In order to avoid the
conventional in singing, Wagner falls into another convention--that of
not singing at all. He subordinates the voice to articulate speech, and
for fear lest the muse should take flight he clips her wings. So that
his works are rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is brought
down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level with the violins, the
hautboys, and the drums, and treated instrumentally. Man is deposed from
his superior position, and the center of gravity of the work passes into
the baton of the conductor. It is music depersonalized, neo-Hegelian
music--music multiple instead of individual. If this is so, it is indeed
the music of the future, the music of the socialist democracy replacing
the art which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective.
The overture pleased me even less than at the first hearing: it is like
nature before man appeared. Everything in it is enormous, savage,
elementary, like the murmur of forests and the roar of animals. It is
forbidding and obscure, because man, that is to say, mind, the key of
the enigma, personality, the spectator, is wanting to it.
The idea of the piece is grand. It is nothing less than the struggle of
passion and pure love, of flesh and spirit, of the animal and the angel
in man.
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