Lengthy AMsS: “Richard Wagner is nothing more than a great genius”

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but not psychology; .and in the twinkling of an eye, I concluded that music is an art which does not penetrate the soul at all and does not wander down small paths,· its realm in the human passions amounts to the grand passions, in their full expansion and health.

Will you permit me – illustrious and justly-admired master – not to share with you this point of view? Perhaps I have a right, you will no doubt agree, to pretend to know a bit about the secret province of an art in which, since childhood, I have lived as a fish in water. I have always viewed it [music] as radically powerless in the realm of pure thought (and is it not in pure thought that philosophy lies to itself?), all-powerful, on the contrary, when it is a matter of expressing passion in all degrees, the smallest nuances of feeling. To penetrate the soul, to stroll there among the small paths, it is precisely in that, that one finds its role of weakness and also its triumph. Music begins where speech ends, it speaks the unspeakable, it leads us to discover within ourselves the profound unknown, it makes impressions  – those ‘states of mind’ – that words cannot express. And, in passing, it is for this reason that dramatic music was so often able to content itself with mediocre texts or worse. It is only at certain moments that music is the verb; it is music which expresses everything. Speech becomes secondary and almost useless.

With his ingenious use of the Leitmotif (oh, that frightening word!) Richard Wagner has again extended the realm of musical expression, making comprehensible –what some people would term it – their most secret thoughts. One had glimpsed this system, already sketched out, but had scarcely paid attention to it before the appearance of works in which it had been fully-developed. Would you like a very simple example, chosen from among thousands? Tristan asks, ‘Where are we?’ ‘Near the end,’ responds Isolde, on the music itself which previously accompanied the words: ‘head devoted to death,’ which she pronounced in a low voice, looking at Tristan; and it was immediately understood of which end she was speaking. Is this philosophy or psychology?

Unfortunately, the voice is fragile, as are all delicate and complicated organs;· it has an effect upon the spectator only on the condition that one can hear all the words distinctly and that one possesses an excellent musical memory.

But that is not the question for the time being. The reader would do better to pardon this digression.

As long as commentators confine themselves to describing the beauty of Wagner’s works – except for an unsurprising tendency toward partiality and hyperbole – they are above reproach. But when they get into the

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question itself – when they want to explain to us how musical drama differs from lyric drama and operatic drama, why musical drama must, of necessity, be symbolic and legendary, how it must be thought of musically, how it must exist within the orchestra and not within the voice, how one would not expect to use opera music for a musical drama, what is the essential nature of a Leitmotif, &, if they want, in a word, to initiate us into all these beautiful things – a thick fog descends upon the style; strange words and incoherent phrases appear all of a sudden like devils jumping out of their box. In short, if they expressed things in an honorable way, no one would understand at all. We need not turn again to the fabulous and ephemeral Wagner Review, which declared one day to its stupefied readers that it would henceforth be written intelligibly. Even its best writers do not escape the contagion.

Naturally endowed by an extreme naivete which many years have not been able to erase, I have long sought to understand this. It is not the light that is missing, I said to myself, it is my poor eyesight. I accused my native foolishness. I made the sincerest efforts to understand the sense of these dissertations, so much so that, one day, finding these same lines of argument – unintelligible to me – set forth by a critic who ordinarily writes in a crystal-clear and lucid manner, I wrote to ask him if he could not – due to my poor eyesight – enlighten me. He was gracious enough to publish my letter and to afford me a response –­ which did not respond to anything, did not enlighten me at all, and left things status quo. Since then, I have given up the battle and have taken up the search for the roots of this bizarre phenomenon.

There are probably several. Perhaps the theories themselves, based on discussion, are not clear enough. ‘When I reread my old theoretical works,’ said Richard Wagner one day to Mr. Villot, ‘I could no longer understand them.’  He was not surprised that others had the same trouble untangling them, and  that which is not intelligible cannot, as you know, be expressed clearly.

But this would not explain the prodigious superabundance of writings on the same subject, mentioned above; the wave of theories could not be for naught. Let us look for, then, and perhaps end by finding, other causes for these strange anomalies.

II

Victor Hugo’s curious book on Shakespeare contains a chapter that should have been published in part as a breviary and put in the hands of all artists and critics. It is the chapter entitled Art and Science.

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In this chapter, the master demonstrates and establishes that between Art and Science – the world’s two guiding lights – there is, ‘a radical difference. Science is perfectible,· Art is not.’

We could somewhat have accused him of having wanted to write, in this book, an appeal disguised pro domo sua. If it had been true, it would have been good for him – whose influence not only upon literature, but also upon Art in its entirety has been so great – that it has sparked a renewal of poetry and language itself, has refashioned them to his own liking, and has suggested – in trying to establish a law of progress in Art –  that his work is the sum total of modem art.

He has done just the opposite.

Art, he says, is the region of equals. The beauty of everything below is perfectible; the beauty of Art, is not to be susceptible to perfection.

Art marches to its own beat: it shifts its position as does Science, but its successive creations, containing something of the immutable, remain.

Homer had only four winds for his tempests,· Virgil who had twelve, Dante who had twenty-four, Milton who had thirty-two, could not make theirs any better.

One wastes time in saying: Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade (Art is a subject neither to be diminished nor magnified).

And he ends with these profound words:

‘… those geniuses whom one cannot surpass, one can equal.’

‘How?’

‘In being others.

The Wagnerian definition is part of a completely different principle.

According to this view, Richard Wagner is not only a genius, but also a messiah. Until he appeared on the scene, Drama and Music were in their infancy and heralded his coming. The greatest musicians – Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven – were only his precursors. There is no longer anything outside of the path he has traced, because it is the path, the truth and the life; he revealed to the world the gospel of perfect Art.

Since then, it would no longer be a question of criticism, but of proselytizing and the apostle, and that which can be easily explained is perpetually renewed – an inexhaustible sermon. Christ and Buddha are long dead, but their teachings continue to be disseminated and their lives continue to be written. This will endure as long as they are worshipped.

But if, as we believe, the principle lacks justice, if  Richard Wagner is nothing more than a great genius like Dante or Shakespeare (one can indulge oneself), then the falseness of the principle must react to its consequences, and it is natural enough in this case to see that the commentators sometimes take a chance with their incomprehensible reasonings, the sources of their delirious deductions.

‘Every great artist,’ said Hugo, ‘remakes art in his own image.’ And that is all. This neither erases the past nor closes the door to the future.

The Passion According to St. Matthew, Don Juan, Alceste, and Fidelio have lost nothing of their value since the birth of   Tristan and the Ring of the Nibelungen. There are only four wind instruments in the Passion, twenty in Don Juan and Fidelio, thirty in Tristan, forty in the Ring of the Nibelung. It is of no use. This is so true that Wagner himself, in Die Meistersinger was able — without any loss — to return almost to the orchestra of Beethoven and Mozart.

III

Let us try to examine questions of composure.

We have been given anew – or rather as a renewal of the Greeks and thus of the noble Game of Goose – this idea of a perfect union of drama, music, mimicry and the theater’s decorative resources. A thousand pardons, but this notion has always been based, from the beginning, upon the Opera. We might possibly take this badly, but the intention was there. One did not always take it as badly as one well wants to say, and when Miss Falcon appeared in The Huguenots, Madame Malibran in Othello, and Miss Viardot in The Prophet, the emotion was at its height; we were terrified at the bloody glimmers of St. Bartholemew, and trembled for Desdemona’s life; we shivered with faith, finding again in the Prophet, surrounded by all the pomp of the Church, the son whom she had presumed dead… and one asked for nothing more.

Richard Wagner ‘remade art in his image;’ his formula fulfilled, in a new and powerful way, the intimate union of the different arts into an ensemble which constituted lyric drama. So be it. Is this formula definitive, is it the truth?

No. It  is not, because it cannot be…

Because if it were, art would await perfection, something not within the power of the human spirit.

Because if it were, art would then be only a mass of imitations, condemned by their very nature to  mediocrity and uselessness.

The different parts of lyric drama will lead unceasingly to perfect equilibrium without ever reaching it, traversing ever new solutions to the problem.

It used to be that one willingly forgot the drama in listening to the voice, and if the orchestra presumed itself to be too interesting, it was accused of diverting [the audience’s ] attention.

Now, the public listens to the orchestra, and tries to follow the thousand patterns entangled in it, the glistening game of sonorities; it forgets to listen to what the actors are saying, and loses its view of the action.

The new system nearly completely annihilates the art of singing, and boasts about it. Thus, the instrument par excellence, the only living instrument, will no longer be charged with pronouncing the melodic phrases,· it will be others, the instruments we have made, pale and inept imitations of the human voice, which will sing in its place. Is there some objection to this?

Let us continue. The new art – because of its extreme complexity – inflicts upon its performer and also its viewer an extreme fatigue, sometimes even a superhuman strain. In the special voluptuousness which separates it from an until now unheard-of development of the harmonic resources and instrumental combinations, it engenders nervous over-excitement, extravagant exaltations, beyond the purpose to which art must offer itself. It overworks the brain, at the risk of upsetting its balance. I am not being critical: I am simply stating something. The ocean submerges, lightning strikes us down: the sea and the hurricane are no less sublime.

Let us always continue. It is contrary to good taste to put drama in the orchestra when its place is on the stage. Will I admit to you that this thought – in this case – is all the same to me? Genius has its reasons which reason cannot know.

But this is enough, I think, to demonstrate that this art has its faults, as everything does in the world; that it is not the perfect art, the definitive art beyond which there is nothing more to strive for.

The ladder is always there. As Hugo said, the first rung is always free.

IV

Hugo painted a picture of geniuses, and it is curious to see how this picture naturally applies to Richard Wagner. We would say, at times, that he has traced his [Wagner’s] portrait. Let us take a look.

‘…These men scale mountains, enter the clouds, disappear, reappear. We watch them, observe them… The way is rough. The slope resists… They must make their own stairway, cut through the ice and proceed, to cut through the hate bit-by-bit… these geniuses are extremists… To not give a hand is a negative perfection. It is good to be assailable… Great souls are obtrusive… there is some truth to the reproaches we give them… The strong, the great, the luminous are, from a certain point of view, offensive… They surpass your intelligence; they hurt your eyes; they question and investigate your conscience and your feelings; they distort them. They break your heart. They carry away your soul…’

Thus we agree upon the greatness of Homer and Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Dante. Geniuses yes, but not the Messiah. The era of the Gods has passed.

There would even be no harm in saying this if there had not been –  under this illusion  –  some traps and dangers.

First, the danger of imitation. Every great artist supplies new methods which enter the public domain: each [individual] has the right, nay, the moral obligation to study them in order to profit from them and be nourished by them, but imitation must end there. If one wants to follow the model step-by-step, if one does not dare stray [from the path], one is condemned to powerlessness and will only produce artificial works, as devoid of life as they are of ability.

Another danger is to persuade oneself that art provides a tabula rasa, that it begins each course anew and has nothing more to do with the past. It is a bit as if one had presumed that in order to make a tree grow, its roots would have to be cut off.

There are no serious studies without respect for, and the culture of tradition.

Tradition is a force, a light, a teaching, it is the repository of a people’s most profound abilities. It assures the intellectual solidarity of generations through time. It separates the civilized from the barbarians. We no longer want its help. We score its teachings. We revile and ignore the masters and, curiously, at the same time, we rush to imitate the unknown. But, in imitating it, we lose its natural qualities and only succeed in presenting its defects. We cease to be clear as a good Frenchman, in order to be profound as a Norwegian, or sentimental as a Russian. We succeed only in being obscure and boring, and, under the pretext of bringing greater beauty and life to our literature, we produce books which, lacking one and the other, also lacked the old national traditions of movement, order, and good sense.

Thus spoke an eminent man, Mr. Charles Richet, who probably scarcely dreamed of the questions which occupy us, when he wrote an article on literary anarchy. He could write another on musical anarchy. Some unhappy young people are actually persuaded that the rules must be discarded, that it is necessary to make the rules themselves according to their particular temperaments. They revert to a savage musical state, to the era of dissonance. Some of them manage to write informed pieces, analogous to those played by children when they haphazardly place their little hands on the piano keys…

Richard Wagner did not work in this way: he plunged his roots deeply into the School, into the nourishing soil of Sebastian Bach; and later, when he had fabricated his own rules, he had acquired the right to do so.

Another risk is that run by some of the less-enlightened Wagnerians – of which there are a few: they wish to know only Wagner’s music, ignoring all the rest and devoting themselves – for want of a comparison – to bizarre appreciations, falling into ecstasy over futilities, marveling over the most ordinary things. Thus it is that one day, a so-called serious writing informed a conductor, to whom he had given the authority of his advice, that in Wagner’s music, the crescendo and diminuendo signified ‘an augmentation and a diminution of sound.’ It is as if one were to say that in Moliere’s works, a period at the end of a word lets the reader know that the sentence has ended.

There would be no more amusing anthology than one which included the errors, the nonsense and all the sorts of foolishness which pulsate in the critiques of Wagner, under the eyes of an innocent public. I leave this to those less occupied than I.

On the verso of his attached letter, Saint-Saens has noted:

page 9. –don’t be startled by ‘the noble game of Goose’

page 11. – some objection. If this bothers you, put a certain objection. (I prefer the other)

Id. The brain at… I did not find anything better. (one……!)

page 15: I have already used bizarre on page 5. If this repetition bothers you, you can put astonishing.

Page 16. It is important [?] that I put signified in… I find this more elegant, If you object, put it in the plural”

An astonishingly detailed and reasoned argument against the most extreme Wagnerites whose aesthetic philosophies attempted to dominate the mid-to late nineteenth century’s musical scene. Saint-Saens, an early proponent of Wagner, knew Tristan by heart, had been approached to conduct the first performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and attended its premiere as well as that of Die Valkyrie. While declaring that Wagner is not the Messiah, Saint-Saens seems, at the same time, to defend the German composer against accusations made at the time (and later) that he was an anti-Christ. Nevertheless, influenced, perhaps, by his own experiences in the Franco-Prussian war, Saint-Saens felt that if German food, language and literature should be frowned upon in France during World War One, then Wagner’s music should be as well. “For me,” he remarked, “France comes first, and then music.”

In fine condition. Pasted into the inner cover is the bookplate of Gaston Calmann-Levy.