Musical Portraits | Page 3

Tristan to his bed of pain.
For all these beings, and behind them Wagner, and behind him his time,
yearn for the past, the pre-natal, the original sleep, and find in such a
return their great fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of his beloved
his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the flame-engirdled hill a
woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited
unchanged for his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that
Kundry enmeshes Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving
embrace of Wotan, sinks on the breast of the god in submission,
reconciliation, immolation. And it is towards an engulfing
consummation, some extinction that is both love and death and deeper
than both, that the music of his operas aspires. The fire that licks the
rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that rises in the finale of
"Götterdämmerung" and inundates the scene and sweeps the world with
its silent, laving tides, the gigantic blossom that opens its corolla in the
Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rain of scent and petals, the tranquil
ruby glow of the chalice that suffuses the close of "Parsifal," are the
moments toward which the dramas themselves labor, and in which they
attain their legitimate conclusion, completion and end. But not only his
finales are full of that entrancement. His melodic line, the lyrical
passages throughout his operas, seem to seek to attain it, if not
conclusively, at least in preparation. Those silken excessively sweet
periods, the moment of reconciliation and embrace of Wotan and
Brunhilde, the "Ach, Isolde" passage in the third act of "Tristan," those
innumerable lyrical flights with their beginnings and subsidings, their
sudden advances and regressions, their passionate surges that finally
and after all their exquisite hesitations mount and flare and unroll

themselves in fullness--they, too, seem to be seeking to distill some of
the same brew, the same magic drugging potion, to conjure up out of
the orchestral depths some Venusberg, some Klingsor's garden full of
subtle scent and soft delight and eternal forgetfulness.
And with Wagner, the new period of music begins. He stands midway
between the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classical
period is accomplished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, is
termination, that there are times when it seems nothing else. There are
times when his art appears entirely bowed over the past; the confluence
of a dozen different tendencies alive during the last century and a half;
the capping of the labor of a dozen great musicians; the fulfilment of
the system regnant in Europe since the introduction of the principle of
the equal temperament. For the last time, the old conceptions of
tonality obtain in his music dramas. One feels throughout "Tristan und
Isolde" the key of D-flat, throughout "Die Meistersinger" the key of
C-major, throughout "Parsifal" the key of A-flat and its relative minor.
Rhythms that had been used all through the classical period are worked
by him into new patterns, and do service a last time. Motifs which had
been utilized by others are taken by him and brought to something like
an ultimate conclusion. The ending, the conclusion, the completion, are
sensible throughout his art. Few musicians have had their power and
method placed more directly in their hands, and benefited so hugely by
the experiments of their immediate predecessors, have fallen heir to
such immense musical legacies. Indeed, Wagner was never loath to
acknowledge his indebtedness, and there are on record several
instances when he paraphrased Walther's song to his masters, and
signaled the composers who had aided him most in his development.
To-day, the debt is very plain. At every turn, one sees him benefiting,
and benefiting very beautifully, by the work of Beethoven. The
structure of his great and characteristic works is based on the
symphonic form. The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die
Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical
sequence, the expositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in the
prelude and in Gurnamanz's narrative, and its subsequent reappearance
and adventures and developments, are something like a summit of
symphonic art as Beethoven made it to be understood. And his

orchestra is scarcely more than the orchestra of Beethoven. He did not
require the band of independent instrumental families demanded by
Berlioz and realized by the modern men. He was content with the old,
classical orchestra in which certain groups are strengthened and to
which the harp, the English horn, the bass-tuba, the bass-clarinet have
been added.
And his conception of an "unending melody," an unbroken flow of
music intended to give cohesion and homogeneity to his music-dramas,
was a direct consequence of the efforts of Mozart and Weber to give
unity to their operatic works. For although these composers