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Page 28
In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably short of
perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the comings and
goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the
arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as most people in
accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed,
eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock,
I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like
the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal's habits a certain
congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as
Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend to believe in a ship which
comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain
goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of
opera-goers cannot live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of
them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone
who has crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place
this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman
would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there and managed to
get ashore, he would call his men after him (if they needed calling),
and trouble neither about casting anchor nor going aboard again. The
thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose that Wagner was too sea-sick to
observe what happened during his weeks of roughing it in the North
Sea. But the second scene is admirable. That monotonous drowsy hum of
the Spinning song is exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for
sympathising with Senta and her dreams. With the third there is an
occasional return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also
hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.
The music is like the stagecraft: now and then simply dramatic, now
and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes
threadbare and vulgar. And by this I do not mean that the
old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and the freer portions
necessarily good. Good and bad may be found in the new and the old
Wagner alike. That sailor's dance is to me as odious as anything in
Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet is scarcely more
tolerable. On the other hand, not even in "The Valkyrie" did Wagner
write more picturesquely weird music than most of the first act. The
shrilling of the north wind, the roaring of the waves, the creaking of
cordage, the banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at
sea,--these are suggested with wonderful vividness. At times Wagner
gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some
passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars
in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her
"mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration.
Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous
self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is
identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece
of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid
expression.
"LOHENGRIN"
"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one
fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling
the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl
crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We
had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an
individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came
all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can
come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older
type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or
nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's
music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried
Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against
Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too
strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to
the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much of sweetness and
delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole opera, including the sweet and
delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly
handling--gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who
heard it under Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at
last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's
imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out
boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in
the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the
melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing
out with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end
instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted Italian
style. And not only were these things in themselves delightful--they
also served to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts of
the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in many respects was
Wagner's art in the "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way
of doing the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of
doing things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be
remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap; and the eternally wise
critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him the
feather was out of place--it made him appear ridiculous, and so on.
Maurel retorted that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian
chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded butterfly, and
that his notion was to look as ferocious as he could. Now the odd
thing is, that though Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense
right also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund one degree
nearer to a man than the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously
out of place; and when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be
lady-killer without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a
pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was
something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally militant
aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing
of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong in trying to
play his part in the right manner when Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and
conductor were all against him in their determination to do their
parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel's footsteps, as he
frequently does, in a modified costume, but when for the first time
the orchestra played right he would not have seemed ridiculous had he
stuck Maurel's red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a
different thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an
armed camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting,
and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst all
this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters, Telramund,
strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to open the drama;
and to command our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is
making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians are
afraid of him that the drama begins to move at all, he cannot possibly
look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too strong of limb and tempestuous
of temper. The proof that this (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the
right one, was that, in the first place, the drama immediately
interested you instead of keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa;
and, in the second place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the
opening scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully
beautiful relief--a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was
very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny
Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the
beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the
conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led,
compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a
background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour
for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude,
the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering
would have been a flawless one.
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