22 May: Boreham on Richard Wagner

The Mission of Music
Born at a stormy time, Richard Wagner, whose birthday we mark today, developed a stormy soul and sang a stormy song. He entered the world to find Napoleon and Wellington at death grips. Europe was a battlefield; everything was preparing for that world earthquake, Waterloo. Yet, such is the whimsical perversity of circumstance that those years of conflict and carnage were especially kind to the world of harmony. Within a single decade Mendelssohn, Liszt, Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, and Wagner made their appearance, and, each in his own way made a distinct and priceless contribution to the evolution of musical and dramatic art. The name of Wagner, however, stands out boldly from the rest, and occupies a place peculiarly its own. Wagner attached himself to none of the existing schools; he conformed to none of the familiar types; he moulded himself on none of the recognised models. And, as is invariably the case, he paid, and paid dearly, for his temerity and daring.

Wagner held strongly and tenaciously that music is by no means the monopoly of professional musicians. It must, of course, appeal to the most exact, the most eminent, and the most competent judges; but it must appeal also to all whose ears are capable of being intrigued by sweet and stirring sounds. To further this end, Wagner insisted that true music must be made the vehicle of clear-cut and easily intelligible ideas. The music must say something, and it must say something so touching, or so tragic, or so tremendous, that ordinary human hearts can be deeply moved by it. He therefore insisted that the words that are wedded to the music are of equal importance with the music itself, and that, without words of real quality and beauty, the music cannot possibly achieve its end. To vindicate this ideal, he was prepared to outrage all the recognised canons, to defy all the established traditions, and to flout all the enthroned authorities.

A Dreamer Who Was Loyal To His Dreams
No illustrious musician ever produced so much discord. In his lifetime the more grave and academic masters affected to regard him as an upstart and an adventurer, hungry for cheap cheers, and spending his strength in a frantic appeal to the gallery. His admirers, however, referred to him as a brilliant and original genius, whose every note trembled with a subtle philosophy and the master stroke of whose inspired compositions entitled him to a place of honour among the greatest musical reformers. All this was, of course, the dust raised by the storm that Wagner's genius created. The air has since cleared. It is now generally conceded that Wagner was a practical visionary who never swerved from his ideal, either to curry favour with crowds or to avoid the scorn of Kings. In his monumental work on "The Post-Romantic Period in German Literature," Prof. J. G. Robertson declares that Wagner's basic principles are deeply rooted among the great traditions of the past, and that his influence has extended, and must extend, far beyond the era with which his ideas as a poet are associated.

In the course of a chequered and eventful career, Wagner made two mistakes which went far towards clouding his fair fame. The first, and most venial, consisted in the fact that he began to write when he was very young, before his ideal had clearly crystallised in his own mind, thus presenting to the rapacity of his critics an immature and vulnerable literature over which they afterwards gloated with malignant and venomous satisfaction. His precocity in translating in his thirteenth year the first 12 books of the Odyssey may have gratified the vanity of his friends and done himself no serious harm. But when, four years later, he composed and published operatic music, he was simply playing into the hands of those pitiless antagonists of his later years who were conveniently deaf to the reasonable plea that a man's life work ought not to be judged by the crudities of his unripe and callow youth.

Contemporary Judgment Overridden By Posterity
Wagner's second mistake lay in his allowing himself to be caught in the whirl of that political cataclysm which, in 1848, convulsed the whole of Europe. It was one of those critical moments that made it extremely difficult for any sensitive and passionate man to assume an attitude of severe detachment and splendid isolation. Wagner was of too emotional a temper to stand aloof when all his friends were engulfed in the seething turmoil, and he threw himself with characteristic energy into the strife. He thus aroused political animosities that were never afterwards permitted to slumber; and he suffered the mortification of seeing his most perfect work driven from the stage by the catcalls and dogwhistles of his relentless foes.

His productions, however, survive, and a generation unruffled by the passions of the period is able to appreciate their merits. Who, today, would challenge his main contention? Music, he argued, must possess something more than mere melody; it must have a meaning, a message, a mission.

Many of our modern expositors have shown that the essential difference between the old pagan music and the music by which our own ears are enchanted, consists in the fact that, whilst the music of antiquity was made up of a twanging of strings and a blowing of reeds, our modern music, with its Misereres and its Jubilates, its Magnificats and its Benedicites, its Te Deums and its Hallelujah Choruses, is eloquent with a stately and sublime rhetoric. In her "Roadmender," Michael Fairless goes into ecstasies over the way in which Wagner, instead of singing exclusively of angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim, sets to music the dust and sweat of earthly toil. Such tributes are well merited and we like to think that when, in 1883, Wagner died and was buried in his beautiful garden tomb at Bayreuth, King Louis II of Bavaria rode alone, and at dead of night, that he might embrace the earliest opportunity of doing homage to Wagner's deathless renown.

F W Boreham

Image: Richard Wagner