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Faust in Solitude.
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must, in the course of three fruitless years, have felt something worse than misgiving. That Wagner did so feel is a matter not of speculation but of history. He has described how, when meditating the subject of the
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Flying Dutchman, he sent for a pianoforte to see whether, after the mean drudgery and abject misery of those years,
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Wagner was not an ordinary man. Everything about him was on a grander scale--his folly and rashness no less than his talent. Though more sensitive than others to the most trifling discomfort, he showed, under an accumulation of miseries that would simply have crushed almost anyone else, a stupendous energy and reaction. He had failed to get his
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Rienzi performed in Paris. For three years he had continued his fruitless endeavours to obtain a hearing at the opera; and a crisis of frightful despondency ensued, when, to ruin and beggary and the sense of having made a fool of himself, was added an attack of a painful skin disease which tormented him at intervals all his life. Now it was precisely at that crisis that he wrote the
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Faust Overture--his masterpiece in the strict sense of the term; that is, the first work of his mastership or mature power. Thus, instead of being crushed, Wagner is suddenly found drawing upon the reserve force of his genius to produce a work that stands very nearly on a level with Beethoven's third
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Leonora Overture. For the Faust Overture is a tone-picture of the utmost energy, nobility, and beauty, utterly defying comparison with any other except Beethoven, and attaining to a kind of demonic eloquence that Wagner himself never found again, till quite late in life, during the
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Ring of the Nibelung
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Nibelung
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Götterdämmerung performance on Saturday with any disposition to satirise the management for the failure of the stage effects in the final scene. In the course of the week Wagner's greatest work had been presented with considerably brighter intelligence and more adequate resource than ever before in this country, and it was piteous that there should be a slight humiliation at the end. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the
human
Ring in its entirety has ever been better done, for the amazing excellence of the orchestral performance was to some considerable extent matched by the singers, and the dramatic realisation of the composer's intentions was good everywhere except in certain parts of the prologue, and showed positive genius at certain points in each of the main dramas forming the trilogy. The general impression was thus one of a great task nobly carried out, and the concluding fizzle, however tiresome and distressing to the stage managers, could but seem a trifling matter to any appreciative spectator. It is a terrible business, that _finale_ of
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Götterdämmerung. Conceived in a mood of frenzied protest, it bears a peculiar stamp of extravagance and violence. It shows Wagner as an Anarchist of the Bakounine type, undertaking, as it were, to
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and
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on the off-chance that Nature might afterwards
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A lifetime of noble endeavour and great achievement, with scarcely any response from the world but the crackling of thorns under a pot, had produced in Wagner such bitterness of spirit as little men are saved from by their natural limitations, and it is that bitterness of spirit which finds expression in the smashing and burning and drowning of the
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Götterdämmerung