HOW MANY CHARMS HATH MUSIC, WOULD YOU SAY?
THE argument of the late Herr Wagner was that grand opera—the musicdrama, as he called it—included, and therefore did away with thenecessity for—all other arts. Music in all its branches, of course, itprovides: so much I will concede to the late Herr Wagner. There aretimes, I confess, when my musical yearnings might shock the late HerrWagner—times when I feel unequal to following three distinct themes atone and the same instant.
“Listen,” whispers the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, “the cornet has nowthe Brunnhilda motive.” It seems to me, in my then state of depravity,as if the cornet had even more than this the matter with him.
“The second violins,” continues the Wagnerian enthusiast, “are carryingon the Wotan theme.” That they are carrying on goes without saying: theplayers’ faces are streaming with perspiration.
“The brass,” explains my friend—his object is to cultivate my ear—“isaccompanying the singers.” I should have said drowning them. There areoccasions when I can rave about Wagner with the best of them. High classmoods come to all of us. The difference between the really high-classman and us commonplace, workaday men is the difference between, say, theeagle and the barnyard chicken. I am the barnyard chicken. I have mywings. There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordidearth and soar into the realms of art. I do fly a little, but my body isheavy, and I only get as far as the fence. After a while I find itlonesome on the fence, and I hop down again among my fellows.
Listening to Wagner, during such temporary Philistinic mood, my sense offair play is outraged. A lone, lorn woman stands upon the stage tryingto make herself heard. She has to do this sort of thing for her living;maybe an invalid mother, younger brothers and sisters are dependent uponher. One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments,well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make itimpossible for a single note of that poor woman’s voice to be heard abovetheir din. I see her standing there, opening and shutting her mouth,getting redder and redder in the face. She is singing, one feels sure ofit; one could hear her if only those one hundred and forty men would easeup for a minute. She makes one mighty, supreme effort; above the bangingof the drums, the blare of the trumpets, the shrieking of the strings,that last despairing note is distinctly heard.
She has won, but the victory has cost her dear. She sinks down faintingon the stage and is carried off by supers. Chivalrous indignation hasmade it difficult for me to keep my seat watching the unequal contest.My instinct was to leap the barrier, hurl the bald-headed chief of herenemies from his high chair, and lay about me with the trombone or theclarionet—whichever might have come the easier to my snatch.
“You cowardly lot of bullies,” I have wanted to cry, “are you not ashamedof yourselves? A hundred and forty of you against one, and that one astill beautiful and, comparatively speaking, young lady. Be quiet for aminute—can’t you? Give the poor girl a chance.”
A lady of my acquaintance says that sitting out a Wagnerian opera seemsto her like listening to a singer accompanied by four orchestras playingdifferent tunes at the same time. As I have said, there are times whenWagner carries me along with him, when I exult in the crash and whirl ofhis contending harmonies. But, alas! there are those other moods—thoseafter dinner moods—when my desire is for something distinctly resemblinga tune. Still, there are other composers of grand opera besides Wagner.I grant to the late Herr Wagner, that, in so far as music is concerned,opera can supply us with all we can need.
But it was also Wagner’s argument that grand opera could supply us withacting, and there I am compelled to disagree with him. Wagner thoughtthat the arts of acting and singing could be combined. I have seenartists the great man has trained himself. As singers they left nothingto be desired, but the acting in grand opera has never yet impressed me.Wagner never succeeded in avoiding the operatic convention and nobodyelse ever will. When the operatic lover meets his sweetheart he puts herin a corner and, turning his back upon her, comes down to the footlightsand tells the audience how he adores her. When he has finished, he, inhis turn, retires into the corner, and she comes down and tells theaudience that she is simply mad about him.
Overcome with joy at finding she really cares for him, he comes downright and says that this is the happiest moment of his life; and shestands left, twelve feet away from him, and has the presentiment that allthis sort of thing is much too good to last. They go off together,backwards, side by side. If there is any love-making, such as Iunderstand by the term, it is done “off.” This is not my idea of acting.But I do not see how you are going to substitute for it anything morenatural. When you are singing at the top of your voice, you don’t want aheavy woman hanging round your neck. When you are killing a man andwarbling about it at the same time, you don’t want him fooling around youdefending himself. You want him to have a little reasonable patience,and to wait in his proper place till you have finished, telling him, orrather telling the crowd, how much you hate and despise him.
When the proper time comes, and if he is where you expect to find himwhile thinking of your upper C, you will hit him lightly on the shoulderwith your sword, and then he can die to his own particular tune. If youhave been severely wounded in battle, or in any other sort of row, andhave got to sing a long ballad before you finally expire, you don’t wantto have to think how a man would really behave who knew he had only got afew minutes to live and was feeling bad about it. The chances are thathe would not want to sing at all. The woman who really loved him wouldnot encourage him to sing. She would want him to keep quiet while shemoved herself about a bit, in case there was anything that could be donefor him.
If a mob is climbing the stairs thirsting for your blood, you do not wantto stand upright with your arms stretched out, a good eighteen inchesfrom the door, while you go over at some length the varied incidentsleading up to the annoyance. If your desire were to act naturally youwould push against that door for all you were worth, and yell forsomebody to bring you a chest of drawers and a bedstead, and things likethat, to pile up against it. If you were a king, and were giving aparty, you would not want your guests to fix you up at the other end ofthe room and leave you there, with nobody to talk to but your own wife,while they turned their backs upon you, and had a long and complicateddance all to themselves. You would want to be in it; you would want tolet them know that you were king.
In acting, all these little points have to be considered. In opera,everything is rightly sacrificed to musical necessity. I have seen theyoung, enthusiastic opera-singer who thought that he or she could act andsing at the same time. The experienced artist takes the centre of thestage and husbands his resources. Whether he is supposed to be indignantbecause somebody has killed his mother, or cheerful because he is goingout to fight his country’s foes, who are only waiting until he hasfinished singing to attack the town, he leaves it to the composer to makeclear.
Also it was Herr Wagner’s idea that the back cloth would leave theopera-goer indifferent to the picture gallery. The castle on the rock,accessible only by balloon, in which every window lights upsimultaneously and instantaneously, one minute after sunset, while thefull moon is rushing up the sky at the pace of a champion comet—thatwonderful sea that suddenly opens and swallows up the ship—thosesnow-clad mountains, over which the shadow of the hero passes like athreatening cloud—the grand old chateau, trembling in the wind—what need,will ask the opera-goer of the future, of your Turners and your Corots,when, for prices ranging from a shilling upwards, we can have a dozenpictures such as these rolled up and down before us every evening?
But perhaps the most daring hope of all was the dream that came to HerrWagner that his opera singers, his grouped choruses, would eventuallysatisfy the craving of the public for high class statuary. I am notquite sure the general public does care for statuary. I do not knowwhether the idea has ever occurred to the Anarchist, but, were I myselforganising sec
ret committee meetings for unholy purposes, I should invitemy comrades to meet in that section of the local museum devoted tostatuary. I can conceive of no place where we should be freer fromprying eyes and listening ears. A select few, however, do appreciatestatuary; and such, I am inclined to think, will not be weaned from theirpassion by the contemplation of the opera singer in his or her variousquaint costumes.
And even if the tenor always satisfied our ideal of Apollo, and thesoprano were always as sylph-like as she is described in the libretto,even then I should doubt the average operatic chorus being regarded bythe _connoisseur_ as a cheap and pleasant substitute for a bas relieffrom the Elgin marbles. The great thing required of that operatic chorusis experience. The young and giddy-pated the chorus master has no usefor. The sober, honest, industrious lady or gentleman, with a knowledgeof music is very properly his ideal.
What I admire about the chorus chiefly is its unity. The whole villagedresses exactly alike. In wicked, worldly villages there is rivalry,leading to heartburn and jealously. One lady comes out suddenly, on,say, a Bank Holiday, in a fetching blue that conquers every male heart.Next holiday her rival cuts her out with a green hat. In the operaticvillage it must be that the girls gather together beforehand to arrangethis thing. There is probably a meeting called.
“The dear Count’s wedding,” announces the chairwoman, “you will all bepleased to hear, has been fixed for the fourteenth, at eleven o’clock inthe morning. The entire village will be assembled at ten-thirty to awaitthe return of the bridal _cortège_ from the church, and offer itsfelicitations. Married ladies, will, of course, come accompanied bytheir husbands. Unmarried ladies must each bring a male partner as neartheir own height as possible. Fortunately, in this village the number ofmales is exactly equal to that of females, so that the picture need notbe spoiled. The children will organise themselves into an independentbody and will group themselves picturesquely. It has been thoughtadvisable,” continues the chairwoman, “that the village should meet thedear Count and his bride at some spot not too far removed from the localalehouse. The costume to be worn by the ladies will consist of a shortpink skirt terminating at the knees and ornamented with festoons offlowers; above will be worn a bolero in mauve silk without sleeves andcut _décolleté_. The shoes should be of yellow satin over flesh-colouredstockings. Ladies who are ‘out’ will wear pearl necklaces, and a simpledevice in emeralds to decorate the hair. Thank God, we can all of usafford it, and provided the weather holds up and nothing unexpectedhappens—he is not what I call a lucky man, our Count, and it is always aswell to be prepared for possibilities—well, I think we may look forwardto a really pleasant day.”
It cannot be done, Herr Wagner, believe me. You cannot substitute themusic drama for all the arts combined. The object to be aimed at by thewise composer should be to make us, while listening to his music,forgetful of all remaining artistic considerations.
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