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Updated: May 8, 2025
Almost the whole scene is played within the soul of Captain Marschner, a man of fifty, who is leading his company to the front-line trench under the enemy's fire. He is not a professional soldier. As a young man he had been an officer, but at the age of thirty he had gone to school again, wishing to quit the trade of war and to become a civil engineer. Now the war had brought him back to the army.
You can easily calculate what those fellows lost in their eleven attacks if we've melted down to thirty men without crawling out of our trench. Just let them go on like that a few weeks longer and they'll be at the end of their human material." Captain Marschner had not wanted to listen. He stood bending over a map, but at the phrase, "human material," he started violently.
Captain Marschner felt easier the minute he had finished scolding the crushed sinner. His conscience was now quite clear, just as though it had really been by chance that he had placed the man at that post. But the feeling did not last very long. The silly fellow would not give up adoring him as his savior.
When Wagner wrote 'Die Feen' he was under the spell of Weber, whose influence is perceptible in every page of the score. Marschner, too, whose 'Vampyr' and 'Templer und Jüdin' had been recently produced at Leipzig, which was then Wagner's headquarters, also appealed very strongly to the young musician's plastic temperament.
For Franz, who had married the song composer, Marie Hinrichs, lost his hearing and drifted to the brink of despair before a series of concerts rescued him from starvation. Heinrich Marschner was married three times, his latter two wives being vocalists. Thalberg married a daughter of the great singer Lablache; she was the widow of the painter Boucher, whose exquisite confections every one knows.
Marschner now arrived for the dress rehearsal; he was very pleased, and, without compelling me to falsehood, he gave me sufficient opportunities for exercising my powers in the art of concealing my real thoughts. At all events I must have succeeded fairly well, for he had every reason to think himself considerately and kindly treated by me.
The captain comes to himself with a shattered skull. At a few paces' distance lies the implacable lieutenant, his entrails trailing on the ground beside him. They exchange a last look. Marschner sees a face that is almost strange to him, pale and sad, with timid eyes. The whole expression is gentle and plaintive; there is an unforgettable air of tender, anxious resignation.
Much of the music does not rise above the level of Spontini or Marschner; there are wearisome pages, there are heavy chords repeated again and again with violin figurations on top, there are lines of the verse repeated to fit in with the conventional melodies in four-bar lengths. Very often the result, it must be admitted, is lamentable.
Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more passionately, ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler.
For practical purposes with Wagner the songs are "absolute" music: the words were his own, and he could alter them to suit the musical exigency. The opening of the next scene is spectacular, and the music is not striking for Wagner, though Marschner or Spontini might have owned it with pride.
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