Musical Portraits | Page 4

by securing an emotional development in the various arias and concerted numbers. The step from "Don Giovanni" and "Euryanthe" to "Tannh?user" and "Lohengrin" does not seem quite as long a one to-day as once it did. Indeed, there are moments when one wonders whether "Lohengrin" is really a step beyond "Euryanthe," and whether the increase of power and vividness and imagination has not been made at the expense of style. Moreover, in much of what is actually progress in Wagner the influence of Weber is clearly discernible. The sinister passages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freisch��tz"; the grand melodic style, the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns and chivalry and flourishes, seem to come directly out of "Euryanthe"; the orchestral scene-painting from the sunrise and other original effects in "Oberon."
Even Meyerbeer taught Wagner something more than the use of certain instruments, the bass-clarinet, for instance. The old operatic speculator indubitably was responsible for Wagner's grand demands upon the scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pompous spectacles fired the younger man not only with "Rienzi." They indubitably gave him the courage to create an operatic art that celebrated the new gold and power and magnificence, and was Grand Opera indeed. If the works of the one were sham, and those of the other poetry, it was only that Wagner realized what the other sought vainly all his life to attain, and was prevented by the stock-broker within.
And Chopin's harmonic feeling as well as Berlioz's orchestral wizardry played a r?le in Wagner's artistic education. But for all his incalculable indebtednesses, Wagner is the great initiator, the compeller of the modern period. It is not only because he summarized the old. It is because he began with force a revolution. In expressing the man of the nineteenth century, he discarded the old major-minor system that had dominated Europe so long. That system was the outcome of a conception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder of nature, placed him in a category of his own, and pretended that he was both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice. They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the average female voice, and the difference between the average soprano and alto. It is upon those intervals that the C-major scale and its twenty-three dependents are based. But with the coming of a conception that no longer separated man from the rest of creation, and placed him in it as a small part of it, brother to the animals and plants, to everything that breathes, the old scale could no longer completely express him. The modulations of the noises of wind and water, the infinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on the planisphere, seemed to ask him to include them, to become conscious of them and reproduce them. He required other more subtle scales. And with Wagner the monarchy of the C-major scale is at an end. "Tristan und Isolde" and "Parsifal" are constructed upon a chromatic scale. The old one has had to lose its privilege, to resign itself to becoming simply one of a constantly growing many. If this step is not a colossal one, it is still of immense importance. The musical worthies who ran about wringing their hands after the first performance of each of Wagner's works, and lamented laws monstrously broken, and traditions shattered, were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction the wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbidden harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan's spear. East and West are near to merging once again. No doubt, had there been no Wagner, the change would have arrived nevertheless. However, it would have arrived more slowly. For what he did accomplish was the rapid emptying of the old wine that still remained in the wineskin, the preparation of the receptacle for the new vintage. He forced the new to put in immediate appearance.
The full impact of these reforms, the full might of Wagner, we of our generation doubtlessly never felt. They could have been felt only by the generation to whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation that attained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of those days that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was in them he battered down