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TITLE: WAGNER'S TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
AUTHOR: GEORGE AINSLIE HIGHT
EBOOK: E06400 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

WAGNER'S "TRISTAN UND ISOLDE"

AN ESSAY ON
THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA

BY GEORGE AINSLIE HIGHT

  Passing the visions, passing the night,
  Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrade's hands,
  Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of
      my soul,
  Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering
      song,
  As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling,
      flooding the night,
  Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet
      again bursting with joy,
  Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
  As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses.

  _Walt Whitman._

PREFACE

The following pages contain little if anything that is new, or that
would be likely to interest those who are already at home in Wagner's
work. They are intended for those who are beginning the study of
Wagner. In spite of many books, I know of no Wagner literature in
English to which a beginner can turn who wishes to know what Wagner
was aiming at, in what respect his works differ from those of the
operatic composers who preceded him. Some sort of Introduction appears
to me a necessary preliminary to the study of Wagner, not because his
works are artificial or unnatural, but because our minds have become
perverted by the highly artificial products of the Italian and French
opera, so that a work of Wagner at first appears to us very much as
_Paradise Lost_ or a tragedy of Sophokles would appear to a person who
had never read anything but light French novels. He must entirely change
the attitude of his mind, and the change, although it be a return to
nature and truth, is not easy to make.

Those who wish fully to understand Wagner's aims must read his own
published works. I have not attempted to give his views in a condensed
form, being convinced that any such attempt could only end in failure.
Whenever it has been made, the result has been a caricature; you
cannot separate a man's work from his personality. All that I could do
was to endeavour to lay some of the problems involved, as I conceive
them, before the reader in my own words.

SAMER, PAS DE CALAIS, _May_, 1912.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I.    ON WAGNER CRITICISM

II.   WAGNER AS MAN

III.  WAGNER'S THEORETICAL WRITINGS

IV.   THE ROOTS OF GERMAN MUSIC

V.    THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA AND ITS ANTECEDENTS

VI.   THE EARLIER VERSIONS OF THE TRISTAN
    MYTH

VII.  WAGNER'S CONCEPTION OF THE TRISTAN
    MYTHOS

VIII. ON CERTAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE WAGNERIAN
    DRAMA

IX.   MUSIC AS AN ART OF EXPRESSION

X.    SOME REMARKS ON THE MUSICAL DICTION
    OF "TRISTAN UND ISOLDE"

XI.   OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC

XII.  OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC
    CONTINUED

XIII. OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC
    CONTINUED

XIV.  CONCLUSION

      APPENDIX

[Greek: Theohus d' ephame eleountas aemas sugchoreutas te kahi
choraegohus aemin dedo-ke'nai to'n te Ap'ollo-a kahi Mousas
kahi dhae kahi tri'ton ephamen, ei' memnaemetha, Dionuson.]

CHAPTER I

ON WAGNER CRITICISM

A new work on Wagner requires some justification. It might be urged
that, since the _Meister_ has been dead for some decades and the
violence of party feeling may be assumed to have somewhat abated, we
are now in a position to form a sober estimate of his work, to review
his aims, and judge of his measure of success.

Such, however, is not my purpose in the following pages. I conceive
that the endeavour to _estimate_ an artist's work involves a
misconception of the nature of art. We can estimate products of
utility, things expressible in figures, the weight of evidence, a Bill
for Parliament, a tradesman's profits. But a work of art is written
for our pleasure, and all that we can attempt is to understand it.
True, we must judge in a certain sense, we must weigh and estimate
before we can arrive at understanding; but it is one thing to meditate
in the privacy of one's own mind, quite another to publish these
constructive processes as an end in themselves, to set up critical
"laws" and expect that poets are going to conform to them.

Art, says Ruskin, is a language, a vehicle of thought, in itself
nothing. Plato's teaching in the third book of his _Republic_ is
the same, and the idea of the secondary nature of art, of its value
only as the expression of something else, of a human or moral purpose
only fully expressible in the drama, is the nucleus of all Wagner's
theoretical writing. In private conversation and in his letters he
often spoke very emphatically. "I would joyfully sacrifice and destroy
everything that I have produced if I could hope thereby to further
freedom and justice."[1]

[Footnote 1: The episode which gave rise to this remark is too long to
relate in the text, but is highly characteristic and instructive for
Wagner's attitude towards art. It will be found in the sixth volume of
Glasenapp's biography, p. 309.]

Let us clearly keep in mind the distinction here involved between the
two elements of every work of art: matter and form, substance and
technique, [Greek: onta] and [Greek: gignomena], Brahm and Maya, Wille
und Vorstellung, the emotional and the intellectual life of man, or,
untechnically, what he feels and his communication of those feelings
to others as a social being. With the first of these the critic has
nothing to do; the matter is given; all he has to consider is whether
it has found adequate expression--that is, to try to understand the
language, that when he has mastered it he may help others to do so
according to his ability. I do not say that the matter is one to which
we are indifferent. On the contrary, it is far the more important of
the two, since the thing expressed is prior to its expression. Only it
is no concern of the critic, because we may fairly assume that if the
technical expression is correct and intelligible the artist has
already told us what he wishes to convey in the most perfect language
of which that idea is susceptible, and that any attempt to put it into
the lower and more prosy language of the critic would only weaken and
distort the thought.

It does not seem to me that passions have abated very much, or
judgments have become much more sober, since Wagner has left us. In
England at least the ignorance and indifference which prevail among
the ordinary public are still profound. In truth the seed which he
sowed has fallen upon evil soil; his fate has been a cruel one. He,
the most sincere and transparent of men, whose only wish was to be
seen as he actually was, has perhaps more than any other great man
been the victim of misrepresentation, alike from his senseless
persecutors and from his equally senseless adulators. While he lived,
every imaginable calumny, plausible and unplausible, was invented to
besmirch his character and his art. Now it is, in Germany at least, no
longer safe to revile him on the ground of his technical artistic
style. The days are long past when the terms "charlatan," "amateur,"
"artistic anarchist" could be applied to him with impunity, and it is
fully recognized by all who have any title to speak that Wagner, so
far from being a revolutionary destroyer, was, like all true
reformers--Luther, for example, or Jeremiah or Sokrates--an extreme
conservative. Those who like Walt Whitman preach libertinism in the
name of democracy do not want reform; they are satisfied with things
as they are. Wagner battled, both in music and in literature, for
_der reine Satz_--purity of diction as against the untidy licence
which was then and still is fashionable among weak-kneed artists and a
thoughtless public.[2]

[Footnote 2: It is perhaps still necessary to produce some warrant for
these statements. The deep-rooted conservatism of Wagner's character
is a prominent feature of all his literary work, and especially
noticeable in his educational schemes, as, for example; the report on
a proposed Munich school of music, with its text: "The business of a
Conservatory is to conserve." On his musical diction the testimony of
Prof. S. Jadassohn will probably be considered sufficient by most
people. He writes: "Wagner's harmonies are clear and pure; they are
never arbitrary, nor coarse nor brutal, but throughout conscientious
and clean according to the strict rules of pure diction (_des reinen
Satzes_). Consequently the sequences and combinations of the chords
and the course of the modulation are easily followed by those who know
harmony. Similarly, his polyphonic style is easily intelligible to the
trained contrapuntist"--and more to the same effect, Jadassohn is here
only expressing what every competent musician knows. Before the first
performance at Bayreuth in 1876 Wagner's last word to the artists was:
_Deutlichkeit_--"clearness"--a word which sums up all his
technical teaching throughout his life.]

Mr. Hadow has truly observed that we have not yet learned to treat
genius frankly, and either starve it with censure or smother it with
irrational excess of enthusiasm. If the malicious misrepresentations

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