this with the aid of a guide, for while you are waiting for them you lose the music in which they are set; the prevailing mood eludes you, and the points themselves fail to make their effect. There is another danger. People easily go leit-motif mad, and their insane imagination creates a leit-motif out of any two phrases that have a superficial and accidental resemblance. Tristan and the Ring are not musical puzzles. The themes are quite able to look after themselves, and to assert themselves at the proper moment. Many of them are not leit-motifs at all. The passage out of the sea-song, which is heard constantly through the first act, is not a leit-motif, nor are many of the other subjects. They receive symphonic development; but, after all, the opening four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony do not form a leit-motif.
I have dwelt at length upon this, for misguided people have blinded both themselves and others as to Wagner's true aims and methods and the splendour of the accomplished thing by trying to read into his music a host of trifling and pettifogging allusions which he never intended. There is enough to break our minds upon without troubling about these.
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde continued...
