examples of how he has discarded all the involutions,
convolutions, twiddles and twaddles of melody, and
gone back to the simplicity and directness of Weber
and Beethoven. His earlier manner and type of
tune, the operatic manner of his day, had, I make
no doubt, its origin in the advisability, not to say
the necessity, of writing so as to please singers
who could sing in the Italian style and no other.
Wagner had now ceased to think of singers’ whims.
He had a matter to find utterance for, and he went
to work in the most direct way, considering nothing
but his artistic aim. We know he conceived
Tannhaeuser
at a white heat, and in a condition of white heat
wrote the words; and though he afterwards cooled down
and had, he said, to “warm up” to his
work again, yet he warmed up so effectually that he
composed at furious speed, haunted by a terror lest
he should not live to complete the opera. This
fervour alone might account for his artistic development
in the
Tannhaeuser period. It drove him
to find the secret of the one true mode of expression—the
law of simplicity, the unvarying rule that anything
more than is needed for the expression of the thing
to be expressed is bad art, and, in the long run,
ineffective. With greater simplicity in the melody
came the greatest possible simplicity in the harmony.
There is a kind of awkwardness to be found in the
music of all the pundits which almost defies analysis.
The progressions are correct enough, are good enough
grammar, yet the result is more disconcerting, even
distressing, to the ear than a schoolboy’s first
efforts. Of this style of harmony the Italians
were masters, and too often in his
Rienzi days
Wagner, thinking of his “melody” (for
at that time by “melody” he meant Bellini
melody), showed how little they could teach him in
this respect. With the simpler “melody”
went the harmony—complicated as you like
when the occasion called, but never more complicated
than the occasion warranted. Compare with the
war-chorus and march in
Rienzi the march in
the second act of
Tannhaeuser, and the difference
will be seen. This march, by the way, ought to
have been signed “after C.M. von Weber.”
IV
Tannhaeuser was written in an epoch of long
or big works of every description. Think of the
length of the novels of Thackeray and Dickens; think
of the interminable Ring and the Book!
Our immediate ancestors were a long-enduring, often
long-suffering, generation. Perhaps they liked
good value for their money. If so, Richard gave
them what they wanted. He himself must have felt
he had done so in Tannhaeuser, for fond though
he was of his own music, he allowed it to be cut freely.
Even as it stands, the finale of the second act is
preposterous: the ripe and perfect artist who
planned Tristan would never have done such
a thing. But with regard to the finales—and
they are all too long—it certainly appears