SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
Sunday concerts
What a place in my life those Sunday concerts held! All the week I lived for those two hours; and when they were over I thought about them until the following Sunday. The fascination of Wagner’s music for youth has often troubled people; they think it poisons the thoughts and dulls the activities. But the generation that was then intoxicated by Wagner does not seem to have shown signs of demoralisation since. Why do not people understand that if we had need of that music it was not because it was death to us, but life. Cramped by the artificiality of a town, far from action, or nature, or any strong or real life, we expanded under the influence of this noble music–music which flowed from a heart filled with understanding of the world and the breath of Nature. In Die Meistersinger, in Tristan, and in Siegfried, we went to find the joy, the love, and the vigour that we so lacked.
At the time when I was feeling Wagner’s seductiveness so strongly there were always some carping people among my elders ready to quench my admiration and say with a superior smile: «That is nothing. One can’t judge Wagner at a concert. You must hear him in the opera-house at Bayreuth.» Since then I have been several times to Bayreuth; I have seen Wagner’s works performed in Berlin, in Dresden, in Munich, and in other German towns, but I have never again felt the old intoxication. People are wrong to pretend that closer acquaintance with a fine work adds to one’s enjoyment of it. It may throw light upon it, but it nips one’s imagination and dispels the mystery. The puzzling fragments one hears at concerts will take on splendid proportions on account of all the mind adds to them. That epic poem of the Niebelungen was once like a forest in our dreams, where strange and awful beings flashed before our vision and then vanished. Later on, when we had explored all its paths, we discovered that order and reason reigned in the midst of this apparent jungle; and when we came to know the least wrinkle on the faces of its inhabitants, the confusion and emotion of other days no longer filled us.
But this may be the result of growing older; and if I do not recognise the Wagner of other days, it is perhaps because I do not recognise my former self. A work of art, and above all a work of musical art, changes with ourselves. Siegfried, for example, is for me no longer full of mystery. The qualities in it that strike me to-day are its cheerful vigour, its clearness of form, its virile force and freedom, and the extraordinary healthiness of the hero, and, indeed, of the whole work.
I sometimes think of poor Nietzsche and his passion for destroying the things he loved, and how he sought in others the decadence that was really in himself. He tried to embody this decadence in Wagner, and, led away by his flights of fancy and his mania for paradox (which would be laughable if one did not remember that his whims were not hatched in hours of happiness), he denied Wagner his most obvious qualities–his vigour, his determination, his unity, his logic, and his power of progress. He amused himself by comparing Wagner’s style with that of Goncourt, by making him–with amusing irony–a great miniaturist painter, a poet of half-tones, a musician of affectations and melancholy, so delicate and effeminate in style that «after him all other musicians seemed too robust.»[108] He has painted Wagner and his time delightfully. We all enjoy these little pictures of the Tetralogy, delicately drawn and worked up by the aid of a magnifying-glass–pictures of Wagner, languishing and beautiful, in a mournful salon, and pictures of the athletic meetings of the other musicians, who were «too robust»! The amusing part is that this piece of wit has been taken seriously by certain arbiters of elegance, who are only too happy to be able to run counter to any current opinion, whatever it may be.
[Footnote 108: F. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner.]
this was: Sunday Concerts
go to next chapter: decadent side in Wagner
