Newman - The Wagner operas

W AGNER : T HE L AST P HOTOGRAPH

Overture

W HEN the first volume of this series was published in England the Opera Nights of 1943 those great and good men the reviewers, from whose lynx-eyes nothing can remain hidden for long, reproached me tenderly for what they regarded as my arbitrary choice of operas. Falstaff, for instance, was there, but not Otello or Ada, Turandot and Gianni Schicchi but not Tosca or La Bohme, Cos fan tutte but not Don Giovanni or Figaro, and so forth. Berlioz and Tchaikovski and Johann Strauss were among the chosen composers, but not Weber or Rossini or Wagner and a few others in whose company the music lover looks to spending an occasional night at the opera. In their grieved perplexity at this seeming aberration on my part there went up a wail from the English reviewers like that of Mr. Wodehouses Monty Bodkin when Miss Butterwick broke off the engagement Gertrude, your conduct is inexplicable. My own conduct, however, can be explained.

A good many years ago I dashed off, at the request of an English firm of publishers, a fortnightly series of analyses, in popular style, of some of the best-known operas, together with brief biographies of the composers. Although this matter did not, in my opinion, in any sense constitute a book, it was issued as such, in three volumes, under the general title of Stories of the Great Operas, in the United States, where, if hearsay is to be trusted, it had a considerable sale. As the English copyright was mine, Messrs. Putnam and Co. suggested, during the late war, that the American volumes should be reprinted in London. From this suggestion I recoiled in horror. In the first place I saw no sense in reprinting the elementary biographies, while in the second place I felt that if the opera analyses were to be collected in volume form I would prefer to revise them all thoroughly, enlarge the scale of treatment, and altogether try to make a better job of it. On these terms agreements were ultimately made with Messrs. Putnam on my side of the Atlantic and Mr. Alfred Knopf on the other.

While these negotiations were proceeding I arranged with Mr. Knopf for a volume dealing with twenty-nine operas that had not been included in the fortnightly series to which I have referred. This entirely new volume appeared in England in 1943 under the title of Opera Nights; but as the analyses of twenty-odd years ago had been issued in the U.S.A. under the title of Stories of the Great Operas, Mr. Knopf brought out the new volume as More Stories of Famous Operas, a procedure calculated, I am afraid, to give a little trouble one of these days to library cataloguers and bibliographers. However, that was no concern of mine. I then set to work to rewrite all the original analyses (Stories of the Great Operas), one volume to be devoted to Wagner, the other to deal with all the famous works by other composers not included in Opera Nights (More Stories of Famous Operas). The present volume is the first stage in this process of reincarnation. It has no connection whatever with the Wagner volume of Stories of the Great Operas; it is an entirely new work from cover to cover. A further volume, similarly rewritten, dealing with the standard works of Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Gounod, Rossini etc. not included in Opera Nights, will follow, I hope, before long.

At first sight there may appear to be no great necessity today for yet another book on the Wagner operas. Sooner or later, however, such a work would have had to be written by someone or other, for our knowledge of Wagner has been so vastly increased during the last few years that the close student of him has a score of lights on him that were denied to our fathers. The recent publication in Germany of his full-length prose sketches for some of his works has taught us a great deal we had never suspected before about him and them; for example, we are now able for the first time to trace every smallest step of his that led, over so many years, to the building up of the present Ring. We see how drastically his original scheme was changed in the course of time, and not always, perhaps, for the better; we see, too, that, as was the case with Vergil and the Aeneid, he has sometimes made an alteration in his plan without noticing that the new feature is inconsistent with something he has left in its first form elsewhere in the poem.

My own study of him has convinced me that it is impossible to understand fully the works of his maturity without having traversed on our own account the extensive and often difficult country over which he himself had to travel before he reached his distant goal. Often a point that is obscure or even inconsistent in the opera poem is elucidated for us by his sketches. Sometimes the psychological motivation of an episode becomes clear to us only in the light of our knowledge of the mediaeval legend that was his starting-point. Sometimes, in the Ring, the clue to his procedure is unexpectedly discovered in such works as the Deutsche Mythologie of the brothers Grimm, which we know him to have studied closely in the late 1840s.

I venture to lay it down, then, that a clear picture of Wagners mind-processes during the conception and realisation of a work is to be obtained only by following him step by step through the literature, ancient and modern, out of which it grew. It may be objected that a work of art should be its own sufficient explanation. But there are cases, some of them the most notable in literary history, in which that simple proposition obviously does not hold good. The