Kitabı oku: «Aspects of Modern Opera: Estimates and Inquiries», sayfa 4

To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician: Where, one ends by wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss? – the unparalleled maker of music, the indisputable genius who gave us a sheaf of masterpieces: who gave us "Don Quixote," "Ein Heldenleben," "Zarathustra," "Tod und Verklärung." Has he passed into that desolate region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist – the futility of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as "Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past)? Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the ministrations of that "Eternal Spirit" which, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases"?

A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA

I

Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters have improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though, Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker with whose example one might to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and "sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines contemned. The ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.

Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained (despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it – not a drama with auxiliary music, but a dramma per musica– a drama for (the sake of) music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing, despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded by the quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves and him.

II

It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be strictly auxiliary – an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the poet, all other persons who have to do with the work – composer, stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and singing actors – should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect, and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the musical element in its constitution. If there is one principle that is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor – like the scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship between the drama and the music is inverted – that in his music-dramas the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect, while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours – it becomes obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively) in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of "Meistersinger," of "Götterdämmerung," when this principle is tested by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the play's the thing? Imagine what the second act, say, divorced from the music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act, with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and that its form is dramatic form and not musical form; but is there to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and controlling?

It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing, or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more generally recognised and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama and its appurtenances, for the most part, as a mere stalking-horse for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is impossible to find the drama because of the music.

It was not, as has been said before, that he fell short, but that he went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a welter of magnificent and inspired music – obscured them, stretched them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that Wagnerism ever had.

It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both in spite of and because of their music. The validity and persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less certain than of old. But the music, qua music, is of undiminished potency – it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite, epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and, as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart – a little lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and attractive"; and at his finest he is incomparable. No one but a master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the ecstatic swoon of Tristan and Isolde in the midst of which the warning voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal – music that is as the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can say no less than that, regarded from any æsthetic standpoint at all, he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have quoted said of a great though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."

III

As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part – their music – which should be accessory and contributive rather than essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly – and, let it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art – through Wagner's orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice. He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text. His singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech, necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical dramatist.

And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.A. Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices, entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama," he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely," he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the place of form in absolute music" – a sentence which, one may be permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of the truth if the word "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned, assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at the same time Mr. Baughan holds that Wagner, in his treatment of the voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice, I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyricism. It is a little difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if the ensemble piece – the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example – is inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it incontrovertibly is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal attitude toward the conventions of the operatic stage makes it difficult to tolerate what Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle of two persons inside a house and two outside, supposed to be unconscious of each other's presence, making their remarks in rhythmic and harmonic consonance. Yet is Wagner much less distant from the dramatic verities when, in the third act of "Die Meistersinger," he ranges five people in the centre of a room and causes them to soliloquise in concert, to the end of producing a quintette of ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly freed himself from what he regarded as the musical bondage of his predecessors when he could tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the duet, the ensemble piece, and the chorus? The truth of the matter seems to be that if Wagner's music, in itself, were less wonderful and enthralling than it is, those who would fain insist upon a decent regard for dramatic consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate many things in the vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the "Ring" and "Parsifal" which are not a whit more dramatically reasonable than the absurdities which Wagner contemptuously derided in the operas of the old school. His vocal writing, far from being deficient in melodic quality, far from ignoring "the full resources of music and of the beautiful singing voice," is saturated and overflowing with musical beauty, and with almost every variety of melodic effectiveness except that which is possible to purely formal song. Mr. Baughan complains that the voice-parts have "no independent life" of their own. "In many cases," he says, "the vocal parts, if detached from the score [from the orchestral support] are without emotional meaning of any kind – the expression is absolutely incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For the same thing is necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied with modern harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written since composers began to discover the modulatory capacities of harmony, one might ask Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or any kind of expression or effect, if the voice part were sung without its harmonic support?

No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe, have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the second place, he had been content to let his dramatis personæ employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.

It would be fatuous, of course, to deny that there are passages in Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as examples of a perfect kind of music-drama: which satisfy, not only every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for example, Waltraute's narrative in "Götterdämmerung"; the early scenes between Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Brunnhilde's announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walküre"; and in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to Isolde his sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act – where the breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated outpourings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.

But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the materials of musical expression had attained a greater ductility and variety, and until the intellectual and æsthetic seed which Wagner sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own time – it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved – that the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed to achieve, and with that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime deficiency.

IV

It is not every generation that can witness the emergence of a masterpiece which may truly be called epoch-making; yet when France – not the Italy of Peri and Monteverdi; nor the Germany of Gluck and Wagner – produced, doubtless to the stupefaction of the shades of Meyerbeer, Bizet, and Gounod, the "Pelléas et Mélisande" of Claude Debussy, it produced a work which is as commanding in quality as it is unique in conception and design.

It has been left for Debussy to write an absolutely new page in the eventful history of the opera. This remarkable composer is to-day regarded with suspicion by the vigilant conservators of our musical integrity – those who are vigorous and unconquerable champions of æsthetic progress so long as it involves no change in established methods and no reversal of traditions; for he has shown a perverse disinclination to conform to those rules of procedure which, in music as in the other arts, are held to be inviolable until they are set aside by the practice of successive generations of inspired innovators. He has, in brief, affronted the orthodox by creating a form and method of his own, and one which stubbornly refuses to square with any of the recognised laws of the game. He is nowhere so significant a phenomenon to the curious student of musical development as in his setting of Maeterlinck's drama. For the first time in the history of opera we are confronted here with the spectacle of a lyric-drama in which, while the drama itself holds without compromise the paramount place in the structural scheme, the musical envelope with which it is surrounded is not only transparent and intensifying, but, as music, beautiful and remarkable in an extraordinary degree. The point to be emphasised is this: that the postulate of Count Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers," formulated by Gluck almost two hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective application in Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande." What the Camerata, and their successors, could not accomplish for lack of adequate musical means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a Frenchman of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved.