Musical Portraits | Page 4

retained the
old convention of an opera composed of separate numbers, they
nevertheless managed to unify their operas by creating a distinct style
in each of them, and by securing an emotional development in the
various arias and concerted numbers. The step from "Don Giovanni"
and "Euryanthe" to "Tannhäuser" 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 Freischütz"; 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 rôle 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