Part 8

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The first ideas of Siegfried were contemporary with the Revolution of 1848, which Wagner took part in with the same enthusiasm he put into everything else. His recognised biographer, Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain--who, with M. Henri Lichtenberger, has succeeded best in unravelling Wagner's complex soul, though he is not without certain prejudices--has been at great pains to prove that Wagner was always a patriot and a German monarchist. Well, he may have been so later on, but it was not, I think, the last phase of his evolution. His actions speak for themselves. On 14 June, 1848, in a famous speech to the National Democratic Association, Wagner violently attacked the organisation of society itself, and demanded both the abolition of money and the extinction of what was left of the aristocracy. In Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) he showed that beyond the "local nationalism" were signs of a "supernational universalism." And all this was not merely talk, for he risked his life for his ideas. Herr Chamberlain himself quotes the account of a witness who saw him, in May, 1849, distributing revolutionary pamphlets to the troops who were besieging Dresden. It was a miracle that he was not arrested and shot. We know that after Dresden was taken a warrant was out against him, and he fled to Switzerland, with a passport on which was a borrowed name. If it be true that Wagner later declared that he had been "involved in error and led away by his feelings" it matters little to the history of that time. Errors and enthusiasms are an integral part of life, and one must not ignore them in a man's biography under the pretext that he regretted them twenty or thirty years later, for they have, nevertheless, helped to guide his actions and impressed his imagination. It was out of the Revolution itself that Siegfried directly sprang.

In 1848, Wagner was not yet thinking of a Tetralogy, but of an heroic opera in three acts called Siegfried's Tod, in which the fatal power of gold was to be symbolised in the treasure of the Niebelungen; and Siegfried was to represent "a socialist redeemer come down to earth to abolish the reign of Capital." As the rough draft developed, Wagner went up the stream of his hero's life. He dreamed of his childhood, of his conquest of the treasure, of the awakening of Bruennhilde; and in 1851 he wrote the poem of Der Junge Siegfried. Siegfried and Bruennhilde represent the humanity of the future, the new era that should be realised when the earth was set free from the yoke of gold. Then Wagner went farther back still, to the sources of the legend itself, and Wotan appeared, the symbol of our time, a man such as you or I--in contrast to Siegfried, man as he ought to be, and one day will be. On this subject Wagner says, in a letter to Roeckel: "Look well at Wotan; he is the unmistakable likeness of ourselves, and the sum of the present-day spirit, while Siegfried is the man we wait and wish for--the future man whom we cannot create, but who will create himself by our annihilation--the most perfect man I can imagine." Finally Wagner conceived the Twilight of the Gods, the fall of the Valhalla--our present system of society--and the birth of a regenerated humanity. Wagner wrote to Uhlig in 1851 that the complete work was to be played after the great Revolution.

The opera public would probably be very astonished to learn that in Siegfried they applaud a revolutionary work, expressly directed by Wagner against this detested Capital, whose downfall would have been so dear to him. And he never doubted that he was expressing grief in all these pages of shining joy.

Wagner went to Zurich after a stay in Paris, where he felt "so much distrust for the artistic world and horror for the restraint that he was forced to put upon himself" that he was seized with a nervous malady which nearly killed him. He returned to work at Der Junge Siegfried, and he says it brought him great joy.

"But I am unhappy in not being able to apply myself to anything but music. I know I am feeding on an illusion, and that reality is the only thing worth having. My health is not good, and my nerves are in a state of increasing weakness. My life, lived entirely in the imagination and without sufficient action, tires me so, that I can only work with frequent breaks and long intervals of rest; otherwise I pay the penalty with long and painful suffering.... I am very lonely. I often wish for death.

"While I work I forget my troubles; but the moment I rest they come flocking about me, and I am very miserable. What a splendid life is an artist's! Look at it! How willingly would I part with it for a week of real life.

"I can't understand how a really happy man could think of serving art. If we enjoyed life, we should have no need of art. When the present has nothing more to offer us we cry out our needs by means of art. To have my youth again and my health, to enjoy nature, to have a wife who would love me devotedly, and fine children--for this I would give up all my art. Now I have said it--give me what is left."

Thus the poem of the Tetralogy was written with doubts, as he said, as to whether he should abandon art and all belonging to it and become a healthy, normal man--a son of nature. He began to compose the music of the poem while in a state of suffering, which every day became more acute.

"My nights are often sleepless; I get out of bed, wretched and exhausted, with the thought of a long day before me, which will not bring me a single joy. The society of others tortures me, and I avoid it only to torture myself. Everything I do fills me with disgust. It can't go on for ever. I can't stand such a life any longer. I will kill myself rather than live like this.... I don't believe in anything, and I have only one desire--to sleep so soundly that human misery will exist no more for me. I ought to be able to get such a sleep somehow; it should not be really difficult."

For distraction he went to Italy; Turin, Genoa, Spezia, and Nice. But there, in a strange world, his loneliness seemed so frightful that he became very depressed, and made all haste back to Zurich. It was there he wrote the happy music of Das Rheingold. He began the score of Die Walkuere at a time when his normal condition was one of suffering. Then he discovered Schopenhauer, whose philosophy only helped to confirm and crystallise his instinctive pessimism. In the spring of 1855 he went to London to give concerts; but he was ill there, and this fresh contact with the world only served to annoy him further. He had some difficulty in again taking up Die Walkuere; but he finished it at last in spite of frequent attacks of facial erysipelas, for which he afterwards had to undergo a hydropathic cure at Geneva. He began the score of Siegfried towards the end of 1856, while the thought of Tristan was stirring within him. In Tristan he wished to depict love as "a dreadful anguish"; and this idea obsessed him so completely that he could not finish Siegfried. He seemed to be consumed by a burning fever; and, abandoning Siegfried in the middle of the second act, he threw himself madly into Tristan. "I want to gratify my desire for love," he says, "until it is completely satiated; and in the folds of the black flag that floats over its consummation I wish to wrap myself and die." Siegfried was not finished until 5 February, 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian war--that is fourteen years later, after several interruptions.

Such is, in a few words, the history of this heroic idyll. It is perhaps as well to remind the public now and then that the hours of distraction they enjoy by means of art may represent years of suffering for the artist.

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Do you know the amusing account Tolstoy gave of a performance of Siegfried? I will quote it from his book, What is Art?--

"When I arrived, an actor in tight-fitting breeches was seated before an object that was meant to represent an anvil. He wore a wig and false beard; his white and manicured hands had nothing of the workman about them; and his easy air, prominent belly, and flabby muscles readily betrayed the actor. With an absurd hammer he struck--as no one else would ever strike--a fantastic-looking sword-blade. One guessed he was a dwarf, because when he walked he bent his legs at the knees. He cried out a great deal, and opened his mouth in a queer fashion. The orchestra also emitted peculiar noises like several beginnings that had nothing to do with one another. Then another actor appeared with a horn in his belt, leading a man dressed up as a bear, who walked on all-fours. He let loose the bear on the dwarf, who ran away, but forgot to bend his knees this time. The actor with the human face represented the hero, Siegfried. He cried out for a long time, and the dwarf replied in the same way. Then a traveller arrived--the god Wotan. He had a wig, too; and, settling himself down with his spear, in a silly attitude, he told Mimi all about things he already knew, but of which the audience was ignorant. Then Siegfried seized some bits that were supposed to represent pieces of a sword, and sang:

'Heaho, heaho, hoho! Hoho, hoho, hoho, hoho! Hoheo, haho, haheo, hoho!' And that was the end of the first act. It was all so artificial and stupid that I had great difficulty in sitting it out. But my friends begged me to stay, and assured me that the second act would be better.

"The next scene represented a forest. Wotan was waking up the dragon. At first the dragon said, 'I want to go to sleep'; but eventually he came out of his grotto. The dragon was represented by two men clothed in a green skin with some scales stuck about it. At one end of the skin they wagged a tail, and at the other end they opened a crocodile's mouth, out of which came fire. The dragon, which ought to have been a frightful beast--and perhaps he would have frightened children about five years old--said a few words in a bass voice. It was so childish and feeble that one was astonished to see grown-up people present; even thousands of so-called cultured people looked on and listened attentively, and went into raptures. Then Siegfried arrived with his horn. He lay down during a pause, which is reputed to be very beautiful; and sometimes he talked to himself, and sometimes he was quite silent. He wanted to imitate the song of the birds, and cut a rush with his horn, and made a flute out of it. But he played the flute badly, and so he began to blow his horn. The scene is intolerable, and there is not the least trace of music in it. I was annoyed to see three thousand people round about me, listening submissively to this absurdity and dutifully admiring it.

"With some courage I managed to wait for the next scene--Siegfried's fight with the dragon. There were roarings and flames of fire and brandishings of the sword. But I could not stand it any longer; and I fled out of the theatre with a feeling of disgust that I have not yet forgotten."

I admit I cannot read this delightful criticism without laughing; and it does not affect me painfully like Nietzsche's pernicious and morbid irony. It used to be a grief to me that two men whom I loved with an equal affection, and whom I reverenced as the finest spirits in Europe, remained strangers and hostile to each other. I could not bear the thought that a genius, hopelessly misunderstood by the crowd, should be bent on making his solitude more bitter and narrow by refusing, with a sort of jealous waywardness, to be reconciled to his equals, or to offer them the hand of friendship. But now I think that perhaps it was better so. The first virtue of genius is sincerity. If Nietzsche had to go out of his way not to understand Wagner, it is natural, on the other hand, that Wagner should be a closed book to Tolstoy; it would be almost surprising if it were otherwise. Each one has his own part to play, and has no need to change it. Wagner's wonderful dreams and magic intuition of the inner life are not less valuable to us than Tolstoy's pitiless truth, in which he exposes modern society and tears away the veil of hypocrisy with which she covers herself. So I admire Siegfried, and at the same time enjoy Tolstoy's satire; for I like the latter's sturdy humour, which is one of the most striking features of his realism, and which, as he himself noticed, makes him closely resemble Rousseau. Both men show us an ultra-refined civilisation, and both are uncompromising apostles of a return to nature.

Tolstoy's rough banter recalls Rousseau's sarcasm about an opera of Rameau's. In the Nouvelle Heloise, he rails in a similar fashion against the sadly fantastic performances at the theatre. It was, even then, a question of monsters, "of dragons animated by a blockhead of a Savoyard, who had not enough spirit for the beast."

"They assured me that they had a tremendous lot of machinery to make all this movement, and they offered several times to show it to me; but I felt no curiosity about little effects achieved by great efforts.... The sky is represented by some blue rags suspended from sticks and cords, like a laundry display.... The chariots of the gods and goddesses are made of four joists in a frame, suspended by a thick rope, as a swing might be. Then a plank is stuck across the joists, and on this is seated a god. In front of him hangs a piece of daubed cloth, which serves as a cloud upon which his splendid chariot may rest.... The theatre is furnished with little square trap-doors which, opening as occasion requires, show that the demons can be let loose from the cellars. When the demons have to fly in the air, dummies of brown cloth are substituted, or sometimes real chimney-sweeps, who swing in the air, suspended by cords, until they are gloriously lost in the rag sky....

"But you can have no idea of the dreadful cries and roarings with which the theatre resounds.... What is so extraordinary is that these howlings are almost the only things that the audience applaud. By the way they clap their hands one would take them to be a lot of deaf creatures, who were so delighted to catch a few piercing sounds now and then that they wanted the actors to do them all over again. I am quite sure that people applaud the bawling of an actress at the opera as they would a mountebank's feats of skill at a fair--one suffers while they are going on, but one is so delighted to see them finish without an accident that one willingly demonstrates one's pleasure.... With these beautiful sounds, as true as they are sweet, those of the orchestra blend very worthily. Imagine an unending clatter of instruments without any melody; a lingering and endless groaning among the bass parts; and the whole the most mournful and boring thing that I ever heard in my life. I could not put up with it for half an hour without getting a violent headache.

"All this forms a sort of psalmody, possessing neither tune nor time. But if by any chance a lively air is played, there is a general stamping; the audience is set in motion, and follows, with a great deal of trouble and noise, some performer in the orchestra. Delighted to feel for a few moments the rhythm that is so lacking, they torment the ear, the voice, the arms, the legs, and all the body, to chase after a tune that is ever ready to escape them...."

I have quoted this rather long passage to show how the impression made by one of Rameau's operas on his contemporaries resembled that made by Wagner on his enemies. It was not without reason that Rameau was said to be Wagner's forerunner, as Rousseau was Tolstoy's forerunner.

In reality, it was not against Siegfried itself that Tolstoy's criticism was directed; and Tolstoy was closer than he thought to the spirit of this drama. Is not Siegfried the heroic incarnation of a free and healthy man, sprung directly from Nature? In a sketch of Siegfried, written in 1848, Wagner says:

"To follow the impulses of my heart is my supreme law; what I can accomplish by obeying my instincts is what I ought to do. Is that voice of instinct cursed or blessed? I do not know; but I yield to it, and never force myself to run counter to my inclination."

Wagner fought against civilisation by quite other methods than those employed by Tolstoy; and if the efforts of the two were equally great, the practical result is--one must really say it--as poor on one side as on the other.

What Tolstoy's raillery is really aimed at is not Wagner's work, but the way in which his work was represented. The splendours of the setting do not hide the childishness of the ideas behind them: the dragon Fafna, Fricka's rams, the bear, the serpent, and all the Valhalla menagerie have always been ridiculous. I will only add that the dragon's failure to be terrifying was not Wagner's fault, for he never attempted to depict a terrifying dragon. He gave it quite clearly, and of his own choice, a comic character. Both the text and the music make Fafner a sort of ogre, a simple creature, but, above all, a grotesque one.