the title of Der Ring des Nibelungen,' we cannot pretend to speak in detail here; the mere description of its plot and arrangement would occupy far more space than we can afford, and our object here is rather the consideration of principles than the criticism of detail. The plot, which mainly turns on the acquisition by one character or another of the magic Ring, which confers extraordinary powers upon its possessor, is probably known to all our readers who are interested in the subject by the detailed descriptions which appeared in the leading daily papers during the period of the first rehearsals at Baireuth recently. Speaking generally, we may observe that the style of the first two dramas at least of the Tetralogy is much less 'advanced' in regard to musical form than that of Tristan.' We find for the most part much clearer outline, a distinct and even persistently-marked rhythm in much of the music, especially that for the minor beings (characters they can hardly be called) among the dramatis persone. Indeed, we could imagine the Rheingold,' the first work which forms the prelude to the whole, becoming in England a very popular opera of the faërie and stage-machinery school. The opening scene, with the three Rhine-maidens swimming about and chasing each other laughingly from rock to rock, while the orchestra keeps up its incessant flowing and undulating accompaniment, is as effective a thing of the kind as could be wished for. As we turn the pages of the score, we gain at least (if we had it not before) an idea of Wagner's remarkable power and originality as a picturesque orchestral colourist. When we descend into Nibelheim, where Alberic, the Nibelung dwarf and possessor of the Ring pro tem., is lording it over the wretched Mimes and making them work for him, we are half startled at the reality of effect achieved by the eighteen anvils, great and small, behind the scenes, which in their combination of heavy thud and rapid clatter, working in time to the characteristic music of the band in front, remind us of the terrible and systematised battering which assailed the ears of Sir Scudamour in the House of 'Care; '* and, in a sufficiently opposite way, the last scene in the Rheingold,' where the gods with renewed youth cross the rainbow bridge to their abodes, amid the continuous shimmering accompaniment of the violins in a rapid tremolo (in eight parts), and the glancing arpeggios of the harps, is a climax which ought to be almost irresistible as a bit of brilliant effect. Other points may be noticed: the dreamy effect of the low note of the violoncello and the hushed taps of the drum, as *Faerie Queen,' Book iv. canto 5, stanzas 35-7. Siegmund sinks to slumber by the dying fire in the first scene of Die Walküre,' and the change when a breeze blows the door open and the bright moonlight shines in, and the sounds of the harps in the orchestra awake in sympathy with it; the gloom which overspreads the score, so to speak, when Brünnhilde comes as the messenger of death to Siegmund; the bright and sparkling passages for strings and wind alternately, almost like laughter in a musical form, which accompany the sports of the Walküre, and the rich and brilliant effect of the instrumentation in the last scene of the same opera, where the magic fire that burns around Brünnhilde's resting-place seems to glow and flicker in the sounds of the music. This last is perhaps one of the best instances of the power of Wagner's method in using music to intensify stage effect and situation. The mere lighting of the stage fire, though the spectator is told of its magical and important influence over the heroine, would produce little effect; but the accompanying music imparts quite a prophetic significance to the incident. On the other hand, one cannot but be struck, in reading these scores, as we were in hearing Lohengrin,' at the sometimes almost absurd disproportion between the orchestral effect and the poem and action. The rush of the band, with the whole added power of more brass instruments than we have time to count up, to emphasise with an overpowering fortissimo some word or gesture which seems totally unworthy of such tremendous emphasis, almost provokes a smile at times at the disproportion between cause and effect. Big scores do not necessarily make great music, either. Meyerbeer has not thrown Gluck into the shade, nor has Spontini superseded Mozart. We cannot ignore the fact, again, that we meet in Wagner's scores with a constant recurrence of certain resources of effect, repeated to an extent which amounts to mannerism. One of these, the incessant reiteration, namely, of a particular orchestral phrase or figure, till it mechanically takes the ear by storm, seems to us to be little more than a trick played on the physical susceptibilities of the audience, and, as Wagner sometimes uses it, a very cheap trick. But a still more serious * * We were witness to an amusing exemplification of this on the first occasion of our acquaintance with the Tannhäuser overture at a very crowded concert, when the less conventional section of the audience found the reiterated violin passages at the climax so exciting that their feelings could not be restrained till the end of the overture, the last part of which was played amidst a crescendo of hand-clapping! Wagner's partisans are welcome to this instance of the popular effect of his music; they will, perhaps, also reflect whether this kind of homage 6 drawback to our allegiance is the puerility, to English ideas, of much of Wagner's dramas, which illustrate only too well that peculiar childish element in the German mind, the presence of which to a certain extent even in Goethe formed perhaps the one national weakness of that otherwise most cosmopolitan genius. When Lohengrin' was produced in London last year, probably a good many besides ourselves may have wondered whether it was possible in any country but Germany that such a mere fairy extravaganza should be made the subject of such solemn and elephantine moralising as has been expended upon what is supposed to be the morale of this opera. The case is certainly not bettered when we come to the Ring 'des Nibelungen;' and as we light on the passage where Fricka (the Juno of the mythus) shakes her sleeping spouse at daybreak, and says, wake up, man, and bestir yourself!' or where Alberic changes himself first into a serpent, and then into a frog, and his windings in the one case and jumpings in the other are grotesquely illustrated by the band; when we see the pages on pages of elaborate scoring in accompaniment to the movements of creatures whose efforts at speech extend little beyond Heia!' Wallaha!' or 'Ho-jo-to-ho!' when we hear of the special contrivances by which the stage will be filled with different coloured mists at pleasure, or read the stage-direction in the scene of the fight between the hero and Fafner in the form of a dragon, in Siegfried - The machine, 'which represents the dragon, is during the fight brought 'somewhat nearer the foreground, to a point where a new trap-door (Versenkung) opens under it, through which the 'player of the part of Fafner sings through a speaking-trum'pet'-we may, perhaps, be pardoned if we find the sentence about the highest and most significantly beautiful that the 'human mind can adore' recurring rather oddly to us, or if we even feel some doubts about the raising of music to its highest intellectual province by associating it with the ordinary 'business' of a Christmas pantomime. These daring decorators exactly challenge the sarcasm of Pope: 6 'Knights, squires, and steeds must enter on the stage. For it is not only as a new exponent of musical drama that Wagner comes before us. His theory aims at much more than placing this one form of musical production on a new has been usually bestowed on what is highest and most intellectual in the art. basis. His position amounts to nothing less than this: that purely instrumental music is practically dead; that it has run its course and said all that it has to say; has been weighed in the balance and found wanting; and that the highest mission and true end and object of music is only realised when it is the exponent of poetry, and that this is the climax towards which music has been consistently progressing; and Beethoven, the great poet of instrumental music, is claimed as the inaugurator of this new era. On what principle this claim is made we may indicate by a quotation or two (necessarily brief) from Mr. Hüffer's treatise before referred to. In the preface to The Music of the Future' we find the remark that, though the first three movements of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony' may be called the triumph of absolute music, yet In this very splendour of artistic perfection we indistinctly, but no less certainly, feel the want of something that remains unexpressed; and by acknowledging this want, as founded in the nature of music itself, and introducing into the last movement of his D Minor Symphony the human word, as a firm basis for his lofty aspirations, Beethoven has at the same time ushered in a new period of his art.' And in the same work we find the following (page 45), which we extract from a long dissertation on the futility of absolute music : 'He (Beethoven) was the first to condense the vague feelings which were all that music had hitherto expressed into more distinctly intelligible ideas. He even brings the song of birds, the thunder, and the murmuring brook before the ear, not as a portrait of nature, but as at once a suggestion and embodiment of the feelings which would be called up by them; Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei, as he wrote at the head of his Pastoral Symphony. Indeed, there are passages in Beethoven's later instrumental works, such as long distinct recitativi, which can only be explained by the presence of some occult idea struggling for self-consciousness, or, if it may be, expression. This idea being previous to all musical conception, the forms of absolute music had to submit to its harmonious expansion, and in this way the spell of their unlimited sway was broken for ever. It therefore was Beethoven who restored the true relations of the two arts, which henceforth became inseparable.' The ingenuity with which a theory that upsets all the recognised standing-ground of the art, and depreciates indefinitely the value of nearly all Beethoven's principal contributions to it, is thus made to stand, like a pyramid upon its apex, upon one movement of one of his symphonies, with a few props from random passages in his works, is noteworthy enough. But what does all this really amount to? So far from the existence of the choral finale to the Ninth Symphony' proving that Beethoven had abandoned the idea of pure instrumental music, it might be said with more probability that the very fact of his having once used this resource afforded the strongest presumption that he would not have recurred to it again. The inexhaustible variety of Beethoven's genius is only paralleled by that of Shakspeare. He never repeated himself, either in great things or little (except in the avowed working up of a favourite theme once or twice in a new form, as in the finale of the Eroica Symphony'); and there is not a tittle of evidence to render it improbable that his Tenth Symphony,' had he lived to write it, would not have been as purely an instrumental work as any of the first eight. Had he died just after writing the Pastoral Symphony,' it might equally have been urged that he had adopted what is now called programme 'music' as the true end of the art; but his two next symphonies (the first of them a much greater and more recondite work than the Pastorale') are without note, hint, or comment of any kind. About the middle of his career he wrote a pianoforte fantasia with chorus, but so far from subsequently confining himself to this form, he never repeated it, and his most elaborate works for pianoforte solo were written long after. The reference to the recitative passages in his instrumental works is the most absurd of all. They are literally infinitesimal in extent in proportion to the mass of his compositions ; they occur in his earlier as well as in his latest works (ex. gr. the D Minor Sonata), and they are not new there. The slow movement of one of Haydn's finest quartetts consists entirely of a recitative in vocal and dramatic style for the first violin; and if Mr. Hüffer can condescend to look into anything so degraded as Mozart's pianoforte works, he may find in the Variations on Grètrys' old air Une fièvre brulante,' evidently considered an important pianoforte composition in its day, a whole page of recitative as impassioned in style as that in Beethoven's Op. 110 Sonata. But we are asked to regard these accidents as essentials, because it suits the theory of Wagner's disciples; while the fact is ignored that Beethoven's very last great pianoforte sonata concludes with a set of variations as brilliantly and symmetrically elaborated, as purely music for the sake of music, as anything that Mozart (or even Bach) ever wrote. Nor can the view which regards the finale of the Choral Symphony' as the roof and crown of the composer's works be accepted by a sound and calm criticism. The theme to which the first verse of Schiller's ode is set is magnificent, and the whole movement full of the |
