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STUDIES
IN THE
WAGNERIAN DRAMA

BY

HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL

NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1904

Copyright, 1891, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
All rights reserved.

TO
JOSEPH S. TUNISON

CONTENTS.

THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA.

CHAPTER I.
THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA: ITS PROTOTYPES AND ELEMENTS.

To understand the real position which Richard Wagner occupies in the world of art, and to appreciate the significance of the achievements which have kept that world in a turmoil for two generations, it is necessary to guard against a very prevalent misconception touching him and his activities. The world knows him as an agitator and reformer, but it does not know as clearly as it ought that the object for which he labored as controversialist and composer was a reform of the opera, not a reform of music in general. Outside the theatre, it is true, he exerted a tremendous influence on the development of the musical art, but that influence he exerted only because he was a gifted musician who stood in the line of succession with the great ones who had widened the boundaries of music and struck out new paths for it—let me say Bach, Haydn, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann. As a legitimate successor of these Kings by the grace of Genius, he advanced the musical art indeed, but as a reformer his activities went, not to music in its absolute forms, but to an entirely distinct and complex art-form: the modern opera. The term which Wagner invented to describe what he wished to see as the outcome of his strivings—the term which his enemies parodied so successfully that the parody has clung to the popular tongue and lingered in the popular ear, in spite of all explanation—is "The Art-work of the Future." By this "Art-work" he meant a form of theatrical entertainment in which poetry, music, pantomime, painting, and the plastic arts were to co-operate on a basis of mutual dependence—or better, perhaps, interdependence—and common aim, the inspiring purpose of all being dramatic expression. In the history of music and the drama certain strongly-marked phases are found, in which the interdependence of the elements which Wagner consorts in his Art-work can be traced; and if we look at these phases a little thoughtfully, they may help us to understand the present phase, and we may learn not only how to appreciate what Wagner has done, but also how to avoid the misconceptions which so frequently stand in the way of appreciation.

I.

Wagner, then, was a Reformer of the Opera; or, as I think it would better be put, a Regenerator of the Lyric Drama. The latter definition is to be preferred, because it presupposes the earlier existence of an art-form similar in purpose and elements (however dissimilar in scope and effectiveness it may have been) to that with which Wagner's name is identified in music's history. The spirit which created that art-form is as old as humanity; but the record of civilization shows two manifestations of it so striking that even the most cursory study ought to disclose Wagner's relationship to them. The Greek stage-plays were much more closely allied to the modern opera than to the modern drama. Music was an integral and essential element of them. So says Aristotle, adding, "and their greatest embellishment." The dramatic and lyrical elements were inseparable in Greek tragedy, which had its origin in the Dithyramb, a dance-song. The one modified the other. The cheer, the gravity, or the horror of the action were reflected at the same time in the music. While there was music also in comedy, yet, as Aristotle indicates, it was there of less importance, probably because comedy—which was really broad enough to meet the modern notions of farce—was beneath the true level of music as apprehended by the Greeks. As between the lyre and flute, the Greeks gave a vastly greater admiration to the former, as is indicated by a proverb quoted by Cicero: "As they say among the Greeks, they are flautists who cannot be citharists;" and it is significant that stringed accompaniments were given to the dithyrambic chorus when its purposes were serious, and accompaniments on the aulos when those purposes were of lighter character. Obviously the writers of Greek tragedy were of necessity versed in the musical art of their time. Æschylus was not merely a poet; he was also a musical composer. A fragment of a theoretical book on rhythm by Aristoxenus, a fellow-pupil with Alexander the Great of Aristotle, has been preserved to us. It is filled with lamentations over the decadence of dramatic music since the good old days of Æschylus, and accuses contemporary composers of pandering to the depraved tastes of the public, and disregarding the noble art of the Æschylean period. We know that Sophocles was a practical musician. He was taught both music and dancing by Lampros (or Lamprocles) the dithyrambist, in his time the foremost professor of these arts in Athens. It is on record that he played in two of his own dramas, taking the character of Nausikaa in the "Pluntriæ," and, in "Thamyris," that of a singer stricken blind by the Muses. In this latter role he so pleased the popular fancy that, by public vote, a portrait of him, with a cithara in his hands, was placed in the Painted Porch—a fact which finds mention in Athenæus. Another indication of his proficiency as a musician is that he wrote pæans and elegies, and a work in prose for the instruction of choral artists. It is written that Euripides, obviously less musician than poet, had to call in the aid of a composer to supply the essential music for one of his plays. Possibly this explains the fact that in his tragedies the odes are less intimately connected with the play than they are in the tragedies of Æschylus. They no longer form part of the action, and their beauty consists in their skilfulness of form rather than in the natural union of rhythm and music.

In the Greek tragedies the actors did not declaim their lines as ours do; they chanted them. The word which they used to describe what we call dramatic declamation was emmeleia, from en and melos, whence we get our word melody; so that they literally spoke of their plays as being spoken "in tune." Even the Attic orators, as well as the later Roman, delivered their orations musically, and, like the actors, sometimes had the help of an accompaniment on the lyre or flute to keep them in pitch. Cicero and Plutarch both relate an anecdote to the effect that Caius Gracchus once lost his pitch in the heat of an oration, and was brought back to it by a slave with an instrument, who was concealed behind him for that very purpose. In the plays the chorus sang the odes which filled the pauses between the various stages of the action; and as they sang they kept time with solemn dance-steps, moving from side to side and around an altar which stood in the centre of the space between the audience and the stage, called then, as now, the orchestra.[A] The choric odes were sung in unison, but, more richly than the declamation of the actors, they were accompanied by instruments which I believe we are justified in assuming (though it is a debated point) supplied a foundation of harmony for the vocal melody. Unfortunately, none of the music composed for these tragedies has been preserved; but we are surely justified in believing that, in spite of its simplicity (for simple it had to be to meet the demands of Greek philosophy), it was beautiful, impressive, and, in the highest degree, expressive music. No people have ever come nearer than those old Greeks to a correct estimate of the real nature of music and the role that it can and ought to be made to play in the economy of civilized life. So convinced were they of the directness and forcefulness of its appeal to the emotional part of man that they refused to divorce it from poetry, and hedged its practice about with legal restrictions, fearful that a too one-sided cultivation of it in its absolute state would tend to the development of the emotions at a cost of the rational and sterner elements on which the welfare of the individual and the community depended. Theirs was surely a lofty ideal: an art which charmed the senses while it persuaded the reason was a noble art. But it died with much else that was noble and lovely when the Romans succeeded the Greeks as arbiters of the civilized world. Under the Romans the lyric drama degenerated into mere spectacular mummery.

II.

Thus much for the first manifestation of the spirit which is exemplified in the Art-work of Richard Wagner. I have laid stress upon the Greek tragedy simply because it was the direct inspiration of the second manifestation, out of which the Art-work which Wagner reformed was evolved, through steps that are easily followed by students of modern musical history. Wherever we turn we find the genesis of the drama to be the same. I might have chosen the Hindu drama as a starting-point, and found in it the same intimate association of poetry, music, and action that characterized Greek tragedy. Or I might have pointed to the Chinese drama, and invited you to a study of that association as it has existed for thousands of years, and still exists in the theatres of the Great Pure Kingdom.

Now for the second manifestation. Towards the close of the sixteenth century dissatisfaction with the inelastic artificiality of polite music took possession of a body of scholars and musical amateurs who were in the habit of meeting for learned discussion in the house of Giovanni Bardi, Count Vernio, in Florence. Their discussions led them to formulate two aims: First, To give emotional expressiveness to music by putting aside polyphony, and inventing what is called the monodic style. They wrote solos for the voice with harmonic support for the instruments in the shape of chords. Second, They tried to revive the Greek tragedies, or, rather, to imitate them in new compositions, to which they applied their monodic music. They conceived the purpose of music to be to heighten the expressiveness of poetry, and held the play to be "the thing." To "Euridice," the first drama of the new style which was published, the composer of the music, Jacopo Peri, wrote a preface, in which he said that he had been convinced by a study of the ancients that though their dramatic declamation may not have risen to song, it was yet musically colored. This exaltation of speech he evidently thought had its basis in those variations of pitch, dynamic intensity, and vocal quality which Herbert Spencer, in his essay on the "Origin and Function of Music," shows to be the physiological results of variations of feeling, all feelings being muscular stimuli. Peri made careful observations of the inflections which mark ordinary speech, and attempted to reproduce his discoveries as faithfully as possible in the musical investiture which he gave to the poet's lines. "Soft and gentle speech he interpreted by half-spoken, half-sung tones, on a sustained instrumental bass; feelings of a deeper, emotional kind by a melody with greater intervals and a lively tempo, the accompanying instrumental harmonies changing more frequently."[B] He bestowed the greatest care on the rhythm of the music, making it flow along with the rhythm of the words.

These men were as revolutionary in their day as Wagner in ours, many times as intolerant, and, some will say, perhaps equally visionary. They revamped the Hellenic myths concerning the power of music, not as containing a germ of verity wrapped in an ample cloak of poetical symbolism, but as very truth. What the ancient art had been they did not know, but they did not hesitate to say that compared with it the music of their own time (the time of Palestrina and the Netherland School) was a barbarism, the creation of a people whose natural rudeness was evidenced even in their uncouth names—Okeghem, Hobrecht, etc. They could not reconcile counterpoint with the theories touching the province of music laid down by Plato; and that fact sufficed to condemn it. Count Vernio himself published a tract stating the purposes of the reformers. The first step in the process of curing the evil which had come over music, he said, should be to protect the poetical text from the musicians who, to exploit their inventions, tore the poetry to tatters, giving different voices different words to sing simultaneously. The philosophers of old—Plato in particular—had said that the melody should follow the verses of the poet and sweeten them. "When you compose, therefore," said the noble amateur, "have a care that the text remain uninjured, the words be kept intelligible, and do not permit yourselves to be carried off your feet by counterpoint, that wicked swimmer, who is swept along unresistingly by the stream, and arrives at an entirely different landing-place than he intended to make. For, as much as the soul is nobler than the body, so much nobler are words than counterpoint; and as the soul must govern the body, so counterpoint must take its laws from poetry." Caccini, who was a famous singing-master, and the first professional musician to join the Florentine coterie, made many statements in the preface to his Nuove Musiche which Gluck and Wagner only echoed when they came to urge their reforms. Thus he recommends the choice of a pitch which will enable the singer always to use his natural voice, so that expression may be unconstrained. He advises that the singer emancipate himself from a too strict adherence to measure, fixing, instead, the relative value of notes by consideration for the words to which they are set. More striking than either of these utterances, however, is his condemnation of the roulades which had come into use even before the solo style had been invented. He calls these roulades "Long flights" (flourishes or whirlings) of the voice (lunghi giri di voce); and says of them, literally: "They were not invented as being necessary to good singing, but, as I believe, to provide a certain titillation of the ears for the benefit of such as have little knowledge of what expressive singing means; for if they understood this, they would unquestionably detest these passages, since nothing is so offensive as they to expressive singing. And it is for this reason that I have said the lunghi giri di voce are so ill applied. I introduce them in songs which are less passionate, and, indeed, on long, not on short syllables, and in closing cadences." Caccini further advises the avoidance of artificial tones, and the use of the natural voice in order that the feelings may have expression. Wagner urges his singers to leave off the affected pathos which they are so prone to assume with the song-voice, and to enunciate, breathe, and phrase as naturally and unconstrainedly as they would if they were speaking the dialogue instead of singing it. Caccini wished the singer to emancipate himself from the fetters of musical metre, and to consult the rhythm of the words. In Wagner's vocal parts the aim is to achieve through music an increased expressiveness for the poetry, and to this end he raises it to a kind of intensified speech, which retains as much as possible of the distinctness of ordinary dialogue with its emotional capacity raised to a higher power. He desires that the melody shall spring naturally from the poetry, but also that the poetry shall "yearn" for musical expression. Caccini recognized the beauty of embellished song, but restricted the introduction of vocal flourishes to songs which were wanting in expressiveness—in other words, to songs intended merely to charm the ear. Wagner (and here I should like to correct an almost universal misconception)—Wagner never condemned beautiful singing, even in the Italian sense, except where it stands in the way of truthful, dramatic utterance. But he raises the question of nationality and tongue as one which must first of all be considered in determining how poetry is to be set to music. Deference must be paid to the genius of the language employed, and also to the vocal peculiarities of the people who are to perform and enjoy the drama. This is really Wagner's starting-point. He aims to be a national dramatist. In the Italian opera the vocal adornments, favored by the inherent softness and beauty of the Italian language, gradually usurped the first place, while dramatic motive, which had inspired the invention of the opera, dropped out of sight. For such an art there is little natural aptitude in the German, and consequently only a modicum of sympathy. Sung to florid tunes, German words become worse than unintelligible; the poetry loses its merit as speech, and the music is robbed of all its purpose and most of its charm. Believing this, and having already striven to restore naturalness of expression in the spoken drama, Wagner wrote the vocal parts of his lyric dramas so as to bring out first the force of the poetry as such.

There is one more point of resemblance between Wagner and the creators of the Italian lyric drama which I must refer to briefly. It may help us out from the sway of that prejudice which we are so prone to feel towards an innovator, to learn that in so many essentials Wagner has simply given new expression to old ideas. Already, in his "Euridice," Peri concealed his orchestra behind the scenes; but as this device was borrowed from the old Roman pantomimes, and was a general custom, I lay no stress upon it. Monteverde, who did not belong to the band of Florentine reformers, but adopted their theories and put them into practice with far greater skill than any of the originators of the new style, added to the instrumental apparatus until he had a reputation for noise with which that of Wagner, in this respect, is no circumstance. In his "Orfeo" he employed thirty-six different instruments, and it has even been suspected that he was the precursor of Wagner in the device of characterizing his personages by relegating to each a certain instrument or set of instruments. But this, I am convinced, is based on a misunderstanding. It is certain, however, that he used his instruments in such a way as to emphasize climaxes, holding some of them back until the arrival of moments in the action when their sudden entrance would have a particularly telling effect.

III.

Where does Wagner touch hands with the first creators of the art-form of which I have called him the regenerator? What are the fundamental features of his system? What were the impulses which led him out of the beaten path of opera composers? I will try to answer these questions on broad lines, keeping essential principles in view rather than trifling details.

Wagner must be associated with the Greek tragedy-writers: First (and foremost), because he is poet as well as musical composer. He unites in himself the same qualifications (but with the tremendous difference in degree brought about by the changed conditions) as did Æschylus.

Second. Wagner sees in the drama the highest form of art—one that unites in itself the expressive potentiality of each of the elements employed in it, raised to a still higher potency through the merit of their co-operation.

Third. Wagner believes, like the Greek tragedians, that the fittest subjects for dramatic treatment are to be found in legends and mythologies.

Fourth. Wagner believes that the elements of the lyric drama ought to be adapted to the peculiarities, and to encourage the national feeling of the people for whom it is created.

This last point is of such vast significance to the question of the degree of appreciation which Wagner's art ought to receive, and also to an understanding of his attitude towards Italian music, that I wish to emphasize it before proceeding further. Wagner is as distinctively a German dramatist as Æschylus was a Greek or Shakespeare an English. In his poetry, in his music, in the moral and physical character of his dramatic personages—in brief, in the matter and the essence of his dramas—the world must recognize the Teuton. As their spirit roots in the German heart, so their form roots in the German language. One of Wagner's most persistent aims was to reanimate a national art-spirit in Germany. The rest of the world he omitted from his consideration. Those of his dramas in which he carried out his principles in their fulness are scarcely conceivable in any other language than the German, and complete or ideal appreciation of them is possible only to persons who sympathize deeply with German feelings. His whole system, of dramatic declamation rests on the genius of the German tongue. He protests against the attempt to use the bel canto of the Italians in German opera, because the German language is too harsh for florid music, and German throats are not flexible enough to execute agile and mellifluous melodies. In the structure of his system there is everywhere discernible a recognition of the characteristics, physiological as well as psychological, which have always marked Teutonic races. Look at Wagner in the conduct of his polemical battle; in the vehemence of his sincerity, and the rude, sledge-hammer vigor of his manner, he is as distinctively a national type as Luther. Aside from all other considerations, such a man cannot conceive music to be mere "lascivious pleasings." To the Northern mind there has always seemed to be something vicious in the influence of Southern art and manners. It seems to feel instinctively that its vigor is preserved by periodical rebellion against Roman things, and it points as a reason and a warning example to the physical and moral degeneracy of those Goths and Franks who lost their rugged virtues by too long dalliance with the Roman colonists. "Strength before Beauty," "Truth before Convention"—these are German ideals in art as well as in morals.[C]

It is only to recognize a truth, which Wagner himself freely confessed, to say that arts and manners based on such ideals do not always appear pleasing—that, in fact, they sometimes, at first blush, at least, appear uncouth and unamiable. But that fact need not long give us pause. We have simply to recognize that beauty, like everything else so far as we are concerned, is subject to change, and that a new order of beauty, which may be called characteristic beauty, has come to the fore with a claim for recognition as a fit element in dramatic representation. Are we bound to accept as infallible the popular maxim that no matter what the state of affairs on the stage, the accompanying music must delight the ear? Suppose that a composer, utilizing the ear simply as one of the gate-ways to the higher faculties, and aiming to quicken the imagination and stir the emotions, should find a means for doing this without pleasing the ear—would his art be bad for that reason? Was the agony on the faces of the Laocoön put there by the sculptor for the purpose of pleasing the eye? Does it please the eye, or does it fascinate with a horrible fascination, and achieve the artist's real purpose by appealing through the eye to the imagination and emotions?

These questions are in the nature of argument and foreign to my immediate purpose; in the way of contrast, however, the thoughts to which they give rise will help us to appreciate one phase of the Teutonism which Wagner has impressed upon his dramas which is altogether lovely. We will look at it in both of its expositions, musical and literary, for thus we shall learn something of his constructive methods as well as his poetical impulses. I refer to the ethical idea pervading those of his dramas which, like the Greek tragedies, are based on legendary or mythical tales. The idea is that salvation comes to humanity through the self-sacrificing love of woman. This idea is at the bottom of the great poems and dramas of Germany; it is the main-spring of "The Flying Dutchman," "Tannhäuser," and "The Niblung's Ring;" the chorus mysticus which ends Goethe's "Faust" proclaims it oracularly:

"All things transitory

But as symbols are sent.

Earth's insufficiency

Here grows to event.

The Indescribable,

Here it is done.

The Woman-Soul leadeth us

Upward and on!"

In the creations of Wagner, by a singular coincidence, this beautiful idea is born simultaneously with the fundamental principle of his constructive scheme—the use of melodic phrases as symbols of the persons, passions, and principles concerned in the play. His first drama based on a legendary story is "The Flying Dutchman." The infinite longing for rest of the Wandering Jew of the sea, and the infinite pity and wondrous love of the woman who, through sacrifice of her own life, achieved for the wanderer surcease of suffering—these are the two fundamental passions of the play. The legend of the Dutchman and his doom is told in a ballad which the heroine sings in the second act of the opera; and this ballad, Wagner tells us himself, he set to music first, even before he had completed the book. It is an epitome of the drama, ethically and musically, having two significant musical themes corresponding to the longing of the Dutchman and the redeeming love of Senta. The first of these musical themes is this:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

The second is this:

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Having invented these two phrases for use simply in the ballad, Wagner tells us how he proceeded with his work:

"I had merely to develop according to their respective tendencies the various thematic germs comprised in the ballad to have, as a matter of course, the principal mental moods in definite thematic shapes before me. When a mental mood returned, its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have sought another motivo so long as the object was an intelligible representation of the subject, and not a conglomeration of operatic pieces." This is Wagner's account of the genesis of the "leading motives," or, as I think they would better be called, "typical phrases," and it directs attention to a misconception of their nature and purpose which is pretty general even among the admirers of his works. They were not invented to announce the entrance of persons of the play on their stage; their duties are not those of footmen or ushers. Nor are they labels. Neither can they rightly be likened, as a German critic has declared, to the lettered ribbons issuing from the mouths of figures in mediæval pictures. They stand for deeper things—for the attributes of the play's personages; for the instruments, spiritual as well as material, used in developing the plot; for the fundamental passions of the story. If they were labels, they could only accompany the characters with which they had been associated at the outset, and this we know is not the case; in fact, in some very significant instances, they enter the score long before the characters with whom they are associated have been heard of or their existence is surmised. They are symbols, and hence arbitrary signs, but not more arbitrary than words. All language is arbitrary convention. Only the emotional elements at the bottom of it are real, absolute, universal. It would be just as easy to build up a language of musical tones capable of expressing ideas as it was to build up a language of words. In fact, though we seldom think of it, the rudiments of such a language exist. We are all familiar with some of them, or we should not involuntarily associate certain rhythms with the dance, and others with the march. A drone-bass under an oboe melody in 6-8 time would not suggest a pastoral; trumpets and drums, war; French-horn harmonies, a hunting scene; and so on. More than this, the Chinese have retained in their language a relic of the time when music was an integral element of all speech, not only of solemn and artistic speech, as we see it in the beginnings of the drama in India, Greece, and China. The meaning of many words in the monosyllabic Chinese language depends upon the musical inflection given to them in utterance. In a sense, a phrase of melody, or a chord, or a succession of chords, of harmony, is a "bow-wow word," the only kind of word universally intelligible. A great deal of music is direct in its influence upon the emotions, but it is chiefly by association of ideas that we recognize its expressiveness or significance. Sometimes hearing a melody or harmony arouses an emotion like that aroused by the contemplation of a thing. Minor harmonies, slow movements, dark tonal colorings, combine directly to put a musically susceptible person in a mood congenial to thoughts of sorrow and death; and, inversely, the experience of sorrow, or the contemplation of death, creates affinity for minor harmonies, slow movements, and dark tonal colorings. Or we recognize attributes in music possessed also by things, and we consort the music and the things, external attributes bringing descriptive music into play which excites the fancy, internal attributes calling for an exercise of the loftier faculty, imagination, to discern their meaning. A few examples in both classes will help to make my meaning plain, and I begin with the second class as the nobler of the two.

In Wagner's Niblung tragedy two of the musical phrases associated with Wotan may be taken as symbols of contrasted attributes of the god. Throughout the tragedy of which he is the hero, Wotan figures, by virtue of his supremacy among the gods, as Lord of Valhalla, and consequently as the manifest embodiment of law.

In music the first manifestation of law is in form.

It is impossible to conceive of a combination of the integral elements of music—rhythm, melody, and harmony—in a beautiful manner without some kind of form. Form means measure, order, symmetry. In music more than in any art it is essential to the existence of the loftiest attribute of beauty, which is repose—an attribute whose divine character Ruskin proclaimed when he defined it as "the 'I am' contradistinguished from the 'I become;' the sign alike of the supreme knowledge which is incapable of surprise, the supreme power which is incapable of labor, the supreme volition which is incapable of change." Now what are the musical qualities of which Wagner makes use in order to symbolize the wielder of supreme power? Here is the phrase whose innate nobility and beauty appear to best advantage at the opening of the second scene in "Das Rheingold:"

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

The melody is built out of the intervals of the common chord—the triad—the starting-point of harmony, its first and most pervasive law. This chord, too, supplies the harmonic structure. Its instrumentation (for four tubas with peculiarly orotund voices, specially constructed for Wagner) is unvarying, calm, stately, majestic, dignified, reposeful. Thus does Wagner symbolize musically the chief deity and chief personage of his tragedy in his character as Lord of Valhalla. But through the operation of the curse to which he became subject when he took the baneful ring, another character than that of a supreme god is forced upon Wotan. He has plotted to regain the ring, and restore it to the original owners of the magic gold. He has begotten a new race, the Volsungs, to execute a purpose which, as the representative of law, he is restrained himself from executing. He becomes a wanderer over the face of the earth, a mere spectator of the development of his foolish plot. How is this new character symbolized? Note the music which accompanies Wotan when, disguised as the Wanderer, he enters Mime's cavern smithy in the second scene of "Siegfried:"

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

The fundamental harmonies are retained. The solemn instrumental color is held fast. The dignity of the chord progressions is still there. What, then, is gone? The element of repose. The harmonies are still triads, but tonality, with its benison of restfulness, has been sacrificed. The phrase is in no key, or rather it is in as many keys as there are chords. There is another beautiful instance in which, by the same means, a deprivation which one of the personages of the play undergoes is made plain to the listener. Note the descending series of chords which follows Wotan's kiss depriving Brünnhilde of her divinity, just after he has spoken his pathetic farewell, and just before the orchestra begins its lullaby, in the final scene of "Die Walküre." Here the loss of divine attributes in the disobedient goddess is published by absence of fixed tonality in the chords which accompany the visible signs of her punishment.

In the last two examples we have been called on to observe how changes in character and loss of attributes are delineated by departure of tonality. I will now cite a case in which not the attributes of a personage, but the property of a thing, is the composer's objective point. The case is a striking one, for it is a supernatural property which is to be brought to the notice of the listener, the power of the Tarnhelm (the familiar cap of darkness of folk-lore) to render its wearer invisible. The musical symbol of this magical apparatus in the Niblung tragedy is this:

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This phrase is not often used, but whenever it occurs in the music its mysteriousness arrests attention. What is the source of that mysteriousness? Nothing else than indefiniteness, vagueness of mode. The closing harmony is an empty fifth; we do not know whether it is major or minor, because the determining interval is lacking. Supply a major third and it is major, a minor third and it is minor; in either case, however, the mystical property of the phrase, the element which establishes its propriety, vanishes.

There are many of these typical phrases primarily associated with personages, whose delineation goes to moods and moral traits. There are others that are frankly delineative of externals. The giants in "Das Rheingold" are the representatives of brute force. They are heavy-witted as well as heavy-footed, and their stupidity and clumsiness are aptly characterized in their melody:

(Fasolt and Fafner, of gigantic stature,
armed with strong staves, enter.)

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

The Niblungs are the antipodes in character of the giants—cunning, resourceful, industrious. Intellectually they are schemers and tricksters; by occupation they are smiths. Wagner delineates these activities, the mental as well as the manual, in the orchestral introduction to "Siegfried." A descending figure (a), (two thirds at the interval of a seventh) characterizes the brooding thoughtfulness, the cogitation of Mime; the fact that the dwarf is a Niblung Wagner publishes by means of a rhythmical phrase like the pounding of hammers (b):

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

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Sometimes Wagner becomes frankly delineative or descriptive, utilizing imitation of nature where it will be effective, as in the phrases associated with the Rhine and its denizens—the nixies whom he calls Daughters of the Rhine. The slow undulation of water in its depths, the flux and reflux of the element, the ripples on its surface, the motions of the swimmers, are all pictured to the ear (if I may be permitted to say so) in the melodies of the Rhine and the nixies whose home the river is, and the changes of time and treatment to which those melodies are subjected. The fitful, flickering, crackling crepitation of fire furnishes a suggestion for the phrase which is typical of Loge, the fire-god, whether he appears in his elemental form, as in the finale of "Die Walküre," or bodily as the incarnation of the spirit of mischief in "Das Rheingold:"

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

In describing how he proceeded in the composition of "The Flying Dutchman," Wagner says that when a mental mood recurred for which he had once found thematic expression, that expression was repeated. He speaks here only of moods, but he extended the principle involved to the whole apparatus of the drama—its secret impulses as well as its external agencies. These agencies, in their physical manifestation, moreover, are sometimes anticipated by the appearance in the music of the melodic phrases which typify them; but this never happens unless they are spiritually present in the drama. This is what I have called the use of the themes for prophecy, and to me it seems one of the most beautiful features of Wagner's constructive scheme. Let me illustrate: the sword, which is the instrument designed by Wotan for the working-out of his plot for the return of the baneful ring to its original owners, for itself and as a symbol of the race of demi-gods who were to be endowed with it; Siegfried, the hero who is to be the vessel chosen, not by Wotan but by fate in the prevision of Brünnhilde, to execute the purposes of the god; Brünnhilde herself, not as a goddess but in the character of loving woman willing and able to make the redeeming sacrifice; all these are prefigured in the drama by the entrance of their typical phrases long before the action permits their physical appearance. They are seen by the prophetic vision of certain personages of the play and manifested to us through the music. Thus: the sword phrase appears in the orchestral postlude of "Das Rheingold" at the moment when Wotan, crossing the Rainbow-bridge with the members of his divine household, stops in thought and conceives the plot which is worked out in the tragedy proper; the phrase typical of the heroic character of Siegfried accompanies Brünnhilde's prediction to Sieglinde that she shall give birth to "the loftiest hero in the world," in the drama "Die Walküre;" in giving voice to her gratitude, Sieglinde, in turn, hails Brünnhilde as the representative of the redeeming principle of the tragedy, Goethe's "Ewig-Weibliche," by using a melody which examination shows to be an augmentation of the melodic symbol of Brünnhilde when she appears as mere woman in the last drama of the trilogy.

Let this suffice as an exhibition of Wagner's method of inventing and introducing the melodic material out of which he weaves his fabric, while we look at some of the principles applied in its use. His system rests upon the development of these themes, not according to the laws of the symphony, but in harmony with the dramatic spirit of the text. The orchestra is the vehicle of this development. It is pre-eminently the expositor of the drama. It has acquired some of the functions of the Greek chorus, in that it takes part in the action to publish that which is beyond the capacity of the personages alone to utter. The music of the instruments is the voice of the fate, the conscience, and the will concerned in the drama. To those who wish to listen, it unfolds, unerringly, the thoughts, motives, and purpose of the personages, and lays bare the mysteries of the plot and counter-plot. As the passions and purposes of the drama grow complex, the musical texture, into which the themes which typify those passions and purposes enter, grows complex and heterogeneous. The most obvious factors in this development are changes of mode, harmony, rhythm, time, and orchestration. A single illustration must here suffice. By applying the principle of augmentation to a phrase, in the three phases of melodic, harmonic, and instrumental structure, Wagner illustrates the tragic growth of Siegfried in the Niblung tragedy. When the hero is merely a high-spirited lad, roaming through the forest and associating with its denizens, the phrase appears as the call which he blows upon his hunting-horn:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

When he has entered upon man's estate, has awakened Brünnhilde from her long sleep, learned wisdom from her teaching, donned her armor, and is about to set out in quest of adventure, the typical phrase which greets him has taken on this form:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

Finally, the phrase is metamorphosed into that thrilling pæan at the climax of the Death March, to indicate which is impossible by means of pianoforte transcription:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

IV.

From the beginning of his career Wagner wrote his own librettos; but it is only in "Tristan und Isolde," "Die Meistersinger," "Der Ring des Nibelungen," and "Parsifal" that he realized his conception of what the poet-composer should be. The starting-point of his reformatory ideas was that music had usurped a place which does not belong to it in the lyric drama. It should be a means, and had become the aim. As an æsthetic principle, he contended that it lies in the nature of music to be not the end, but a medium, of dramatic expression. He therefore reversed the old relations of librettist and composer, and made music, which can only address itself to the emotions and imagination, dependent for form, spirit, and character on the poetry, which appeals to reason. Each art when isolated has a restricted range of expression; but in the Wagnerian drama each contributes a complement and helps it to convey all its meanings and intentions without the help of a frequently untrustworthy imagination. In elaborating his theory, Wagner held that as a poetical form of expression rhyme is useless in music, because it not only implies identity of vowel-sounds, but also of the succeeding consonants, which are lost by the singer's need of dwelling on the vowels. The initial consonant, however, cannot be lost in song, because it is that which stamps its physiognomy on the word, and repetition creating a sort of musical cadence which is agreeable to the ear, Wagner desired alliteration to be substituted for rhyme in the chief parts of his verse. From the verse-melody thus obtained he wished the musical melody to spring, words and music becoming lovingly merged in each other, each sacrificing enough of selfishness to make the union possible. To what I have already said about the nature of the typical phrases I wish to add this as a résumé of their purpose: In every drama there are employed certain dramatic and ethical principles as well as agencies. The development of these principles in the conduct and words of the personages, the employment of the agencies, give us the action and significance of the play. For these principles and agents Wagner provides musical symbols. The nature of the principles, the character of the agents, explain the form and spirit of the symbols; the symbols, in turn, sometimes help us to understand the real nature of the things symbolized. If we have grasped the fundamental ideas of a drama, therefore, and appreciated the fitness of their symbols, we shall have penetrated near to the heart of the Art-work. But it cannot be too forcibly urged that if we confine our study of Wagner to the forms and names of the phrases out of which he constructs his musical fabric, we shall at the last have enriched our minds with a thematic catalogue and—nothing else. We shall remain guiltless of knowledge unless we learn something of the nature of those phrases by noting the attributes which lend them propriety and fitness, and can recognize, measurably at least, the reasons for their introduction and development. Those attributes give character and mood to the music constructed out of the phrases. If we are able to feel the mood we need not care how the phrases which produce it have been labelled. If we do not feel the mood we may memorize the whole thematic catalogue of Wolzogen and have our labor for our pains. It would be better to know nothing about the phrases and content one's self with simple sensuous enjoyment than to spend one's time answering the baldest of all the riddles of Wagner's orchestra: "What am I playing now?"

The ultimate question concerning the correctness or effectiveness of Wagner's system of composition must, of course, be answered along with the question, "Does the composition, as a whole, touch the emotions, quicken the fancy, fire the imagination?" If it does these things, we may, to a great extent, if we wish, get along without the intellectual processes of reflection and comparison, which are conditioned upon a recognition of the themes and their uses. But if we put aside this intellectual activity, we shall deprive ourselves, among other things, of the pleasure which it is the province of memory to give; and the exercise of memory is called for by music much more urgently than by any other art, because of its volatile nature and the role which repetition plays in it.

Nothing could have demonstrated more perfectly the righteousness of Wagner's claim to the title of poet than his acceptance of the Greek theory that the legends and myths of a people are the fittest subjects for dramatic treatment, unless it be the manner in which he has reshaped his material in order to infuse it with that deep ethical principle to which reference has several times been made. In "The Flying Dutchman," "The Niblung's Ring," and "Tannhäuser," the idea is practically his creation. In the last of these three dramas it is evolved out of the simple episode in the parent-legend of the death of Lisaura, whose heart broke when her knight went to kiss the Queen of Love and Beauty. The dissolute knight of the old story Wagner in turn metamorphoses into a type of manhood "in its passionate desires and ideal aspirations"—like the Faust of Goethe. All the magnificent energy of an ideal man is brought forward in the poet's conception, but it is an energy which is shattered in its fluctuation between sensual delights and ideal aspirations, respectively typified in the Venus and the Elizabeth of the play. Here is the contradiction against which he was shattered as the heroes of Greek tragedy were shattered on the rock of implacable Fate. But the transcendent beauty of the modern drama is lent by the ethical idea of salvation through the love of pure woman—a salvation touching which no one can be in doubt when Tannhäuser sinks lifeless beside the bier of the atoning saint, and Venus's cries of woe are swallowed up by the pious canticle of the returning pilgrims.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] For popular purposes there is no harm in letting this statement stand as made. Of course the reference goes only to the Greek theatre in its latest form, the evolution of which is indicated, perhaps, in the comparative weakness of the bond which unites the chorus to the action in Euripides. The orchestra was, in fact, the centre around which all the rest, the theatron and the skēnē, were gradually grouped. In the antique festal plays the principal feature was the dance in a circle around the thymele, or altar of Dionysus. It was only by a slow process that the actor came to be thought of as anywise distinguished from his companions. As generally in ancient art priority was indicated by height, there is here a reason for the tragic cothurnus, which might be said to be an inexplicable deformity on any other theory; for it was only by putting them on stilts, so to speak, that it was possible to indicate the participants in the dialogue as apart from the general rout of dancing worshippers. Even in the time of the three great dramatic writers, it seems probable, disturbing as such an idea may be to popular impressions, that some, if not all, plays were performed without any stage. The word skēnē (tent) points to a temporary structure, used in the first place, perhaps, as a shrine for the symbols and properties of the god (like the Tabernacle of the Israelites), then as the dressing-room of the actors; it was succeeded by the temple when the place had become consecrated to the worship of Dionysus, then by the structures suited to a given play, and finally by a permanent stage, which gradually encroached on the space that had once belonged to the orchestra. These conclusions, at least, seem to be borne out by the discoveries and arguments of Dörpfeld.

[B] Naumann's History of Music, vol. i., p. 524.

[C] Mephist. Du weisst wohl nicht, mein Freund, wie grob du bist?
Bac. Im Deutschen lügt man wenn man höflich ist.

GOETHE. "Faust," Part II., Act 2, Sc. 1.

CHAPTER II.
"TRISTAN UND ISOLDE."

A vassal is sent to woo a beauteous princess for his lord. While he is bringing her home the two, by accident, drink a love-potion, and ever thereafter their hearts are fettered together. In the mid-day of delirious joy, in the midnight of deepest woe, and through all the emotional hours between, their thoughts are only of each other, for each other. Meanwhile the princess has become the vassal's queen. Then the wicked love of the pair is discovered, and the knight is obliged to seek safety in a foreign land. There (strange note this to our ears) he marries another princess whose name is like that of his love, save for the addition "With the White Hand;" but when wounded unto death he sends across the water for her who is still his true love, that she come and be his healer. The ship which is sent to bring her is to bear white sails on its return if successful in the mission; black, if not. Day after day the knight waits for the coming of his love—while the lamp of his life burns lower and lower. At length the sails of the ship appear on the distant horizon. The knight is now too weak himself to look. "White or black?" he asks of his wife. "Black," replies she, jealousy prompting the falsehood; and the knight's heart-strings snap in twain just as his love steps over the threshold of his chamber. Oh, the pity of it! for with the lady is her lord, who, having learned the story of the fateful potion, has come to unite the lovers. Then the queen, too, dies, and the remorseful king buries the lovers in a common grave, from whose caressing sod spring a rose-bush and a vine, and intertwine so curiously that none may separate them.

Here, in its simple forms, is the tale which half a millennium of poets have celebrated as the High Song of Love, the canticle of all canticles which hymn the universal passion. British bards, French trouvères, and German Minnesinger, while they sang of the joys and sorrows of humanity, united in holding up Sir Tristram and La beale Isoud as the supreme type of lovers. To-day our poets, writing under the influence of social and moral systems, radically different from those which surrounded the original singers, send back the perennial note with fervor. But the moralist shakes his head, sinks into perplexed brooding, or launches the thunders of his righteous wrath against the storied lovers and their sin. We wish to study the manner in which a great dramatic poet of our day has presented this profoundly tragical yet universally fascinating tale. Must we confront the problem and seek to reconcile the paradox created by the attitudes of poet and moralist? Or may we put aside the phenomenon as one whose interpretation is to be left to each individual's notions of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, and address ourselves directly to a study of the drama as a work of art regardless of its ethical phases? Eventually, I am inclined to believe, we shall be obliged to do the latter; but as appreciation of what the poet-composer has done depends upon an understanding of his purposes, and this again upon a discovery of the elements of the legend which seemed to him potential, we are compelled to make at least a cursory survey of some of the phases through which the story has gone in the progress of time; for each poet, passing the original metal through the fires of his imagination, brought it forth changed in color and enriched with new designs. In the new color and adornments we study something of the social institutions and moral and intellectual habits of the poet's time, these being superimposed on the original idea embodied in the fundamental story. In one of the beautiful tales of Northern mythology (a tale in which I am tempted to think a relic of the primitive Tristram myth may one day be found) we are told how Skirnir cunningly stole the reflection of Frey's sunny face from the surface of a brook, and imprisoned it in his drinking-horn that he might pour it out into Gerd's cup, and by its beauty win the heart of the giantess for the lord for whom, like Tristan, he had gone a-wooing. A legend which lives to be retold often, is like the reflection of Frey's face in this beautiful allegory; each poet who uses it spreads it upon a mirror which not only reflects the original picture, but also the environment of the relator. It will be necessary to remember this when we attempt an inquiry into the morals of Wagner's drama.

I.

To readers of English literature opportunities to acquaint themselves with the legend which is the basis of Wagner's drama have been given by Sir Thomas Malory, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Swinburne, to say nothing of critics and commentators. The story is of Keltic origin, and is supposed to have got into the mouths of the German Minnesinger by way of France. The most admirable as well as complete version extant is the epic poem of Gottfried von Strassburg, written in the thirteenth century. Sir Walter Scott, who was deeply interested in the literary history of the tale, in 1804 edited a metrical version of it from a manuscript said to be the production of Thomas the Rhymer, who lived about a century after Gottfried, if, indeed, he lived at all. From this manuscript Scott argued in favor of a Welsh source for the romance instead of a Norman, as was then generally accepted. The author of the German epic followed a French version, as was customary with the Minnesinger of his period. Tennyson's share in the exposition is exceedingly scant and wholly valueless. It is found in the poem, "The Last Tournament," one of the "Idyls of the King." Arnold's is much more interesting. He treats directly of the outcome of the tragedy in his poem "Tristram and Iseult," and indirectly relates nearly all that is essential to an understanding of the story. His poem presents the death scene of Tristram in Brittany, with the fanciful imaginings of the dying man while waiting for the coming of Iseult, who has been summoned from Tintagel. The whole tale is related by Swinburne in his "Tristram of Lyonesse."

The names of the chief personages in the romance vary slightly in the different German and English versions, but the variations need lead no one astray. Wagner's Tristan is otherwise known as Sir Tristrem and Tristram. All derive the name from the French word triste, and find in it a premonition of his fate. Thus Arnold:

"Son," she said, "thy name shall be of sorrow;
Tristram art thou called for my death's sake."

The poet speaks of the hero's dying mother. So also Swinburne:

"The name his mother, dying as he was born,
Made out of sorrow in very sorrow's scorn,
And set it on him smiling in her sight,
Tristram."

Isolde is variously Iseult, Ysolt, Isoud, and Ysonde; Brangäne is Brangwain and Brenqwain; Kurwenal, Gouvernayle. The changes in orthographical physiognomy are trifling and easily recognized.

It cannot be amiss to call attention to several deviations in Wagner's drama from the legend as it has been handed down by the poets. The majority of these deviations will be found to be full of significance. At the outset we are confronted with the chief of these. In all the other versions the love-potion is drunk by Tristan and Isolde by mistake. In Mr. Swinburne's poem Tristram toils at the oars,

"More mightily than any wearier three,"

and when he rests, calls for a drink,

"Saying: 'Iseult, for all dear love's labor's sake,
Give me to drink, and give me for a pledge
The touch of four lips on the beaker's edge'."

Iseult's maid, Brangwain, is asleep, and the Princess, not wishing to awake her, herself looks for wine and finds a curious cup hid in the maid's bosom. She thinks its contents wine and drinks, and hands it to Tristram to drink. It is the love-draught prepared by Queen Iseult and intrusted to Brangwain, to be by her sacredly guarded and given to Mark and Iseult on their wedding night. Mr. Arnold also has these lovers drink unwittingly

"——that spiced magic draught

Which since then forever rolls

Through their blood and binds their souls,

Working love, but working teen."

In this respect both English poets follow the German epic of Gottfried von Strassburg. The dramatic significance of Wagner's variation can be reserved for discussion hereafter. Its value as intensifying the character of Isolde is obvious at a glance.

Tennyson omits all mention of the love-potion, and permits us to imagine Tristram and Iseult as a couple of ordinary sinners, the former's doctrines on the subject being published in lines like these:

"Free love—free field—we love but while we may;

The woods are hush'd, their music is no more:

The leaf is dead, the yearning passed away:

New leaf, new life—the days of frost are o'er:

New life, new love to suit the newer day:

New loves are sweet as those that went before;

Free love—free field—we love but while we may."

The next important variation (I do not speak of omissions which are inevitable in throwing an epic into dramatic form) is in the scene which follows the discovery of the lovers by King Marke. To discuss this in all its bearings would require more space than I shall care to employ for the purpose, but it is well to know it. The wronged Marke of Wagner, some will say as many have said, is not wronged at all since he chooses to remain inactive, whereas the popular impulse is illustrated in Tennyson's version, where Mark cleaves Tristram to the brain on discovering his treachery. But the Marke of Gottfried and the Mark of Swinburne are scarcely more comprehensible in their conduct than Wagner's Marke. In Gottfried's epic, after the king has repeatedly sent the lovers away and taken them back again, he is finally convinced of their guilt. But before he takes action against Tristan, the latter escapes. In Swinburne, Tristram is taken and led towards the chapel for trial. On the road he wrenches a sword from Moraunt's hands, kills him and ten knights more, leaps into the sea from a cliff, and escapes, aided by Gouvernayle.

In his last act, Wagner has proceeded with the utmost freedom, as in all respects he had a right to do, since no authentic version of the close of the legend has been preserved. Karl Simrock, following the old English "Sir Tristrem," appended to his translation into modern German of Gottfried's epic the episode of Tristan's life in Brittany with a second Isolt, called Isolt of the White Hand. Being low with a wound received in combat, Tristan sends for the first Isolt, cautioning his brother-in-law (as Ægeus cautioned Theseus in Greek story), who goes on the mission, to hoist white sails on returning if successful, black if not. Isolt of the White Hand, who is watching for the return of the ship, moved by jealousy, announces that the sails are black, and Tristan dies just as Isolt enters the chamber. This version Swinburne follows, but Arnold adds a beautiful touch to the old legend by making the second Iseult tend her husband with unflinching love and unfailing fidelity, even while she awaits the coming of her rival. Arnold gives Tristram and the second Iseult a family of children; Swinburne keeps the latter a "maiden wife." Bayard Taylor, in writing about Gottfried's epic, almost angrily refuses to believe that Iseult of the White Hand killed her knight by the falsehood about the sails. Wagner saves himself this embarrassment, and ennobles his hero by omitting the second Isolde from the play altogether, a proceeding which not only brings the tale into greater sympathy with modern ideas of love, but also serves marvellously to exalt the passion of the lovers.

II.

Wagner tells the story of the tragedy in three acts. Few dramas have so little to offer in the way of action, if by action we are to understand incident and diversity of situation. At Bayreuth, in the summer of 1886, Mr. Seidl characterized it very aptly as consisting in each of its three acts as merely preparation, expectation and meeting of the ill-starred lovers. Yet I doubt not that many will agree with me, that the effect of the tragedy upon a listener is that of a play surcharged with significant occurrence. The explanation of this is to be found in the fact that music which has a high degree of emotional expressiveness makes us forget the paucity of external incident, by diverting interest from externals to the play of passion going on in the hearts of the personages. This play is presented to us freed from every vestige of spectacular integument in the instrumental prelude to the drama. I want to lay stress on this statement. It is the passion of the lovers to which the composer wishes to direct our attention at the outset, and to do this most effectively he constructs his musical "argument of the play" out of melodic phrases which have purely a psychological significance. There is considerable music of the kind that I will call scenic in the score of "Tristan und Isolde," but none of it is introduced in the prelude, which for that reason appeals much more directly to the emotions and the lofty faculty of imagination than it does to the fancy. It is true that this makes the task of analytical study more difficult, but for this there is compensation in the fact that enjoyment of its beauties and apprehension of its purposes do not require the intellectual activity conditioned by a following of its typical phrases through the web and woof of the composition. This is characteristic of the entire score of the drama. More than any other of the dramas of Wagner, with the possible exception of "Die Meistersinger," it shows the spontaneity in artistic creation, without which a real art-work cannot come into existence. Wagner himself expressed a preference for "Tristan" over others of his works, and based it on the solid ground that in the composition of its score he had proceeded without thought of his own theories; in other words, he worked spontaneously and not reflectively. The result is strikingly noticeable in the fact that, though there are comparatively few typical melodies in the score, one is much less inclined to dissect it for the pleasure which such a process brings than any other of his scores. The direct, sensuous, and emotional appeal is sufficient. Yet we know that it is a perfect and complete exemplification of his theories.

To come back to the prelude:

An ardent longing for the unattainable; a consuming hunger

"——which doth make

The meat it feeds on;"

a desire that cannot be quenched, yet will not despair; finally, at the lowest ebb of the sweet agony, the promise of an end of suffering, in self-forgetfulness, oblivion, annihilation of individual identity, and hence in a blending or union of identity—these, according to Wagner's exposition and the play itself, are the elements which are prefigured in the instrumental introduction. What are their musical symbols?

The fundamental theme of the drama, the kernel of its musical development, is the phrase which we hear at the beginning of the prelude:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

Brief as this is, it illustrates one step in the melodic development, in respect of which "Tristan und Isolde" is Wagner's most marvellous achievement. It is a unit, in so far as it stands for the passion of the pair, in both its aspects of blissful longing and infinite suffering, but it is nevertheless already complex. It is two-voiced. One voice descends chromatically, the other (beginning with the third measure) ascends by similar degrees. A figure like that used in music to indicate a crescendo,

presents a symbol of duality in unity for the eye like that of this phrase for the ear. How simple yet profound is the idea that all the conflicting passions of the drama are one in origin and in nature. Am I becoming fantastical in thinking that Wagner purposed that this philosophical concept should be stated in the basic material of his music? I think not; but if there is a haunting fear that way it may be dissipated by looking a little further into the prelude. After a brief development of this first musical thought by means of repetition on various degrees of the scale and changes of instrumental color, two new phrases are reached. The first:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

followed immediately by:

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

Now, let us stop to note some resemblances, and from significant portions of the play derive a meaning for our symbols. In this we cannot be helped, as we sometimes are, by natural likenesses. These melodies are not imitative or delineative of external things; they are the result of efforts to give expression to soul-states. At the beginning of Scene 5, Act I., the entrance of Tristan is proclaimed in a manner that leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the first of the two phrases now under investigation. The melody there appears extended, in augmentation, as the musicians say. It stands for the hero of the tragedy. The genesis of the love of Tristan and Isolde must next be studied. That love antedated the beginning of our tragedy. Isolde relates the story of its beginning to her maid. Disguised as a harper, Tristan had come to Ireland to be healed of a wound received in battle with Isolde's betrothed, whom he had killed. Isolde nursed him, but before he was completely restored to health she discovered that the edge of his sword was broken, and that a splinter of steel taken from the head of her dead lover fitted into the nick. The slayer of her betrothed lay before her. She raised the sword to avenge his death, but as she was about to strike, Tristan turned his glance upon her. He looked not at the threatening sword, but into her eyes, and in a moment her heart was empty of anger. Hatred had given place to love. Note here that while Wagner uses that silly apparatus of mediæval romance, the philter, it is not as the creator or provoker of love; that is born without the aid of magic other than Nature's. "He looked into my eyes," says Isolde, and immediately the tender second phrase is uttered by the orchestra. It is thus that this phrase is identified with the glance which aroused Isolde's love.

The material which has now been marshalled is practically all that is contained in the prelude; but there are two modifications of the fundamental phrase which ought to be noticed. One of these, frequently treated responsively by the instruments to build up a climax,

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

seems to depict the gradual recognition by the lovers of the state into which the potion has plunged them. The other is a harmonized inversion of the same figure,

[PNG] [[audio/mpeg]]

to which an added character is given by the jubilant ascent of thirty-second notes, and which, from several climactic portions of the drama, we discover to be significant of the lovers' joyful defiance of death—a sentiment which will be better understood after the philosophy of the tragedy has been studied.

Wagner has himself given us an exposition of this prelude. In one of his writings, after rehearsing the legend down to the drinking of the fateful potion, he says:

"Now there is no end to the yearning, the longing, the delight, and the misery of love. World, might, fame, splendor, honor, knighthood, truth, and friendship all vanish like a baseless dream. Only one thing survives: desire, desire unquenchable, and ever freshly manifested longing—thirst and yearning. One only redemption: death, the sinking into oblivion, the sleep from which there is no awaking!

"The musician who chose this theme for the prelude to his love-drama, as he felt that he was here in the boundless realm of the very element of music, could only have one care: how he should set bounds to his fancy; for the exhaustion of the theme was impossible. Thus he took once for all this insatiable desire; in long-drawn accents it surges up, from its first timid confession, its softest attraction, through throbbing sighs, hope and pain, laments and wishes, delight and torment, up to the mightiest onslaught, the most powerful endeavor to find the breach which shall open to the heart the path to the ocean of the endless joy of love. In vain! Its power spent, the heart sinks back to thirst with desire, with desire unfulfilled, as each fruition only brings forth seeds of fresh desire, till, at last, in the depth of its exhaustion, the starting eye sees the glimmering of the highest bliss of attainment. It is the ecstasy of dying, of the surrender of being, of the final redemption into that wondrous realm from which we wander farthest when we strive to take it by force. Shall we call this Death? Is it not rather the wonder-world of Night, out of which, so says the story, the ivy and the vine sprang forth in tight embrace o'er the tomb of Tristan and Isolde?"

III.

We are on board a mediæval ship within a few hours' voyage of Cornwall, whither Tristan, knight and vassal, is bearing Isolde as bride of King Marke. Isolde is an Irish princess, daughter of a queen of like name with herself. The first scene discloses her to be a woman of most tumultuous passion. Hearing the cheery song of a sailor, she bursts forth like a tempest and declares to her maid, Brangäne, that she will never set foot on Cornwall's shore. She deplores the degeneracy of her mother's sorcery, which can only brew balsamic potions instead of commanding the elements; and she wildly invokes wind and waves to dash the ship to pieces. Brangäne pleads to know the cause of her mistress's disquiet—what I have already related of the previous meeting between the princess and King Marke's ambassador.

After telling this tale to Brangäne, Isolde sends the maid to summon Tristan to her presence, but the knight refuses to leave the helm until he has brought the ship into harbor, and his squire, Kurwenal, incensed at the tone addressed by the princess to one who in his eyes is the greatest of heroes, as answer to the summons sings a stave of a popular ballad which recounts the killing of Morold and the liberation of Cornwall by his master. The refusal completes the desperation of Isolde. Outraged love, injured personal and national pride (for she imagines that he who had relieved Cornwall from tribute to Ireland was now gratifying his ambition by bringing her as Ireland's tribute to Cornwall), detestation of a loveless marriage to "Cornwall's weary king," a thousand fierce but indefinable emotions are seething in her heart. She resolves to die, and to drag Tristan down to death with her. Brangäne unwittingly shows the way. She tries to quiet her mistress's fears of the dangers of a loveless marriage by telling her of a magic potion brewed by the queen-mother with which she will firmly attach Marke to his bride. Thus innocently she takes the first step towards precipitating the catastrophe. Isolde demands to see the casket of magical philters, and finds that it also contains a deadly poison. Kurwenal enters to announce that the ship is in harbor, and Tristan desires her to prepare for the landing. Isolde sends back greetings and a message that before she will permit the knight to escort her before the king he must obtain from her forgiveness for unforgiven guilt. Tristan obeys this second summons, and in justification of his conduct in keeping himself aloof during the voyage he, with great dignity, pleads his duty towards good morals, custom, and his king. Isolde reminds him of the wrong done her in the slaying of her lover and her right to the vengeance which once she had renounced. Tristan yields the right, and offers her his sword and breast, but Isolde replies that she cannot appear before King Marke as the slayer of his foremost knight, and proposes that he drink a cup of reconciliation. Tristan sees one-half her purpose, and chivalrously consents to pledge her in what he knows to be poison. Isolde calls for the cup which she had commanded Brangäne to prepare, and when Tristan has drunk part of its contents she wrenches it from his hand and drains it to the bottom. Thus they meet their doom, which is not death and surcease of sorrow, but life and misery, for Brangäne had disobeyed her mistress out of her love and mixed a love-potion instead of a death draught. A moment of bewilderment, and the two fated ones are in each other's arms, pouring out an ecstasy of passion; then the maids of honor robe Isolde to receive King Marke, who is coming on board to greet his bride.

These are the dramatic contents of the first act, whose musical investiture is now to be looked at a little analytically. At the outset there is an example of the skill with which Wagner employs the charm of contrast. I have said that the music of the prelude is not scenic—it aims at moods and passions, not at pictures. The drama opens with music of the other kind. As the curtain is withdrawn we see within the tent erected for Isolde on the deck of the ship. Hangings conceal all else from view; but the first music which we hear is the voice of an unseen sailor at the mast-head, who sings to the winds that are blowing him away from his wild Irish sweetheart. The melody has a most insinuating charm, especially its principal phrase:

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There is something of the buoyant roll of the ship and the freshness of sea-breezes about it. It plunges us at once into the scenic situation, puts us on shipboard, and helps us to share in the pleasurable sensations of the voyage to Cornwall, especially when, a moment later, it accompanies and amplifies Brangäne's account of the happy progress of the voyage. Scarcely have we surrendered ourselves to this pleasure, however, before Isolde's outburst of rage turns our attention from the scenes to the personages of the play. What was innocent delight to the singer and to us (who are now playing sympathetically along in the drama) has somehow loosened an emotional tempest in the heart of the passenger most concerned in that voyage. Suddenly, as we listen to her imprecations, the whole past of the heroine is revealed—she stands before us, not the inexperienced, unconcerned princess of the other poems, but a fully developed woman, a furious woman, a tragic heroine ripe for destruction. It is a favorite device of poets and musicians—of all creative artists, indeed—to invite Nature to take part in the play of their creations. We think a thunder-storm the proper accompaniment of a murder, and balmy sunshine of a wedding. Here the breezy sea-music has provoked a storm of passion, and the composer permits the enraged princess to lash it into a fury. To suit her mood he invokes dark clouds to obscure the sunshine of its tonality, sends harsh harmonies hurtling among the simple chords that sounded its original innocency, and stirs up a whirlwind out of its first quiet movement. But when, a few moments later, Isolde has checked her wild passion, the music settles back into its original quietude, and in time with its measured pulsations we see the sailors pulling upon the ship's tackle. Now it sings its "Yo-heave-ho!" as decorously as any shanty-song.

I have referred to the duality in unity of the fundamental idea in the music of the drama. A study of the scene in which Isolde resolves upon the double crime of murder and suicide will disclose how relation in thought, emotion, and dramatic motive is expressed by relation in musical symbol. The symbol of longing contained in the fundamental phrase shows ascent in chromatic degrees. Observe, now, that in Act I., Scene 3, the sufferings of the wounded Tristan are depicted in a theme composed wholly of descending half-steps,

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and note, too, that the closing cadence of the short phrase which stands for the love-glance is a downward leap of seven degrees. In this phrase, as we first hear it, there is much tenderness and gentle happiness; but in the glance there was the phantom of that Life-in-Death who won Coleridge's Ancient Mariner from the grisly skeleton in their awful game of dice. Though we do not suspect it, at first, that downward leap of a seventh is an ominous symbol—the symbol of Fate, which might have been heard under the yearning voices of the prelude, and is now proclaimed by the gloomy basses in the scene wherein Isolde selects the poison from the casket of philters which her mother had given in charge of Brangäne:

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There is another phrase of tragic puissance with which we must now get acquainted. At the first glance which Isolde throws upon Tristan, motionless at the helm of the ship, when the curtains are parted to permit the maid to summon the knight into the presence of the princess, this phrase publishes her dreadful determination to seek revenge for outraged love in murder and suicide. It is the symbol of death, whose relationship to the symbol of fate will easily be recognized:

Death... de - vot - ed head!

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Its ominous expressiveness, apart from instrumental color, which cannot be reproduced on the pianoforte, comes from the sudden and unprepared change of key from A-flat to A.

The culminating scene in the drama is that which brings the first act to a close—the meeting of Tristan and Isolde, and the drinking of the potion. In this scene the device of introducing cheerful and exciting sailors' music to heighten the intensity of a dramatic climax is used with peculiarly startling effect. It produces a marvellous illusion by the suddenness of its entrance, its sharp interruption of the tragic music expressive of the soul-torments of the principal personages, and the unprepared transition from the spectacle of doomed humanity to the joy-inspiring aspect of nature. An almost equally noteworthy effect is the orchestral proclamation of Tristan in his character as a fully-developed tragic hero. Observe how, by augmenting the simple phrase, the orchestra increases the stature of the knight; but note also how, though he looms up in Isolde's door-way like a demi-god clad in steel and brass, a knight capable of overthrowing the choicest spirits of Arthur's Round Table, and scattering thirty of King Marke's knights, the fateful harmonies in their chromatic descent (which have their model in the melody of the wounded Tristan) publish his doom with a prophetic forcefulness that cannot be misunderstood.

There is in this scene, also, a peculiarly eloquent example of the manner in which Wagner permits the music to publish hidden meanings in the text. While Brangäne, obeying her mistress's behest, is preparing the fatal draught, the gladsome noise of the sailors is heard from without. The ship is entering the harbor. Tristan, who is brooding over Isolde's demand that he drink a drink of expiation for the slaying of Morold, suddenly arouses himself. "Where are we?" he asks. "Near the goal," answers Isolde. What goal does she mean? Cornwall, the goal of the voyage? Ah, no! The music tells us; the words are sung to the death-phrase.

IV.

Wagner's skill in plunging his listeners into the mood essential to the proper reception of his drama has no brighter illustration than "Tristan und Isolde." The passionate stress and profound melancholy which mark all that really belongs to the story are prefigured for us in the prelude. That story is more than nine-tenths told in the first act. The music that is introduced to give relief to the mind, and also to heighten the tragic effect by means of contrast, is the music that is related to the scene which is the theatre of the outward action, or to the personages of the play who bear no part in the real tragedy which, as I have already intimated, plays on the stage of the lovers' hearts. These comparatively inactive persons who serve as foils are the young seaman who sings at the mast-head, the sailors, the shepherd who enters in the last act, and Kurwenal, the squire. Kurwenal, rugged yet tender, amiable and picturesque, gentle as a woman at core, shares in the bright, flowing, rhythmically vigorous music which tells of unfettered breezes, heaving billows, and popular pride; while to Tristan and Isolde is given the music made out of the few phrases which, as they unfold themselves over and over again in an infinite variety of combinations and with continually changing instrumental color, bring to our consciousness in a wonderfully vivid manner the torments which are consuming them. In the introduction to the second act we have another mood picture—a picture of the longing and impatience of the lovers; but this idea is presented with such peculiar eloquence and beauty in the first scene that I prefer to pass over the instrumental introduction with this bare reference. I am not attempting a dissection of every scene; my purpose will be attained if I can suggest the things which best indicate the mood in which it is well to listen, and give starting-points to the imagination. The second act differs from the first in that it is all but actionless. In it, however, is presented the catastrophe of the tragedy—the discovery of the guilt of the ill-starred lovers by King Marke. The scene is a garden before Queen Isolde's chamber; the time, a lovely night in summer. A torch burns in a ring beside the door leading from the chamber into the garden. The King has gone a-hunting, and as the curtain rises the tones of the hunting horns dying away in the distance blend entrancingly with an instrumental song from the orchestra, which seems a musical sublimation of night and nature in their tenderest moods. Isolde appears with Brangäne, and pleads with her to extinguish the torch and thus give a signal to Tristan, who is waiting in concealment. But Brangäne suspects treachery on the part of Melot, a knight who is jealous of Tristan and himself enamoured of Isolde, and who had planned the nocturnal hunt. She warns her mistress and begs her to wait. In their dialogue there is lovely fencing with the incident of the vanishing sounds of the hunt like Shakespeare's dalliance with nightingale and lark, in "Romeo and Juliet." Beauty rests upon this scene like a benediction. To Isolde the horns are but the rustling of the forest leaves as they are caressed by the wind, or the purling and laughing of the brook. Longing has eaten up all patience, all discretion, all fear. She extinguishes the torch in spite of Brangäne's pleadings, and with wildly waving scarf beckons on her hurrying lover. Beneath the foliage they sing their love through all the gamut of hope and despair. The text of their duet consists largely of detached ejaculations and verbal plays, each paraphrasing and varying or giving a new turn to the outpouring of the other, the whole permeated with the symbolism of pessimistic philosophy, in which night and death and oblivion (which have their symbols in the music) are glorified, and day and life (which also have their symbols) and memory are contemned. There is transporting music in the duet, and many evidences that in it Wagner wrote and composed with tremendous enthusiasm, veritably with a pen of fire. In the dialogue of this scene lies the key of the entire philosophy of the tragedy. We ought to know this, but we do not need to justify it. If I were to indulge in the unnecessary luxury of criticism, I should suggest that pessimistic philosophy transmitted through verbal plays which are carried far beyond the limits of reason, if not to the verge of childishness, is not good dramatic matter, and half an hour of it is too much. Swinburne, who repeatedly makes use of metaphors and thoughts which tempt one to believe that he made a study of Wagner's drama, also attempts a dalliance with the images of night and day which fill so many of Wagner's pages, but with a difference, and his Iseult, unlike the German Isolde, checks Tristram's song wherein he asks:

"Love, is it day that makes thee thy delight,
Or thou that seest day made out of thy light?"

by calmly observing,

"I have heard men sing of love a simpler way
Than these wrought riddles made of night and day."

I have said that we ought to know something of the philosophy of the tragedy. In Wagner's exposition of the prelude he wishes us to observe the "one glimmering of the highest bliss of attainment" in the surrender of being, the "final redemption into that wondrous realm from which we wander farthest when we try to take it by force." For this wondrous realm he chooses death and night as symbols, but what he means to imply is the Nirvana of Buddhistic philosophy, the "final deliverance of the soul from transmigration." Nirvana is the antithesis of Sansâra. Sansâra, the world, means turmoil and variety, and each new transmigration means another relapse into the miseries of existence. The love of Tristan and Isolde presents itself to Wagner as ceaseless struggle and endless contradiction, and for such a problem there is but one solution—total oblivion. Nirvana is the only conception which offers a happy outcome to such love; it means quietude and identity.

The duet is rudely interrupted in its moment of supremest ecstasy by a warning cry from Brangäne. Kurwenal dashes in with a sword and a shout: "Save thyself, Tristan!" King Marke, Melot, and courtiers at his heels. Day, the symbol of all that is fatal to their love, has dawned. Tristan is silent, though King Marke, in a long speech, bewails the treachery of his nephew and friend. Much ridicule has been poured out on this scene, which the ordinary theatre-goer finds dramatically disappointing. There can be no question that the popular sentiment is better expressed by Tennyson, in the corresponding scene in his poem, "The Last Tournament:"

"But while he bow'd to kiss the jewell'd throat,
Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch'd,
Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek—
'Mark's way,' said Mark, and clove him thro' the brain."

One need not be an advocate to say that though Marke's sermonizing may be theatrically disappointing, it offers in itself a complete defence of its propriety. From the words of the heart-torn king we learn that he had been forced into the marriage by the disturbed state of his kingdom, and that he had not consented to it until Tristan (whose purpose it was to quiet the jealous anger of the barons) had threatened to depart from Cornwall unless the King revoked his decision to make him his successor. Tristan's answer to the sorrowful upbraidings of Marke is to obtain a promise from Isolde to follow him into the "wondrous realm of Night;" then (note this as bearing on the ethics of the drama), seeing that Marke did not wield the sword of retribution, he makes a feint of attacking Melot, but permits the treacherous friend to reach him with his sword. He falls wounded unto death.

V.

The dignified, reserved knight of the first act, the impassioned lover of the second, is now a dream-haunted, longing, despairing, dying man, lying under a lime-tree in the yard of his ancestral castle in Brittany, wasting his last bit of strength in feverish fancies and ardent longings touching Isolde. Kurwenal has sent for her. Will she come? A shepherd tells of vain watches for the sight of a sail by playing a mournful melody on his pipe. What a vast expanse of empty sea is opened to our view by the ascending passages in long-drawn thirds! How vividly we are made to realize the ebbing away of Tristan's vital powers!

In the music of this act, if anywhere in the creations of Wagner, we are lifted above the necessity of seeking significances. Even the pianoforte can speak the language of this act. There is not one measure in it which does not tell its story in a manner which puts mere words to shame. Oh, the heart-hunger of the hero! The longing! Will she never come? The fever is consuming him, and his heated brain breeds fancies which one moment lift him above all memories of pain, and the next bring him to the verge of madness. Cooling breezes waft him again towards Ireland, whose princess healed the wound struck by Morold, then ripped it up again with the avenging sword with its telltale nick. From her hands he took the drink whose poison sears his heart. Accursed the cup and accursed the hand that brewed it! Will the shepherd never change his doleful strain? Ah, Isolde, how beautiful you are! The ship, the ship! It must be in sight! Kurwenal, have you no eyes? Isolde's ship! A merry tune bursts from the shepherd's pipe. It is caught up by the orchestra and whirled away on an ocean of excited sound. It is the ship! What flag flies at the peak? The flag of "All's well!" Now the ship disappears behind a cliff. There the breakers are treacherous. Who is at the helm? Friend or foe? Melot's accomplice? Are you, too, a traitor, Kurwenal?

Tristan's strength is unequal to the excitement of the moment. His mind becomes dazed. He hears Isolde's voice, and his wandering fancy transforms it into the torch whose extinction once summoned him to her side: "Do I hear the light?" He staggers to his feet and tears the bandages from his wound. "Ha, my blood, flow merrily now! She who opened the wound is here to heal it!" Life endures but for one embrace, one glance, one word—"Isolde!"—which is borne to her ears by the sadly sweet phrase, typical of the first glance of love—the word and tones which first he had uttered after the potion had made him forget all but his love.

While Isolde lies mortally stricken upon Tristan's corpse, Marke and his train arrive upon a second ship. Brangäne has told the secret of the love-draught, and the king has come to unite the lovers. But his purpose is not known, and faithful Kurwenal receives his death-blow while trying to hold the castle against Marke's men. He dies at Tristan's side. Isolde, unconscious of all these happenings, sings out her broken heart and expires.

"And ere her ear might hear, her heart had heard,
Nor sought she sign for witness of the word;
But came and stood above him, newly dead,
And felt his death upon her: and her head,
Bowed, as to reach the spring that slakes all drouth;
And their four lips became one silent mouth."

VI.

The story of Tristan and Isolde, as it was sung by the minstrel knights of the Middle Ages, is a picture of chivalry in its palmy days. We need to bear this in mind when we approach the ethical side of Wagner's version. In the music of the love duet and Isolde's death lies, perhaps, the most powerful plea ever made for the guilty lovers. No one will stray far from the judgment which the future will pronounce on Wagner's creations, I imagine, who sets down Isolde's swan's song as the choicest flower of Wagner's creative faculty, the culmination of his powers as a composer. I do not believe that the purifying and ennobling capacity of music was ever before or since demonstrated as it is here. While listening to this tonal beatification, it is difficult to hear the voice of reason pronouncing the judgment of outraged law. Yet it is right that that voice should be heard. It is due to the poet-composer that it should be heard. Wagner's attitude towards the old legend differs vastly from that of the poets who preceded him in treating it.

In the days of chivalry depicted by Gottfried von Strassburg and the other mediæval poets who have sung the passion of these lovers, the odor which assails our moral sense as the odor of death and decay was esteemed the sweetest incense that arose from a poet's censer. Read the Wachtlieder of the German Minnesinger. The German Wachtlied, the Provençal alba, is the song sung by the squire or friend watching without, warning the lovers to separate. Brangäne's song in the second act is such a Wachtlied. Read the decisions of the Courts of Love, which governed the actions of chivalrous knighthood when chivalry was at its zenith. Again and again was it proclaimed by these tribunals that conjugal duty shut out the possibility of love between husband and wife. In the economy of feudal castle life there was no provision for women. The place was the domicile of warriors. Daughters of the lord of the castle were married off in childhood. Who, then, could be the object of knightly love? The answer is not far to seek. The service of woman to which mediæval knighthood was devoted, the service which is celebrated in words which we can scarcely accept, except as wildest hyperbole, was the service paid to another man's wife. And the fact that the knight himself had a wife was not a hinderance but an incentive to the service which was the occupation of his life. Now think for a moment on Wagner's modification of the Tristram legend. From it he eliminates the second Iseult. His hero cannot contract a loveless marriage, and at one stroke one element in the attitude of the sexes which appears strange, unnatural, and shocking to us, is wiped from the story.

The versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Tennyson, and Wagner present three points of view from which the love of the tragic pair must be studied. With the first three the drinking is purely accidental, and the passion which leads to the destruction of the lovers is something for which they are in no wise responsible. With Tennyson there is no philter, and the passion is all guilty. With Wagner the love exists before the dreadful drinking, and the potion is less a maker of uncontrollable passion than a drink which causes the lovers to forget duty, honor, and the respect due to the laws of society. It is a favorite idea of Wagner's that the hero of tragedy should be a type of humanity freed from all the bonds of conventionality. It is unquestionable in my mind that in his scheme we are to accept the love-potion as merely the agency with which Wagner struck from his hero the shackles of convention.

Unquestionably, as Bayard Taylor argued, the love-draught is the Fate of the Tristan drama, and this brings into notice the significance of Wagner's chief variation. It is an old theory, too often overlooked now, that there must be at least a taint of guilt in the conduct of a tragic hero in order that the feeling of pity excited by his sufferings may not overcome the idea of justice in the catastrophe. This theory was plainly an outgrowth of the deep religious purpose of the Greek tragedy. Wagner puts antecedent and conscious guilt at the door of both his heroic characters. They love before the philter, and do not pay the reverence to the passion which, in the highest conception, it commands. Tristan is carried away by love of power and glory before men, and himself suggests and compels by his threats Marke's marriage, which is a crime against the love which he bears Isolde and she bears him. There is guilt enough in Isolde's determination and effort to commit murder and suicide. Thus Wagner presents us the idea of Fate in the latest and highest aspect that it assumed in the minds of the Greek poets, and he arouses our pity and our horror, not only by the sufferings of the principals, but also by making an innocent and amiable prompting to underlie the action which brings down the catastrophe. It is Brangäne's love for her mistress that persuades her to shield her from the crime of murder and protect her life. From whatever point of view the question is treated, it seems to me that Wagner's variation is an improvement on the old legend, and that the objection, which German critics have urged, that the love of the pair is merely a chemical product, and so, outside of human sympathy, falls to the ground.

CHAPTER III.
"DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG."

Once upon a time—if I were disposed to be circumstantial I would say in the early summer of the year of our Lord 1560, for it was the year of Hans Sachs' widowerhood—Veit Pogner, desiring to honor the craft of the master-singers in Nuremberg, to whose guild he belonged, offered a rare prize as the reward of the victor in a singing contest to be held on St. John's Day. Pogner was a rich silversmith who had travelled much, who had loved the arts of song and song-making, and whose pride had been hurt by the discovery that the gentry and nobility of the German nation affected to despise the humble burgher for his too great devotion to money-getting, unmindful of the fact, which Pogner knew full well, that what there was of art-love and devotion and talent was possessed and encouraged by the common people. It was for this reason that he resolved to stimulate a supreme effort in the form of art which most interested him, and the prize which he offered was nothing less than his only child Eva in marriage, with all his great wealth as a dowry. But Eva, dutiful in the main if rather forward and self-willed, was little inclined to be bestowed as a prize unless she had the picking of the winner. The fact is, she had lost her heart to a handsome young knight from Franconia—in the course of a flirtation carried on during divine service, I regret to say—and had told him so in a somewhat impetuous manner, scarcely consistent with modern notions on the subject of young women's behavior. She had not thought it necessary to take her father into her confidence, and so the young Franconian knight, who had come to Nuremberg to repair his fortunes, was reduced to the extremity of entering the Guild of master-singers, so that he might be qualified to go into the competition on the morrow. A trial of candidates for admission to the guild had been announced for that very day after divine service, and Walther von Stolzing (that was the young knight's name) entered the lists. But, alas! he knew nothing of the code of laws which governed the structure of master-songs and prescribed the thirty-two offences which must not be committed. Nor did he count on the fact that the adjudicator who would keep tally of his violations of those laws would be Sixtus Beckmesser, the town-clerk, whose longing glances were also turned in Eva's direction—or, at least, towards her father's gold. He went into the contest trusting to the inspiration of his love and his memory of the spirit which breathes through the songs of that ardent old nature-lover, Walther von der Vogelweide, whom the master-singers counted among the founders of their guild, to carry him through. When the time came for him to improvise a song which was to determine whether or not he was fit to be a master-singer, he sang: now pouring out an ecstasy of feeling, and anon scorching with scornful allusions the jealous pedant behind the judge's curtain. In a burst of enthusiasm he rose from the chair in which the code required the singer to sit, and this completed his discomfiture. Hans Sachs, who, as he used to say, was "shoemaker and poet, too," indeed had recognized evidences of genius in the song, and its newness of style and indifference to ancient formula seemed to him to weigh little as against its freshness and eloquence and ardor. But Sachs could not prevent judgment going against the singer. That night the young couple resolved to elope and seek their happiness outside the code of laws of the Master-singers, but were interrupted by the circumstance that Sachs, haunted by the song of the knight whose cause he had espoused, was unable to sleep, and had resolved to finish a pair of shoes ordered by Beckmesser. Sachs was kindly disposed towards the lovers, but he had a strong sense of the duty due to parents. He saw the pair in the shadow of a tree while he was musing on the occurrences of the day, and suspected their purpose, as, indeed, he well might, for Eva had changed her head-dress for that of her maid, Magdalena. As if without special purpose, he drew his bench to the door, and threw a ray of light across the street, through which they would be obliged to pass. In another moment the malicious town-clerk appeared on the scene with a lute. He had come to serenade Eva, in the hope of making an impression which would be useful to him on the morrow, for it had been stipulated that though the winner of the prize must be a master-singer, yet Eva was to have a voice in the decision. While Magdalena took her place at the window to delude Beckmesser with the belief that his serenade was being listened to by its object, Sachs interrupted the malicious clown by lustily shouting a song as he cobbled at the bench, pleading in extenuation, when Beckmesser remonstrated with him, that he must finish the shoes, for want of which Beckmesser had twitted him at the meeting in St. Catherine's Church a few hours before. Finally, having reduced the boor to the verge of distraction, Sachs agreed to listen to his serenade, provided he were allowed the privilege of playing adjudicator and marking the errors of composition by striking his lapstone. The errors were not few, and, as you may imagine, each critical tap threw Beckmesser into more of a rage, until he lost his head altogether, and Sachs beat such a tattoo on his lapstone that he had finished his work when Beckmesser came to the end of his song, which, we may believe, was comical enough. And now, to complete Beckmesser's misery, David, an apprentice of Sachs' and Magdalena's sweetheart, thinking that the serenade had been intended for her, began to belabor the singer with a club; the hubbub called the neighbors into the street, and, as many of them bore little grudges against each other, they took occasion to feed them all fat. A right merry brawl was in progress when the watchman's horn was heard. Quick as a flash the brawlers disappeared, and when the sleepy old watchman entered the street none of the peace disturbers was to be seen; the old Dogberry stared about him in amazement, rubbed his eyes, sang the monotonous chant which told the hour and cautioned the burghers against spooks, and walked off in the peaceful moonlight.

Next morning Walther, who had been taken in by Sachs, sang the recital of a dream which had enriched his sleep. It was as beautiful in the telling as in the experience, and Sachs transcribed it, punctuating the pauses with bits of advice which enabled Walther easily to throw it into the form of a master-song which would pass the muster even of the pedantic code, though a few liberties were taken in the matter of melody. While Sachs was absent from his shop to don clothes meet for the coming festivities, Beckmesser came in and found the song, which he conveyed to his own pocket. Sachs, returning, discovered the theft, and gave the song to the thief, who, knowing Sachs' great talent in composition, secured a promise from him not to claim it as his own, and to permit him to sing it at the contest. This suited Sachs' purposes admirably. A few hours later all the good people of Nuremberg were gathered on the meadow just outside the walls, which was their customary place of merrymaking. The guilds were there—the cobblers and tailors and bakers and toy-makers—God bless 'em!—with trumpeters and drummers and pipers, and hundreds of spruce apprentices; and the master-singers with their banner and insignia, headed by Sachs. Beckmesser was there, too, with the words of Walther's song whirling in a hopeless maze in his addled pate. He tried to sing it, but made a monstrously stupid parody, and when the populace hooted and railed and jeered at him for presuming to aspire to the hand of the beauteous Eva he flew into a rage, charged the authorship of the song which had caused his downfall on Sachs, and left the field to his rival Walther, who, to vindicate Sachs' statement that the song was a good one when well sung, presently burdened the air with its loveliness, adding, in his enthusiasm, an improvised apostrophe to Eva and the Parnassus of poetry. Master-singers, people—and Eva—were agreed that the gallant knight had won the prize, and Sachs gently compelled him, in spite of his protest, to take the master-singer's medallion along with the bride, and charged him never more to affect to despise the German masters of song, whose works shall live though the Holy Roman Empire go up in smoke.

I.

The story of "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" furnishes more food for reflection than one might think at first blush, and opens a channel of thought not commonly used when Wagner is in mind. It is a comedy, and it is easiest to think of Wagner as a tragedian. Yet it is not the smallest of his achievements that, more thoroughly and consistently than any dramatist of our time, he has in his works restored the boundary line which in the classic world separated comedy from tragedy. In "Tannhäuser," "Tristan und Isolde," and "The Niblung's Ring" are found examples of the old tragedy type. They deal with grand passions, and their heroes are gods or god-like men who are shattered against Fate. His only essay in the field of comedy was made in "Die Meistersinger," and this is as faithful to the old conception of comedy as the other dramas are to the classic ideals of tragedy. It deals with the manners and follies and vices of the common people, and exemplifies the purpose of comedy as it was set down in one of the truest and best definitions ever written. It aims to chastise manners with a smile. There are two ways of looking at "Die Meistersinger." It can be weighted with a symbolical character, or it can be taken as an example of pure comedy, with no deeper significance than lies on the easily-reached surface of its lines, action, and music. There is no doubt that Wagner conceived it as a satire, and it is even possible (although I can recall no direct statement of his to that effect) that he intended to chastise with it the spirit of conservatism and pedantry which was for so long a time a stumbling-block in the way of his system. Telling of his first draft of the comedy in 1845, immediately after the completion of "Tannhäuser," he said that he had planned it as a satyr-play after the tragedy, and, conceiving Hans Sachs as the last example of the artistically productive Folk-spirit, had placed him in opposition to the master-singer burgherdom, to whose droll and rule-of-thumb pedantry he gave individual expression in the character of the adjudicator, or Merker. This statement, although it was made nearly a generation before the comedy was written, justifies the assumption that it was his purpose in it to celebrate the triumph of the natural poetic impulse, stimulated by communion with nature, over pedantic formulas. But a word of caution should be uttered against the autobiographic stamp which some extremists have wanted to impress upon it. The comedy is not rendered more interesting or its satire more admirable by thinking of Walther as the prototype of Wagner himself, of Beckmesser as Wagner's opponents, and of Hans Sachs as King Ludwig, embodying in himself, furthermore, the symbol of enlightened public opinion, which neither despises rules nor is willing to be ridden by them. Such an exposition of its symbolism lies near enough in its broad lines, but there is danger in carrying it through all the details of the plot. When it is too far pushed, critics will ask in the future, as they have asked in the past, how this can be accepted as the satirical motive of the comedy when the hero who triumphs over the supposed evil principle in the drama does so, not to advance the virtue which stands in opposition to that evil principle, but simply to win a bride—a purpose that is purely selfish, however amiable and commendable it may be. Walther does, indeed, discover himself as the champion of spontaneous, vital art, and the antagonist of the pedantry represented by the master-singers; but this is not until after he has learned that he can only win the young lady by himself becoming a member of the guild, and defeating all comers at the tournament of song. Knowing none of the rules, he boldly relies on the potency of the inspiration begotten by his love, and does his best under the circumstances; that he ultimately succeeds he owes to the help of Sachs, and the fact that his rival defeats himself by resorting to foul means. Besides, to justify fully this dramatic scheme, Beckmesser ought not to have been made the blundering idiot and foolish knave that he appears to be in the stage versions, but at the worst a short-sighted, narrow-minded, and perhaps malicious pedant. As he stands in the stage representations Beckmesser is an ill-natured and wicked buffoon, a caricature of a peculiarly gross kind, and only an infinitesimally tiny corrective idea lies in the fact that a manly young knight who loves a pretty young woman should have saved her from falling into such a rival's hands by marrying her himself. He would have had the vote of the public on his side if he had sung like a crow and Beckmesser like Anacreon.

II.

If we will look upon the contest symbolized in the comedy, not as that between Wagner and his contemporaries, but as between the two elements in art whose opposition stimulates life, and whose union, perfect, peaceful, mutually supplemental, is found in every really great art-work, I think we shall come pretty near the truth. At least, we will have an interesting point of view from which to study its musical and literary structure. Simply for convenience sake let us call these two principles Romanticism and Classicism. The terms are a little vague, entirely arbitrary, and if we were seeking scientific exactness we should be obliged to condemn their use. Popularly, they are conceived as antithetical in the critical history of literature as well as music. It is in this sense (with a difference) that I wish to use them.

If the history of music be looked at with a view to discovering the spirit which animates its products rather than observing their integument, it will be found that from the beginning two forces have been in operation, and by their antagonism have done the work of progressive creation. In the religious chant, with its restrictive clog (the fruit of superstitious veneration and fear) we find that manifestation of the spirit of antique music which was chiefly instrumental in its establishment and regulation. To that spirit tribute above its meed is paid in the hand-books which begin the history of modern music with the chants of the Christian Church. The other spirit, having been cultivated outside the church, has had fewer historians to do it reverence. It is the free, untrammelled impulse which rests on the law of nature and refuses the domination of formal rule and restrictive principle. On the love-song, war-song, and hunting-song of early man, on the cradle-song crooned by early woman, there rested not the weight of superstitious fear and hope which fettered the religious chant. They were individual manifestations of feeling, and in them the fancy was free to discover and use all the tonal and rhythmical combinations which might be helpful in giving voice to emotion. The mission of this spirit (which I will call Romanticism to distinguish it from the conservative, and regulative spirit which I will call Classicism) was fulfilled, during the artificiality and all-pervading scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the Minnesinger and trouvère; and though the death of chivalry ended that peculiar ministry, the spirit continued to live as it had lived from the beginning, as it still lives and will live in sæcula sæculorum, in the people's songs and dances. When the composers of two hundred and fifty years ago began to develop instrumental music they found the germ of the sonata form—the form that made Beethoven's symphonies possible—in the homely dance tunes of the people which till then had been looked upon as vulgar things, wholly outside the domain of polite art. The genius of the masters of the last century moulded this form of plebeian ancestry into a vessel of wonderful beauty; but by the time this had been done the capacity of music as an emotional language had been greatly increased, and the same Romantic spirit which had originally created the dance forms that they might embody the artistic impulses of that early time, suggested the filling of the vessel with the new contents. When the vessel would not hold these new contents it had to be widened. New bottles for new wine. That is the whole mystery of what conservative critics decry as the destruction of form in music. It is not destruction, but change. When you destroy form you destroy music, for the musical essence can manifest itself only through form.

As a perfectly natural result of the development of this beautiful and efficient vessel called the Sonata form, a love of symmetry and order, of correct logic and beautiful sequence, came to dominate composers, and it is a relic of this love, a love which we must not despise in such masters as Haydn and Mozart, which led them to fill so many of their compositions with repetitions of parts and conventional passages that appear meaningless and wearisome to us. They were written in compliance with the demands of form.

III.

For the purposes of our exposition of the symbolism of Wagner's comedy, of the meaning of its satire, we shall have to look upon classical composers as those who developed music chiefly on its formal side and conserved the laws which enabled them to reach one ideal of beauty. The Romantic composers will then be those who sought their ideals in other regions than the formal, and strove to give them expression irrespective—or, if necessary, in defiance—of the conventions of law. Romanticism will appear to us as the creative principle, and hence we shall find it in Wagner's comedy associated with Youth, its passions and enthusiasms; with Love, and heedless, reckless daring; with Spring and blooming time; with the singing of birds and the perfume of flowers; with assertion of the right of unfettered utterance and denial of the wisdom or justice of reflection and moderation.

Do not visions corresponding with these attributes rise up out of the incidents of the play? The lovers, with their impetuous love-making and reckless resolve which sapient Sachs frustrates; Walther's songs in the first act, telling of Spring releasing Nature from her icy shackles and winning her smiles, while sunlight and birds and meadow flowers, and the old poet who sang the praises of them and was named after the mead he loved, united in teaching him the art of song; the bold defiance of the master-singers and their code; the rejection of the medal when it had been won. Classicism, in turn, will appear as the regulative and conservative principle, and its association in the play will be with maturity of age and moderation in thought and action; with personages in whom the creative impulse is not an elemental force, but a pleasure or a duty which waits upon the judgment; also, for satirical purposes, with a guild of handicraftsmen and tradespeople who enforce an apprenticeship in art as they do in trade; who think that by adherence to rule artworks may be created as shoes are made over a last; who are pompous in their pedantry and amiable only in the holy simplicity of their earnestness, their vanity, and their complacency. Such are the associations which arise when the pictures of the comedy are passed in hasty review; and they have been grievously incomplete. They have omitted the real hero of the play, the poet who belongs to the guild and upholds its laws while battling for the spirit represented by him who falls under the condemnation of those very laws. Where is Hans Sachs? Search him out. You will find him in the midst of the combatants fighting valiantly on both sides; representing a principle at once creative and conservative, standing, in the history of artistic development, for those true geniuses who breathe the breath of life into the body, not for the purpose of destruction, but that the spirit may become manifest in the flesh.

It is contest which brings life. All the great classical composers from Brahms back to Bach have had their moments of Romantic feeling; it is never absent from the truly creative artist; but its most eloquent expression was reserved for our century. You recognize it in the whole body of instrumental music, beginning with Beethoven; you yield to its influence when you hear the operas of Gluck, Mozart, and Weber. The musicians whose influence was strongest when Wagner began his reforms were frank in their protestations of allegiance to this conception of Romanticism: "The Spirit builds the forms, or finds them ready-built, and refashions them according to its needs and desires," said Marx. "If you wish to adopt art as a profession you cannot accustom yourself early enough to consider the contents of an art-work as more important and serious a matter than its structure," said Mendelssohn, the greatest master of form that the century has known. "That would be a trivial art which would have only sounds but no language or signs for the conditions of the soul," said Schumann.

Wagner was too thorough an artist, too profound a musician, not to recognize the value of constructive law. He would have been false to his principles and false to his practice had he written a comedy for the purpose of glorifying mere lawlessness. Had this been his purpose he would not have told us as he has that it was Sachs whom he intended to oppose to the spirit of pedantry and formalism personified in Beckmesser. Sachs has no condemnation to pronounce on the laws of the guild of which he was the brightest ornament. On the contrary, he upholds them even against Walther, and persuades him to adopt them in the composition of his prize song, just as after the victory is won he admonishes him to give the reverence due to the masters. What he learns from Walther, and impresses on his colleagues, is the need of adapting form to spirit, and the mental conflict which brings him to this conviction is a reflection of that creative activity which looks to the short-sighted like destructive war, but is exemplified in the works of the great masters as the highest peace. We can gain an insight into the musical structure of the comedy, and find proofs for our contention at the same time, if we observe Sachs under the influence of this seeming contradiction.

It is evening, and the poet has returned to his cobbler's bench. The scent of the elder-tree, the charm of the summer night, will not permit him to work; they turn his thoughts to poetry; but memories of Walther's song come over him, and under their influence he can neither work nor compose. There was an inexplicable charm in the song. No rule would fit it, yet it was faultless. It was new and strange, yet sounded old and familiar, like the carolling of birds in May-time. To try to imitate it would result in shame and contumely. That he knew. Where lay the mystery? At last he discovers it. The song was the voice of Spring, of the heyday of the singer's life and passion. The need of utterance brought with it the capacity and the privilege. All this we may learn from the words of Sachs, while the music tells us of what is passing through his mind in the intervals of his soliloquizing. This music is built up out of a very short phrase, but it is the phrase which may be set down as the chief musical symbol of the spirit which I have called Romanticism:

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To learn why this phrase should haunt the mind of Sachs its genesis must be traced. It is found first to enter the score of the drama (after the prelude) to accompany a tender but urgent glance of inquiry which Walther bestows on Eva in the first scene between the lines of the chorale sung by the congregation:

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Next, when Eva shyly rebukes his ardor with a glance, but quickly returns it with emotion:

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When the congregation breaks up, Walther, gazing intently on Eva, from whom he had received a look which confessed her love (accompanied by a phrase which afterwards plays an important role in his prize song), hurries to address her; his eagerness is published by the orchestra in this variation of the phrase:

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A threefold augmentation of the phrase is shown in these examples, which suffice to identify it with one of the fundamental feelings concerned in the play. It depicts or typifies the youthful impetuosity of the lovers, the ardor of their passion before it had been confessed in words. Is not its fitness for such a mission obvious? Observe the eagerness which the triplet injects into its rhythm, the ebulliency expressed by the tendency of its melody to ascend ever higher and higher in the regions of tonality. Poetical association consorts analogous attributes with Love and Youth and Spring-time; and it is in the song which Walther sings in praise of Spring and Love—his trial song in the first act—that the phrase receives its most eloquent treatment. Note the irrepressible enthusiasm of its proclamation in this song (Fanget an!); how, after a peaceful announcement, it surges upward and ever upward in the accompaniment, until the voice can no longer hold out against but is borne up on it, until left by a scintillant explosion which seems to be the only means at hand to bring the jubilant phrase back into control. This is the Romantic expression which haunted the mind of Sachs when, after the stormy meeting in St. Catherine's Church, he thought to work in the perfumed quiet of the evening.

IV.

In broad lines the prelude to "Die Meistersinger" not only serves to delineate the characteristic traits of the personages concerned in the comedy, but also exhibits Wagner's method of musical exposition, and teaches the lesson which is at the bottom of the satire—the lesson, namely, that it is through the union of the two principles, which until the close of the play appear in conflict, that a genuine work of art is quickened. The prelude contains the whole symbolism of the comedy in a nutshell. In form it is unique, but in so far as it employs only melodies drawn from the play it may not incorrectly be classed with the medley overtures which composers used to throw together for ante-curtain music. It is the manner in which Wagner has treated his melodies, and the delineative capacity with which he has endowed them, that render the prelude a capital exemplification of the theory advanced by Gluck, when, in his preface to "Alceste," he said, "I imagined that the overture ought to prepare the audience for the action of the piece, and serve as a kind of argument to it." Wagner follows this precept and the example set by Beethoven in the "Leonore" overtures, and indicates the elements of the plot, their progress in its development, and finally the outcome, in his symphonic introduction. The melodies which are its constructive material are of two classes, broadly distinguished in external physiognomy and emotional essence. They are presented first consecutively, then as in conflict (first one, then another, pushing forward for expression), finally in harmonious and contented union. It should always be borne in mind that no matter how numerous the hand-books—which a witty German critic called "musical Baedeckers"—if one wishes to know Wagner's purpose in the use of a typical phrase or melody, he need take no one's word for it except Wagner's. He can turn to the score and trace it out himself, learning its meaning from the words and situations with which it is associated. If this plan be followed, it will be seen that the master-singers are throughout the comedy characterized by two melodies,

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and

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Note that as the master-singers belonged to the solid burghers of old Nuremberg—a little vain, as was to be expected in the upholders of an institution of great antiquity and glorious traditions; staid, dignified, and complacent, as became the free citizens of a free imperial city, whose stout walls sheltered the best in art and science that Germany could boast—so these two melodies are strong, simple tunes; sequences of the intervals of the simple diatonic scale; strongly and simply harmonized; square-cut in rhythm; firm and dignified, if a trifle pompous, in their stride. The three melodies belonging to the class presented in opposition to the spirit represented by the master-singers are disclosed by a study of the comedy to be associated with the passion of the young lovers, Walther and Eva, and those influences in nature which are the inspiration of romantic utterance—spring-time, the birds, and flowers. They differ in every respect—melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, as well as in treatment—from the melodies which stand for the old master-singers and their notions. They are chromatic; their rhythms are less regular and more eager (through the agency of syncopation); they are harmonized with greater warmth, and set for the instruments with greater passion. The first,

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most surely tells us of the incipiency of the lovers' passion, for it is the subject of the interludes between the lines of the chorale which accompany the flirtation in the church scene. The second,

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is again concerned with the passion, showing it in the phase of ardent longing. Another is the melody to which Walther sings the last stanza of his prize song. I have already quoted and described it as the phrase to which Eva confesses her love by a gesture of the eyes in the church scene. Lest the significance of that telltale glance should not be recognized, observe that both lovers use the melody in their protestations of devotion to each other at parting:

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The fourth is the impatiently aspiring phrase described in the analysis of Sachs' monologue.

There is another theme which is of less importance, seemingly, in the score, but which plays a happy part in the comedy as it is prefigured in the prelude. It is the rhythmically strongly-marked phrase with which the populace jeers at Beckmesser, and effects his discomfiture in the final scene of the play.

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This little phrase it is which performs the duty of musical satirist in the middle part of the prelude, where the grotesque elements in the character of Beckmesser are pictured. It is a scherzando movement, the master-singers' march melody being presented in diminution by the choir of wood-wind instruments, which persist stubbornly in their fussy cackling, in spite of the fact that the strings take every opportunity to send some of the passionate, pushing, pulsating love music surging through the desiccated mass of tones. Here it is that Wagner chastises the foolish manners of the master-singers, as he does later in the actual representation. The jeering phrase, started by the middle strings, eventually cuts through the mass of tones, and when the caricature of the broad melody, typical of the master-singers, has been laughed out of court, the music which exemplifies the freshness and vigor of Youth and Spring and Love, and their right to free and spontaneous proclamation, masters the orchestra and conquers recognition, and even celebration, from the representatives of conservatism and pedantry. In the musical contest it is only the perverted idea of Classicism which is treated with contumely and routed; the glorification of the triumph of Romanticism is found in the stupendously pompous and brilliant setting given to the master-singers' music at the end.

You see already in this prelude that Wagner is a true comedian. He administers chastisement with a smile (ridendo castigat mores), and chooses for its subject only things which are temporary aberrations from the good. What is strong and true and pure and wholesome in the art of the master-singers he permits to pass through his satirical fires unscathed. Classicism in its original sense, as the conservator of that which is highest and best in art, he leaves unharmed, presenting her after her trial, as Tennyson presents his Princess, at the close of his corrective poem, when

"All
Her falser self slipt from her like a robe,
And left her woman, lovelier in her mood
Than in her mould that other, when she came
From barren deeps to conquer all with love."

V.

The third act of the comedy is preceded by a prelude which, rightly understood, reflects the cobbler-poet whom I have chosen to think the real hero of the play, in the light in which he appears in the history of German civilization and culture. Twice before, in the comedy, a glimpse of him in that character had been given—in the summer evening, after the meeting, when he could not work because he was haunted by the memory of Walther's song, and again when, having found the solution of the problem raised by that song, he drove away all the phantoms of melancholy by his lusty cobbling song. Apparently that song is all carelessness and contentment, but in reality it tells of the lofty thinker and his melancholy, bred of his contemplation of the vanities of the things with which he finds himself surrounded.

This is the last stanza:

"O Eve, my sore complaints attend,
My needs and dire distresses,
For underfoot mankind the cobbler's work of art oppresses.
If I'd no angel knew
What 'tis to make a shoe,
I'd leave this cobbling in a trice.
But when I go to his retreat,
I leave the world beneath my feet,
Myself I view, Hans Sachs a shoemaker and song-master too!"

In the accompaniment to this stanza a phrase appears in the orchestra (it is not in the simplified pianoforte scores) in which, as Wagner himself puts it, there is "the bitter cry of resignation of the man who shows to the world a cheerful and energetic mien." It is the solemn phrase which gives character and color to Sachs' monologue in the third act, when he contemplates the follies and petty passions of humanity (Wahn! Wahn! überall Wahn!). It symbolizes for us Sachs, the philosopher. To appreciate the full significance of the Nuremberg cobbler as poet and thinker, a glance must be thrown upon a highly important phase in the history of German culture. A new melody had been put into that voice by the Reformation. Luther lived to be hailed by it as "the Nightingale of Wittenberg" in a poem whose opening lines Wagner ingeniously uses as a tribute to Sachs in the third act of the comedy. It is the chorale, Wach auf! Es nahet gen dem Tag.

The Reformation had revived interest in the old art of master-song which had sunk into decadence under the edict of the Romish Church prohibiting the reading of the Bible by the common people. The greatest of the Nuremberg school of master-singers was inspired by the new dawn, and Luther and Melanchthon looked up from the pages of Homer, Virgil, and Horace to listen to the strange new melody which felt and sang with and for the people. This character of Sachs, in all the details that I have pointed out, is delineated in the prelude to the third act, whose melodic contents are thus summarized: First, the contemplative phrase, Wahn! Wahn! next the Lutheran chorale, Wach auf! a portion of the cobbling song ("as if the man had turned his gaze from his handiwork heavenwards, and was lost in tender musing," says Wagner); then the chorale again, with increased sonority, and eventually the opening phrase attuned to cheerfulness and resignation.

VI.

Wagner's "Meistersinger von Nürnberg" is a comedy, and by that token is more difficult of understanding and appreciation by persons unfamiliar with the German tongue, history, and social customs than any of his tragedies. In considering the latter, it is only the elements of expression that need give us pause. In their essence, being true tragedies, they are as much the property of one race as another. This is not the case with comedies. They do not deal with the great fundamental passions of humanity, but with the petty foibles and follies and vices of a people. Being such, they vary with peoples and with times, and their representation compels the use of historical backgrounds, the application of local color. "Die Meistersinger" is a capital illustration of this principle of dramatic poetry. As a picture of the social life of a German city three hundred years ago its vividness and truthfulness are beyond praise; it has no equal in operatic literature, and few peers in the literature of the spoken drama. It is absolutely photographic in its accuracy. To appreciate this fact fully one must have visited Nuremberg, gone through its museum, and turned over the records. With such assistance it is easy to call up in fancy such a vision of its social life in the middle of the sixteenth century as will form a most harmonious setting for the series of pictures which Wagner created. It is still the quaintest city in Germany, and full of relics of its old glory. Of these relics, however, fewer belong to the time of the master-singers than an investigator would be likely to imagine. In the Germanic Museum may be found remains of many of the old guilds of the town, but none of the Master-singers' Guild, except a tablet which once hung on the walls of St. Catherine's Church and has been removed to the museum for safe-keeping. The church, indeed, is still in existence, but its use by the master-singers never brought it fame until after Wagner's comic opera had been written, and now I doubt whether a hundred residents of Nuremberg, aside from those who live in the immediate vicinity, could even tell a visitor where to find it. For more than a century it has been put to secular uses, and nothing of the interior remains to indicate what it looked like in the time of Hans Sachs except the walls. All the furniture and decorations were long ago removed, for it has been a painters' academy, drawing-school, military hospital, warehouse, public hall, and perhaps a dozen other things since it ceased to be a place of public worship. Just now it is the paint-shop of the Municipal Theatre. It is a small, unpretentious building, absolutely innocent of architectural beauty, hidden away in the middle of a block of lowly buildings used as dwellings, carpenter-shops, and the like. I got the keys from a sort of police supervisor of the district and inspected the interior in 1886. The janitor knew nothing about its history beyond his own memory, and that compassed only a portion of its career as a sort of municipal lumber-room. It was built in the last half-decade of the thirteenth century, and on its water-stained walls can be seen faint bits of the frescos which once adorned it and were painted in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; but they are ruined beyond recognition or hope of restoration. I went to the director of the Germanic Museum to learn what had become of the old church furniture. He did not know.

"Have you seen the tablet of the master-singers which we have up-stairs?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Well, that is all that we have in the way of master-singer relics. If you have seen that and the church, you have seen all, and will have to compose the rest of the picture—draw on your imagination, or hire an artist to do it for you."

The tablet is really a more interesting relic than the church. It is a small affair of wood, with two doors, and was painted by a Franz Hein in 1581. On the doors are portraits of four distinguished members of the guild. Two pictures occupy the middle panel, the upper, with a charmingly naïve disregard of chronology, showing King David praying before a crucifix; the lower, a meeting of master-singers with a singer perched in a box-like pulpit. Over the heads of the assemblage is a representation of the chain and medallion with which the victor in a singing contest used to be decorated. Sachs gave one of these ornaments to the guild, and it was used for a hundred years. By that time, however, it had become so worn that Johann Christoph Wagenseil, a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Altdorf (to whose book, entitled De Sacri Rom. Imperii Libera Civitate Noribergensi Commentatio, printed in 1697, we owe the greater part of our knowledge of the art and customs of the Meistersinger), replaced it with another. The tablet might offer suggestions to the theatrical costumer touching the dress of the master-singers, and also the picture of David and his harp which ornamented their banner; but old Nuremberg costumes are familiar enough, and can be studied to better purpose elsewhere. Only one feature suggests itself as worthy of special notice. On the tablet the master-singers all appear wearing the immense neck-ruff of the Elizabethan period. As for the architectural settings of the stage in the first act (which plays in the Church of St. Catherine), so far as I know no attempt at correctness has been made by scene-painters; nor would it be possible to reproduce a picture of the church and still follow Wagner's stage directions. Evidently the poet-composer never took the trouble to visit the Church of St. Catherine.

WOODEN TABLET OF THE MASTERSINGERS OF NUREMBERG.

I have said that, barring the church and tablet, there are no relics of the old guild to be found in the Nuremberg of to-day. Until lately it was supposed that the Municipal Library contained a number of autographic manuscripts by Hans Sachs, but when I asked for them, they were produced with the statement that they were no longer looked upon as genuine. It did not require much investigation to convince me that the claim long maintained that they were autographs of the cobbler-poet rested wholly on presumption. Sachs autographs are extremely scarce. The Royal Library at Berlin possesses a volume of master-songs known to be in the handwriting of Sachs (among them is one by Beckmesser), but when I was in the Prussian capital this treasure was in Dresden, whither it had been sent to enable a literary student to utilize it in the preparation of a book on Sachs. A Berlin scholar, whom I found at work in the Nuremberg Library gathering material for a new biography of Sachs, informed me that the greatest number of Sachs autographs, and they not many, had been found in Zwickau, whither they had been brought by some member of the Sachs family many years ago. There are, then, no manuscript relics of him who was the chief glory of the Nuremberg guild in the old town. You may drink a glass of wine at the street-corner where tradition says the old poet cobbled and composed, but the house is a modern one. Of his companions in the guild I found no manuscripts in the library, and not one of them left his mark in any way on the town. But I did find a number of old manuscript volumes dating back two hundred years or more, which served to vitalize in a peculiarly interesting manner the record which the learned old Wagenseil left behind him, and some of the personages of Wagner's comedy. Those who have taken the trouble to investigate the source to which Wagner went for the people and customs introduced in his "Meistersinger von Nürnberg" (Wagenseil's book) know that the names of the master-singers who figure in the comedy once belonged to veritable members of the Nuremberg guild. Wagenseil mentions them as singers whose memories were cherished in his day, and some of them were also mentioned by an older author, whose book, devoted chiefly to the Strassburg guild, which at one time was even more famous than that of Nuremberg, is referred to by Wagenseil. The book of the Strassburg writer, singularly enough, was known to Wagenseil only as a manuscript, and such it remained until two or three decades ago, when it was printed by a literary society at Stuttgart. In Wagenseil's day it was valued so highly that it was kept wrapped in silk, like the sacred scrolls of the Jews, a circumstance that enabled the pedantic Orientalist to air his learning on the subject for many pages in his wofully discursive but extremely interesting book. But if Wagenseil had not given his testimony, I could now bear witness to the fact that Conrad Nachtigal, Hans Schwartz, Conrad Vogelgesang, Sixtus Beckmesser, Hans Folz, Fritz Kothner, Balthasar Zorn, and Veit Pogner once lived as well as Hans Sachs. I have read some of their poems and copied some of the melodies invented by them and utilized by their successors in the guild. The volumes containing these curiosities of literature have been in the Municipal Library over one hundred years. In the catalogue of the Bibliotheca Norica Williana, printed one hundred and sixteen years ago, they are mentioned as having been purchased from an old master-singer. Five of them are small oblong books of music paper, upon which some old masters or apprentices in the art of master-song have copied melodies which were much used at the meetings in St. Catherine's Church. It was the custom of the members of the guild to compose poems to fit these melodies. In the second scene of his opera Wagner mentions a great many of the singular titles by which these melodies or modes were designated. He got them from Wagenseil. Besides these books, there are two immense manuscript volumes, in which some industrious old lover of the poetical art transcribed songs which he evidently thought admirable. They are each almost as large as Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and must represent months, if not years, of labor. One is devoted wholly to German paraphrases of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," set to a great variety of melodies. The author is M. Ambrosius Metzger, who was one of the few members of the guild who were scholars. He wrote the poems in 1625. The other volume contains songs by a great number of master-singers, though Hans Sachs is the principal contributor. The plan of the volume indicates that it was a collection of admired poems. It begins with paraphrases from the Pentateuch. Some early pages are missing, the first poem preserved dealing with the sixth chapter of Genesis. Chronological order is maintained up to chapter twenty-eight of the same book. Then follow songs dealing with the Gospels and Epistles. The Book of Job is not forgotten. Finally, there are a number of secular poems, many recounting Æsop's fables and anecdotes drawn from old writers. Songs of this character were composed by the master-singers for diversion at their informal gatherings. At the meetings in the Church of St. Catherine only sacred subjects were allowed. It is for this reason that Wagner's Kothner asks Walther in the opera whether he had chosen sacred matter (ein heil'gen Stoff) for his trial song, which provokes the reply from the ardent young knight that he would sing of love, a subject sacred to him. Whether sacred or secular, however, the form and style of the songs are alike. Nothing could more completely illustrate the absurdity of the fundamental theory of the foolish old pedants that poetry might be written by rule of thumb than the publication of a few of the songs in this old book. The nature of the poetical frenzy which fills them can, perhaps, be guessed if I record the fact that the majority of them, I think, begin with a citation of chapter and verse, or some statement equally matter of fact, as thus:

"The twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis records," or "Diogenes, the wise master," or "Strabo writes of the customs," or "Moses, the eleventh, reports," or "The Lesser Book of Truth doth tell," etc.

The last of these lines is the beginning of a master-song which has a twofold interest. In the first place, it is a secular poem by Hans Sachs which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been printed or written about. In the second place, it is set to a melody by the veritable Pogner who, in Wagner's comedy, offers his daughter and his fortune to the winner in the singing contest which makes up Wagner's last act. The poem is so amusing that I would like to give it entire in English, but its irregularity of accent and peculiarities of rhyme do not lend themselves willingly to translation. Of musical accent the master-singers, who followed the rhyming rules of those marvellously ingenious rhymesters the Minnesinger, had not the slightest idea. Wagner knew that. Sachs' first critical tap on his lapstone in Beckmesser's serenade is evoked by a blunder in accent which the veritable Sachs would have passed unnoticed, though, being a real poet, his sins in this respect were not as numerous as those of his colleagues and predecessors. I content myself, therefore, with the first Stollen, or stanza, and its Abgesang, or burden, which the curious student will find to be composed in strict accordance with the rules which, in the opera, Kothner reads from the blackboard. These Leges Tabulaturæ, by-the-way, are almost a literal transcription from the original laws preserved in Wagenseil's book. The matter of the song is this: A boor falls ill. Finding that his appetite is wholly gone, he calls in a physician, who informs him (in a drastic fashion) that the trouble is caused by an accumulation of slime in the stomach. He administers a purgative, but without result. The sickness increases, and the boor upbraids the doctor, who retorts that his patient will be a dead man within an hour unless he consent to having his stomach taken out and scoured with chalk. The boor consents, the physician performs the operation, cutting the man open with a pair of shears, brushes out the offending organ with a wisp, and hangs it on the fence to dry. What the farmer does meanwhile is not recorded; but before the physician could replace his stomach a raven carried it off to the woods and ate it. In this dilemma the physician disclosed himself as a worthy progenitor of the modern race of surgeons. He was terribly frightened, but didn't let any one see it. By stealth he procured a sow's stomach, introduced it into the farmer's body, and quickly sewed up the aperture. The farmer got well, and paid eight florins for the job. But heavens, what an appetite was that which he developed! To satisfy him now was utterly impossible, for which reason, concludes the moralist, an insatiable eater is nowadays said to be a hog (literally "to have a sow's stomach"), who devours more than he produces, as many women lament:

"Darum spricht man noch von ein Man,

Den man gar nicht erfuellen kan,

Wie er hab einen Sawmagen;

Verthut mehr denn er gewinnen kan,

Hoert man vil Frawen klagen."

FIRST STOLLEN.

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The Less - er Book of Truth doth tell,
How ill - ness on a boor once fell,
Taste for all food de - stroy - ing;
A - gainst all drugs it did re - bel,
His pleas - ures all al - loy - ing.......
One day there came a doc - tor wise,
Who glanced him o'er with search - ing eyes,
Found out what caused his ail - ing.
His learn - ing proof a - gainst sur - prise,
Made work like that plain sail - ing.......

THE ABGESANG.

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"Far - mer, of all your pains... the cause,
Is slime with - in your stom - ach wide dis - tend - ing."
The far - mer heard with gap - - ing jaws,
For gnaw - ing pains in - side his paunch were rend - ing.