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Page 37
called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of
ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.
The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid of a
sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near to the
conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone.
Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments has been
execrable; many of them have rarely been even in approximate tune. The
truth is that the players do not play well unless a master-hand
controls them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently
wanted. Instead of a master-hand we have had to put up with Master
Siegfried Wagner's hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst
moments we have wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we
have longed passionately for another. I do not propose to discuss his
conducting in detail. Under him the band has played with steady,
unrelenting slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been robbed of
its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest numbers--as, for
example, the Valkyrie's Ride, the prelude to the third act of
"Siegfried," the march in "The Dusk of the Gods"--have been
deliberately massacred. One cannot criticise such conducting: it does
not rise near enough to competence to be worthy of criticism. But one
has a right to ask why this young man, who should be serving an
apprenticeship in some obscure opera-house, is palmed off on the
public as "the best artist procurable"? He scarcely seems to possess
ordinary intelligence. I had the honour of being inadvertently
presented to him, and he asked me, should I write anything about
Bayreuth, to say that he objected very much to the Englishmen who came
in knickerbockers--in bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested that if
they came without knickerbockers or the customary alternative he would
have better reason to complain, he asserted that he and his family had
a great respect for the theatre, and it shocked them to find so many
Englishmen who did not respect it. I mention this because it shows
clearly the spirit in which Bayreuth is now being worked. The Wagner
family are not shocked when Wagner's music is caricatured by an
octogenarian tenor or a twenty-stone prima donna; they are shocked
when in very hot weather a few people wear the costume in which they
suffer least discomfort. So the place is becoming a mere fashionable
resort, that would cause Wagner all the pangs of Amfortas could he
come here again. The women seem to change their dresses for every act
of the opera; the prices of lodgings, food, and drinks are rapidly
rising to the Monte Carlo standard; a clergyman has been imported to
preach on Sunday to the English visitors; one sees twenty or thirty
fashionable divorce cases in process of incubation; and Siegfried
Wagner conducts. With infinite labour Wagner built this magnificent
theatre, the most perfect machine in the world for the reproduction of
great art-works; and Mrs. Wagner has given it as a toy to her darling
son that he may amuse himself by playing with it. And, like a baby
when it gets a toy, Siegfried Wagner is breaking it to pieces to see
what there is inside. Unless it is taken from him until he has spent a
few years in learning to play upon instead of with it, Bayreuth will
quickly be deserted. Already it is in decadence. I shall always come
to Bayreuth, for reasons already given; but fashions change, and the
people who come here because it is the fashion will not be long in
finding other resorts; and those who want only to see the music-plays
adequately performed will have learnt that this is not the place for
them. With one voice the ablest German, French, and Dutch critics are
crying against the present state of things; and it is certainly the
duty of every English lover of Wagner to refuse to take tickets for
the performances that are to be conducted by Wagner's son. Bayreuth
promises us the best artists. Whether some of the singers are or are
not the best artists is largely a matter of taste. But that Siegfried
Wagner is the best conductor procurable in Germany is too preposterous
a proposition to be considered for a moment. He may be some day; but
that day is far off.
As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble to
discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately come my
way. It shows me that the old game is being pursued as busily as ever.
Since Wagner's death the world has been carefully and persistently
taught that only Bayreuth can do justice to "Parsifal"; and since the
world believes anything if it is said often enough, it has come to
think it sheer blasphemy to dream of giving "Parsifal" elsewhere than
at Bayreuth. "Parsifal" is not an opera--it is a sacred revelation;
and just as the seed of Aaron alone could serve as priests in the
sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner
can serve as priests--that is to say, as chief directing priests--when
"Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa
Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of
argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to
perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive
from a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, who are grown more German
than the Germans, and just as religiously forget to make any reference
to this missing link of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and
Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones
of the beauty and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the
unhappy writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little
significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and, to
do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly successful in
persuading the world to think with them. Verily, they have their
reward--they partake of afternoon tea at Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy
the honour of bowing low to the second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner's legal
descendants cordially take them by the hand. And they go away
refreshed, and again spread the report of the artistic and moral and
religious supremacy of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up
joyfully to Bayreuth to be taxed--one pound sterling per head per
"Parsifal" representation. The performances over, the world comes away
mightily edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard nothing
with its own ears, having understood nothing at all;--having, in fact,
so totally miscomprehended everything as to think "Parsifal" a
Christian drama; having been too deaf to realise that the singers were
frequently out of the key, and too blind to observe that the scenery
in the second act resembled a cheap cretonne, and that many of the
flower-maidens were at least eight feet in circumference. On the way
home the world whiles away the long railway journey by reading
metaphysical disquisitions on "Parsifal' and the Ideal Woman,"
"'Parsifal' and the Thing-in-Itself," "The Swan in 'Parsifal' and its
Relation to the Higher Vegetarianism." It knows the name of every
leit-motif, and can nearly pronounce the German for it; it can refer
to the Essay on Beethoven apropos of Kundry's scream (or yawn) in the
second act; it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic ignorance
of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his wound on the
right side, although the libretto distinctly states it to be situated
on the left. It is a fact that this year a lady was heard to ask why
Parsifal quarrelled with his wife in the second act. (I might mention
that an admirer of "Parsifal" asked me who the dark man was in the
first act of "The Valkyrie," and whether Sieglinde or Br�nnhilde was
burnt in the last.) The which is eminently amusing, and conjures up
before one a vision of Richard, not wailing, like the youth in
Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," for the faith he kindled, but gazing
patiently, rather wearily, with a kindly ironical smile, on the world
he conquered, on the world that adores him _because_ it fails to
understand him.
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