Musical Portraits | Page 2

incessant reports, the whole sinister
glittering faëry of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and
soar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such
grandeur, such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands
of years had split open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming
giants. The dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests,
were sprung up again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a
mighty and fantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned
Siegfried, the man born of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to
clear and rejuvenate the globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the
old false barriers and pierce upward to fulfilment and power. Mankind,
waking from immemorial sleep, thought for the first time to perceive
the sun in heaven, to greet the creating light. And where was this music
more immanent than in the New World, in America, that
essentialization of the entire age? By what environment was it more
justly appreciated, Saxon though the accents of its recitative might be?
Germany had borne Wagner because Germany had an uninterrupted
flow of musical expression. But had the North American continent
been able to produce musical art, it could have produced none more
indigenous, more really autochthonous, than that of Richard Wagner.
Whitman was right when he termed these scores "the music of the
'Leaves.'" For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungen flourish more
lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts and mountains and
plains. From the towers and walls of New York there fell a breath, a
grandiloquent language, a stridency and a glory, that were Wagner's
indeed. His regal commanding blasts, his upsweeping marching violins,
his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the American scene.
The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury and
expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud

processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and
blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody;
appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art.
American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its
vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and
transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain
something like eternal being.
And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the age's cry of material
triumph, so, too, there sounds in it its terrible cry of homesickness. The
energy produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked back again
with no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw
as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of
feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century
life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within
themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the past
once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful and
yet bereft and forlorn. And Wagner's music expresses with equal
veracity both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense of outward
power, so, too, it is sick with a sense of inner unfulfilment. There is no
longing more consuming, no homesickness more terrible, no straining
after the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness more burning
than that which utters itself through this music. There are passages,
whole hours of his, that are like the straining of a man to return into the
darkness of the mothering night out of which he came. There is music
of Wagner that makes us feel as though he had been seeking to create
great warm clouds, great scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he
had come to his art to find something in which he could envelop
himself completely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into
oblivion. For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate,
rockbound coast, cries through the immortal longing of the music. For
such a divine messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a
redeemer Kundry, driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns.
His lovers come toward each other, seeking in each other the night, the
descent into the fathomless dark. For them sex is the return, the
complete forgetfulness. Through each of them there sounds the
insistent cry:

"Frau Minne will Es werde Nacht!"
There is no tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men and
women. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utter
consumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging in
the Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the void
mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing
that enchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the
distant horns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating
fever that chains the sick