IV.

The first element to be noted in Wagner’s operatic forms is the energetic protest against the artificial and conventional in music.  The utter want of dramatic symmetry and fitness in the operas we have been accustomed to hear could only be overlooked by the force of habit, and the tendency to submerge all else in the mere enjoyment of the music.  The utter variance of music and poetry was to Wagner the stumbling-block which, first of all, must be removed.  So he crushed at one stroke all the hard, arid forms which existed in the lyrical drama as it had been known.  His opera, then, is no longer a congeries of separate musical numbers, like duets, arias, chorals, and finales, set in a flimsy web of formless recitative, without reference to dramatic economy.  His great purpose is lofty dramatic truth, and to this end he sacrifices the whole framework of accepted musical forms, with the exception of the chorus, and this he remodels.  The musical energy is concentrated in the dialogue as the main factor of the dramatic problem, and fashioned entirely according to the requirements of the action.  The continuous flow of beautiful melody takes the place alike of the dry recitative and the set musical forms which characterize the accepted school of opera.  As the dramatic motif demands, this “continuous melody” rises into the highest ecstasies of the lyrical fervor, or ebbs into a chant-like swell of subdued feeling, like the ocean after the rush of the storm.  If Wagner has destroyed musical forms, he has also added a positive element.  In place of the aria we have the logos.  This is the musical expression of the principal passion underlying the action of the drama.  Whenever, in the course of the development of the story, this passion comes into ascendency, the rich strains of the logos are heard anew, stilling all other sounds.  Gounod has, in part, applied this principle in “Faust.”  All opera-goers will remember the intense dramatic effect arising from the recurrence of the same exquisite lyric outburst from the lips of Marguerite.

The peculiar character of Wagner’s word-drama next arouses critical interest and attention.  The composer is his own poet, and his creative genius shines no less here than in the world of tone.  The musical energy flows entirely from the dramatic conditions, like the electrical current from the cups of the battery; and the rhythmical structure of the melos (tune) is simply the transfiguration of the poetical basis.  The poetry, then, is all-important in the music-drama.  Wagner has rejected the forms of blank verse and rhyme as utterly unsuited to the lofty purposes of music, and has gone to the metrical principle of all the Teutonic and Slavonic poetry.  This rhythmic element of alliteration, or staffrhyme, we find magnificently illustrated in the Scandinavian Eddas, and even in our own Anglo-Saxon fragments of the days of Caedmon and Alcuin.  By the use of this new form, verse and melody glide together in one exquisite rhythm, in which it seems impossible to separate the one from the other.  The strong accents of the alliterating syllables supply the music with firmness, while the low-toned syllables give opportunity for the most varied nuances of declamation.