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In The Flying Dutchman Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in Tannhäuser he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in Lohengrin, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works the Mastersingers.
The Dutchman's motive is not so much sung as jodelled by Senta; the Montsalvat music is rather orchestral than vocal; all the motives in Tristan are either orchestral or declamatory. In saying this I do not at all underrate the other operas: simply I wish to point out the very marked difference in the quality of the music. The Mastersingers is a long song, and the first act the first verse of it.
Or take the watchman with his cow-horn in the Mastersingers; the music is redolent of the old world; it impresses the imagination more than an entry in Pepys "the watchman calling two of the morning and a thick snow falling."
The result is always a fine piece of music; and thousands of listeners have derived artistic enjoyment from the Mastersingers overture, the Lohengrin prelude and Tristan prelude without troubling to trace the story as it is plainly told. In the prelude to Act II here, for example, no one need seek a story, though it is obvious enough.
It is one of the few characters he did attempt to draw, and by far the most important of them. In the Mastersingers Walther and Eva are sketched, and Hans Sachs is worked out in some detail; but nothing in their nature especially affects the drama. In Lohengrin the tragedy is directly produced by Elsa's weakness and curiosity. The characterization is by no means profound or microscopic.
The Mastersingers had been sketched, as we know, in 1845; but the new work was a change, in that he created the character of Hans Sachs afresh, and the opera became an entirely different thing.
I summarised the events leading up to his beginning on the Mastersingers; but it is necessary to go over some of the ground in a little more detail to show in what a terrible plight Wagner had been landed when King Ludwig II of Bavaria sent for him. He was bankrupt financially, in health and in hope. Like the nose of his boyish hero, everything turned to dust the moment he touched it.
At the risk of turning this sketch into something like an analytical programme, I have concentrated my attention on his operas, and have tried to show how the later Wagner the Wagner of the Ring, the Mastersingers, and of Tristan grew out of the earlier Wagner, who composed as everyone else did at the time.
The melodies are of two sorts conforming to the two parties into which the personages of the play can be divided; and, like those parties, the melodies are broadly distinguished by external physiognomy and emotional essence. Most easily recognized are the two broad march tunes typical of the mastersingers and their pageantry. One of them has already been presented. Like its companion,
The Wagner of the Valkyrie, of Tristan and of the Mastersingers, has not acquired full mastery of his new art; there are still plenty of full closes, and, though words are not repeated, the effect at times would hardly be more conventional if they were. But in all the music we have the first-fruits of Wagner's walks amongst the Swiss mountains.
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