Throughout his life Richard Wagner consistently attributed a decisive influence on his career as a “musical dramatist” to the early example of operatic performances by Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. The daughter of an accomplished operatic baritone, Friedrich Schröder, and his wife, Sophie (née Bürger), perhaps the most celebrated German actress of her day, Wilhelmine was trained from earliest childhood in all aspects of the theater: ballet, pantomime, and acting as well as singing. She was catapulted to fame in November 1822 when, not quite eighteen, she electrified Viennese audiences as the heroine in a revival of the revised Fidelio, a production at least partly overseen by Beethoven himself. She went on to specialize in this and a few other carefully chosen roles: the simple, pure, and sentimental young maiden as Emmeline in Weigl’s Schweizerfamilie and Agathe in Weber’s Der Freischütz; the noble Greek priestess of Diana in Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris (Iphigénie en Tauride); the passionate, reckless, love-torn youth in the trouser role of Bellini’s Romeo (I Capuleti e i Montecchi), a model for Adriano in Wagner’s Rienzi, which she would create in 1842; and such sorely tried noble heroines as Julia in Spontini’s La vestale, the title figure in Weber’s Euryanthe, Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello, and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni.1 (Figure 1 reproduces an 1839 portrait recently identified by H. Colin Slim as Schröder-Devrient, here holding a scrolled sheet of music manuscript containing the incipit, in German translation, of the aria “O malheureuse Iphigénie” from C. W. Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride.)2 Hallmarks of her performances included a thrilling sense of identification with character and situation, the ability to act persuasively in song as well as speech, grandeur and nobility of bearing (or naïve simplicity, where the role demanded it), and a gift for both dramatic and musical timing.
Figure 1. Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. Portrait by Joseph Weber, 1839 (oil on canvas, 30 × 25 1/16 in.; Berkeley, California, private collection).
The specific quality of her singing voice was a topic of continual debate throughout her career and subsequently. The general picture that emerges is a voice less than perfectly trained or controlled, but guided by strong musical instincts and, above all, by a highly developed sense of theater. It is characteristic that Ludwig Rellstab’s early appreciation of her career identifies as one of her most moving achievements her silent pantomime as she searches for her husband among the prisoners momentarily released into the daylight in the Act 1 finale of Fidelio. Citing the musician Bernhard Klein, Rellstab remarks on the way her “silent play of gestures…joined itself so flexibly to the music” such that it became “a kind of mute obbligato instrument, performing its own melody, fitting with the whole and yet separate from it.”3 Similarly, in her own account of her debut in the role (as transmitted by Claire von Glümer), the deaf composer is won over by a performance he witnesses more as a dramatic dumb-show than as opera, since he is essentially unable to hear her voice.
Wagner’s recollections of Schröder-Devrient’s influence on his youthful self are somewhat less consistent in the matter of chronology and repertoire. In his autobiography Mein Leben Wagner suggested, without giving precise dates, that he experienced the crucial operatic epiphany of his youth sometime in 1829. The Italian company of Dresden (members of the court opera) had been giving performances in Leipzig, he recalls, enthralling local audiences, himself included, when his attention was suddenly attracted by another guest appearance from Dresden, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, “who then stood at the pinnacle of her career, young, beautiful and ardent as no woman I have since seen on the stage. She appeared in Fidelio.” “When I look back across my entire life,” Wagner continues, “I find no event to place beside this in the impression it produced upon me…. After the opera was over I dashed to the home of one of my friends to write a short letter in which I told her succinctly that my life had henceforth found its meaning, and that if ever she should hear my name favorably mentioned in the world of art, she should remember that she had on this evening made of me that which I now vowed to become.”4 He further claims that the singer was able to recite this hyperbolic fan letter to him verbatim when he befriended her upon his return to Dresden in 1842.
Unfortunately, neither this impassioned note nor any other evidence survives to document this legendary performance or Wagner’s experience of it. Wagner’s earliest autobiographical text, a “sketch” of his early career up to 1842, is suspiciously silent about this event, though it does explicitly mention an 1834 “guest appearance” in Leipzig, as Romeo in Bellini’s Capuleti—a performance for which there is external corroboration, unlike the 1829 Leipzig Fidelio.5 In the creative autobiography embedded in the 1852 Communication to My Friends (a text very little concerned with detailed facts or dates, it must be said) Wagner again mentions a decisive “guest appearance on the Leipzig stage” which, in context, can only refer to Schröder-Devrient’s Romeo of March 1834, since he has been speaking of the sources of his “Young German” phase (Heinse’s novel Ardinghello and the popular French and Italian operatic repertoire of the early 1830s) that shaped the conception of his second opera, Das Liebesverbot, between 1834 and its completion in 1836.6 It seems clear enough, then, that Wagner certainly did hear the singer in Bellini’s opera in 1834 when both the work and the performance caused him to reevaluate the new Italian bel canto in view of its effective approach to operatic composition, dramaturgy, and singing. “Even the most distant encounter with this extraordinary woman,” he commented in the Communication, “had a positively electrifying effect on me; for long afterward, even up to the present day, I could hear and feel her presence whenever I was animated with the impulse to artistic creation.”7
Whether he also saw her famous Fidelio, which she reprised in Leipzig in 1834, we cannot be sure. He did in any case have ample opportunity to become well acquainted with the dramatic singer he now admired so much, starting one year later when she agreed to perform several roles with his fledgling company in Magdeburg—Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello as well as Bellini’s Romeo—and above all when he returned to Dresden in 1842, where Schröder-Devrient remained engaged as a singer until 1847. (Like Wagner, she was an active participant in the socialist agitations of May 1849 in Dresden, and likewise had to flee the city.) In Dresden Wagner was able to coach her in creating the roles of Adriano in Rienzi, Senta in Der fliegende Holländer, and Venus in Tannhäuser—all of them roles conceived to some degree with her in mind. Although she was already in vocal decline after 1840, these collaborations cemented the composer’s lifelong admiration of Schröder-Devrient’s achievements as a singing actress who aspired to a kind of proto-method acting approach of total identification with the parts she played.8
In an 1872 essay “On Actors and Singers” Wagner celebrated this quality as Selbstentäußerung, a “renunciation of the self” that allows the actor to inhabit a fictional-dramatic persona without the slightest inhibition or distraction. He cites the career of Ludwig Devrient (1784-1832), founder of the theatrical dynasty into which Wilhelmine Schröder married, as a paradigm of this capacity. This sense of emotional conviction conveyed by the elder Devrient was unprecedented on the German stage: the ability of inspiring Hamlet’s rhetorical question in admiration of the player-king: “What’s Hecuba to him?”9 Devrient’s sometime daughter-in-law transplanted this capacity to the operatic stage like none other, Wagner claims. In her case, Wagner also relates this “renunciation” to what he calls the “liberating consciousness of play,” the “terrifying” but at the same time dramatically enabling consciousness that the actor is momentarily trading his own personality or being for that of a fictional creation. “Through the example of this extraordinary woman I became acquainted in a truly astounding manner with the redemptive transference of consciousness, while lost in the most complete self-renunciation, to the sudden interior awareness of the play that had taken hold of it.”10 In this essay, as elsewhere, Wagner’s praise for the histrionic “truth” of Schröder-Devrient’s performances resonates with his own ongoing polemics against the operatic tradition and its cult of beautiful singing as the ultimate good. The debate as to whether highly trained operatic singing was a prerequisite of a higher species of “dramatic” Wagnerian singing, or simply an obstacle to achieving it, remained a vexed one throughout the early generations of Wagner’s Bayreuth festival. (See, for instance, the reviews of festivals from 1886 to 1904 included in Part V of this volume.)
The two authors whose works are excerpted here represent contrasting views of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient’s operatic achievement. Claire von Glümer, her first biographer, was a fan and true believer, like Wagner. Henry Chorley (1808-72), a respected London music critic, represents a more objective, more skeptical, sometimes even hostile viewpoint.
Glümer’s adoring, sentimental, and rather selective account of her life and career has at least the advantage of deriving to some extent directly from Schröder-Devrient, whose friendship she cultivated during the singer’s final years.11 They were first briefly introduced in Frankfurt in 1849, two years after her retirement from the stage. Later, in Dresden, Glümer and her female companion Auguste Scheibe became intimates of Schröder-Devrient during the last two years of her life (1858-60); Glümer was charged with working up her scattered notes, letters, and diaries into a biography, which appeared in 1862.12
By the time Wagner had the opportunity to cast Schröder-Devrient in his own operas at Dresden, between 1842 and 1845, he, too, had some misgivings about the actual lyrical capacity of the voice. Later, however, he dismissed such scruples in favor of the larger significance of the theatrical personality, which remained a model for what he believed could be the future of a genuinely dramatic school of singing. It always distressed him, he claimed, to have to answer the question of whether she had a truly “good voice,” to be forced to compare this “great tragedienne” with the “female castrati” (!) of the modern opera house. If anyone were to put that question to him now, he wrote in the 1872 essay “On Actors and Singers,” he would be inclined to reply:
“No! She had no ‘voice’ at all; and yet she knew how to work her breath so beautifully and to project with it such a truly feminine soul that one ceased to think anymore about singing or voices at all! Furthermore, she was able to suggest to a composer how he ought to write something worthy to be ’sung’ by such a woman.” …
My entire understanding of the actor’s mimetic art I owe to this great woman, a lesson that allows me to view truthfulness as the essential foundation of that art.13
Schröder-Devrient embodied, then, the valorization of dramatic “truth” over mere vocal agility and beauty of sound, and in that sense she also embodied the entire aesthetic value system of the Wagnerian music drama that continued to be so vigorously debated throughout the composer’s lifetime.
Perhaps it is not surprising that in constructing his official life, posthumously published as Mein Leben, Wagner preferred to identify his original musical-dramatic “epiphany” with Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient’s signature role of Leonora/Fidelio. Whether or not this was really the role in which he first heard her (and the evidence suggests that it was not), he could easily have heard or read accounts of her interpretation, accounts that invariably point to her famous transgression from song to passionate speech at the climactic moment of Fidelio’s self-revelation as Florestan’s ever-faithful wife Leonora (yet another sense of Selbstentäußerung?) when she cries out to the villain Pizarro, “Tödt’ erst sein Weib!” (First kill his wife!). This transgression into speech epitomized the challenge to operatic values expressed by Schröder-Devrient’s whole theatrical profile: the sacrifice of vocal beauty for dramatic truth in the aim of complete, uncompromising identification with character and situation. Claire von Glümer’s description of how this interpretation was coined no doubt corresponds to something like what Wagner might have heard from the singer directly, either when they first became acquainted in 1835 or when he was in regular contact with her in Dresden in the 1840s. Since we may never know for sure what Wagner did hear of this role (or when), Glümer’s “authentic” account can at least suggest to us what he imagined, which was based as well on those performances we know he did hear, starting from the 1834 Capuleti. Glümer’s account of this other key role, likewise presented in terms of the singer’s own recollections, further reinforces the concept of the singing actor’s complete, almost trance-like identification with her role.
Henry Chorley, who wrote for the weekly journal The Athenaeum, heard most of the leading Italian and French operatic singers of the fertile era from the 1830s through the 1850s. Against this international standard he judges Schröder-Devrient as something of an interesting aberration, characteristic of certain German ideals that were, of course, assiduously cultivated by Wagner in distinction to Italian or French ideals of bel canto vocal virtuosity. For his part, Chorley remained a devotee of the latter school and fundamentally resistant to the early works of Wagner. Apart from Mendelssohn, whose cult in Victorian England he did much to foster, Chorley was critical of most German Romantic music, despite several extended musical tours of Germany and Austria between 1839 and 1846.14
Henry Chorley’s picture of Dresden and its operatic establishment is included in the first volume of his collection Modern German Music (“Glimpses at Dresden in 1839-40”), and is drawn from his earlier travelogue, Music and Manners in France and Germany.15 It describes the place very much as Wagner would have found it upon returning home in 1842 after his various misadventures in northern Germany, East Prussia, and Paris over the previous decade. The chapter also includes an extended description—not included here—of Weber’s Euryanthe performed at Dresden in 1839 with favorable accounts of Schröder-Devrient in the title role and the tenor Josef Tichatschek (later Wagner’s first Rienzi and Tannhäuser) as Adolar.16 The second excerpt supplements those personal observations of Dresden with other experiences of Schröder-Devrient and of Wagner’s earlier operas, primarily Tannhäuser. Like other early critics of that work represented in the present volume, Chorley’s response is a mixture of admiration and revulsion, conceding the unusual talent and imagination of the composer but regretting much about the willful, unconventional manner in which it is manifested in the opera as he hears it.
Footnotes reproduced on the page are from the original document. All endnotes are the translator’s.
CLAIRE VON GLÜMER
Recollections of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient
Leipzig, 1862
Already during her father’s lifetime Wilhelmine and her sister retired from the ballet.17 Now she began to make good her heretofore scanty education, while also preparing herself for more serious theatrical endeavors under the instruction of her talented mother.18 For the academic side of her education her half brother Wilhelm Smets, the only son of Sophie Schröder’s first marriage, took enthusiastic charge. He had come to Vienna as a house-tutor and was fondly reunited there with his mother and the oldest of his sisters, having lived six years apart from them and just now recognizing his sister’s unusual gifts.
In 1819 the fifteen-year-old Wilhelmine made her theatrical debut. With growing success she appeared as Aricie in Phèdre, Melitta in Sappho, Luise in Kabale und Liebe, Beatrice in The Bride of Messina, Ophelia in Hamlet.19 And at the same time her musical gifts were becoming equally apparent: her voice developed in strength and beauty of tone, she received instruction from Madame Grünbaum and from Josef Mozatti, and not more than a year had passed before she was able to yield to the irresistible urge to exchange the spoken drama for opera.
First she appeared as Pamina in The Magic Flute—this was on January 20, 1821. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote about this, in the somewhat affected style of those days:
Demoiselle Schröder realized a perfect picture of the most delicate femininity. As long as this character, so faintly depicted by the poet, has been represented on our stages in similarly vague outlines, perhaps no theatrical mime has come closer to drawing out the ideal-poetic side from the prosaic libretto than this pupil of a mother who herself has reached the highest stages of mastery in her craft; and this offers a rare demonstration of how infinitely such common dialogue can be elevated by means of sense, nature, and feeling.20
And this Pamina, whose first performance set an example for all interpreters of the role of Pamina, was all of sixteen years old!
Wilhelmine pursued with great diligence the path on which she had embarked so successfully. As early as March of the same year she performed Emmeline in Die Schweizerfamilie,21 the next month Maria in Grétry’s Barbe-Bleu,22 and then when Weber’s Freischütz had its Viennese premiere, the part of Agathe was entrusted to our youthful artist.
On March 7, 1822, Der Freischütz, which had put all of Vienna into a frenzy, was given a second time, now as a benefit for Wilhelmine. The house was packed, and the level of enthusiasm—even for the enthusiastic Viennese—was unprecedented. Weber conducted the opera himself, and the high spirits of his admirers made it almost impossible for the performance to go on. As Agathe, Wilhelmine shared in the evening’s triumph. She was exactly the blond, pure, gentle maiden the composer and the poet had dreamed of—a simple, modest child all a-quiver with her dreams, lost in reverie, yet finding in love and faith the strength to overcome all the powers of hell.
As evidence of how much a child she really was at that time, Wilhelmine recounts how when Weber came the next morning to congratulate her, she was lying outstretched on the floor, engrossed in setting up toy soldiers with her younger siblings.
In Dresden, too, where Wilhelmine accompanied her famous mother in the summer of 1822, her beauty as well as her talent aroused much admiration; but that which was to make her one of the greatest dramatic singers of all times, the irresistible magic and power of her genius, truly revealed itself only when she returned to Vienna and sang in Fidelio.
For some time the opera had been out of the repertoire, since no singer adequate to the leading role was to be found. Then a revival was proposed for November 1822 to celebrate the name day of the Empress, the demanding role of Fidelio being assigned to the seventeen-year-old Wilhelmine.
When Beethoven learned of this he was said to have expressed his considerable dissatisfaction that this exalted figure should be entrusted to “such a child.” But so it was decided. Sophie Schröder taught her daughter the role as best she could and the work went into rehearsal.23
Beethoven insisted on conducting the performances himself, and he did indeed wield the baton in the dress rehearsal. Wilhelmine had never set eyes on him before. She was sore afraid when she beheld the master (whose ears were by then closed to all sound) gesticulating wildly, his hair in wild abandon, his features distorted and his eyes alight with an uncanny glare. If the music was to be played piano he nearly crept beneath the music stand, for the forte he sprung up, emitting the most extraordinary sounds. The orchestra and the singers fell into confusion, and after the rehearsal the music director Umlauf had the sorry task of informing the composer that it would be impossible to charge him with conducting the opera.
So it was that, on the evening of the first performance, he sat directly behind the conductor, entirely wrapped in his overcoat, so that only his glowering eyes could be seen. Wilhelmine was afraid of these eyes, and became quite terrified. But no sooner had she spoken her first lines than she felt herself suffused with wonderful energy. Beethoven and the whole public disappeared from her view—any sense of laborious, piecemeal study fell away. She herself was now Leonora, she lived and suffered through every scene.
Up to the scene in the dungeon she remained filled with this illusion, but then her energy began to fail. She knew that she lacked the means to carry out what must next be represented onstage. This growing unease found expression in her bearing, her features, her movements—and yet all of this was so apt to the situation that it made the most compelling impression on the audience. The assembled public sat there in breathless silence—which can affect the dramatic artist just as powerfully as the loudest applause.
Leonora summons her courage and flings herself between her husband and the dagger of the murderer. The dreaded moment has arrived, and she is seized with sheer despair; more shouting than singing, she emits the heartrending line:
| Tödf erst sein Weib! | First kill his wife! |
Pizarro tries again to thrust her back, but she then draws the pistol from her blouse and aims it at the murderer. He falls back, while she remains motionless, still threatening him. And now the trumpets announce the rescue, and she relaxes the tension she has so long maintained. No sooner had she managed to force the criminal to the exit, holding the pistol in her outstretched hand, than she let drop the weapon—by now she was deathly tired from this terrible strain, her knees shaking; she leaned back and put her hands to her forehead, involuntarily emitting that famous, unmusical cry which later interpreters of the role have sought to emulate, with such poor results. With Wilhelmine this was truly a cry of distress, searing the listener’s heart. Only when, in response to Florestan’s outburst:
| Mein Weib, was hast du um mich geduldet! | My wife, what you have suffered on my account! |
she fell into her husband’s arms, declaring, half sobbing and half triumphant:
| Nichts, nichts, nichts! | Nothing, nothing, nothing! |
only then did the magic spell, which had held every heart in thrall, finally yield. A storm of applause broke out that would not stop. The artist had discovered her Fidelio, and however much and however earnestly she continued to work on this role, its fundamental outlines remained the same.
Beethoven, too, recognized Wilhelmine as his true Leonora. He was not able to hear the actual sound of her voice, but the spirit of her singing was revealed to him in every trait of her face, radiant with inspiration, and in the glowing vitality of her whole appearance. After the performance he went to her. His eyes, otherwise so fierce, were now smiling at her; he patted her cheeks, thanked her for her Fidelio, and promised to compose a new opera for her. Unfortunately, it was never to happen.
The next year the young artist had the opportunity of performing the difficult role of Fidelio under the direction of Carl Maria von Weber. On April 2, 1823, the maestro wrote to Böttiger: “I cannot give Fidelio until I have the little Schröder girl here.”24 She soon arrived in Dresden and after eight rehearsals made her debut there in the role. After the performance of April 29 Weber wrote in his diary: “Minna was outstanding, and was justly applauded.”…
About the role of Romeo [in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi] she wrote to Emmy la Grua, who, like many others, had sought her advice and instruction:
The greatest difficulty posed by this role is the fact that it was written for a woman.25 The artist is thus faced with the terribly difficult task of forgetting her own sex and representing in her bearing, movement, and stance a fiery youth, suffused with the glow of his first love. Nothing must betray her sex if the whole situation is not to devolve into absurdity. She must walk, stand, and kneel down like a man; she must draw her dagger and prepare for combat like a practiced fighter; and above all there must be no feminine traces in her costume: no delicate locks, no corseted feet, no elegant waistline. No less important is the proper manner of taking on and off hats or gloves.
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient knew how to combine all these details into a living whole. From the first entrance of Romeo, where he appears at the head of his warriors with proud step and head defiantly aloft, offering terms of peace to the Capulets, to the last cry of his death struggle, his final sinking down upon Juliet’s bier, she knew how to portray the proud patrician son and the young enamored hero in every glance, every movement of the lips or hands, translating Shakespeare’s figure back into the Bellini opera….
[Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient] told us repeatedly how Romeo, afterward one of her favorite roles, had first been “revealed” to her. I Capuleti e i Montecchi was given in Dresden first by the Italian opera troupe, and Signora Schiafetti sang the part of Romeo. Returning from an extended holiday Wilhelmine saw one performance of the opera, but she found neither the awkward libretto nor the shallow music any more to her taste than did the rest of the audience. Then suddenly she received a copy of the part with the direction that she was to learn it within eight days so as to take over from the ailing Signora Schiafetti. Wilhelmine was horrified at this demand. It seemed to her an impossibility to learn this extensive role in such a short time, and in a foreign language as well. All the same, she went to work and succeeded in memorizing the music by the given deadline. Yet the figure she was to represent remained alien to her, she could not warm to it; she felt unsure, convinced that she would not be able to accomplish much while in this mood. “This feeling of constraint vanished as soon as I found myself in costume,” she said,
but now, instead, I found myself seized with a sort of giddiness. When the final curtain descended I had no idea of what or how I had sung and acted. The public showered me with applause, but I could not say why. It was like a dream. Instead of changing my clothes, as I normally would, I merely asked for my coat; I went home and threw myself on the sofa, still in the costume of Romeo, and with my hands behind my head I stared at the ceiling, eyes wide open, until five o’clock in the morning.
During this time the opera was running through my head, scene by scene. When at dawn I stood up from my resting place I had absorbed the role into the very core of my being, and ever since I have sung it with great enthusiasm.
The artist was nearly always so fully immersed in her task while performing that everything around her was similarly enlivened and spiritualized. Asked once how they perceived the scenery while they were performing on stage, the singers Jenny Lind, Henriette Sontag, and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient gave answers entirely characteristic for each of them. Jenny Lind said: “For me, the scenery does not exist; I have no idea what it is there for. I enter, and have no further thoughts than that I am singing, that I must sing.” Henriette Sontag responded: “While engaged in my work I always regard the scenic decorations for what they are, but I am always at pains to use them for my own artistic ends, to whatever extent this is possible. I think and feel my way into the scene to the point where it can inspire me, but never to the point of forgetting what is before me.” Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient answered: “Of course, it is all just so much stuff and rubbish to me, but it must also become for me what I wish it to be. It must be imbued with spirit, so that it seems truly to live. Soon again, it will be just bare rubbish, but at the moment, the trees seem truly to rustle, the flowers to breathe, the fountains to purl, the stars to shine, the storm to flash and rage. Whoever cannot see these things this way will himself never be able to flash or rage.”
If the too frequent repetition of an opera resulted in the loss of this illusion, then she had to put aside the role, even if one of her favorites. It was a mystery to her how French actors could play the same role a hundred times on end, always exactly the same and with the same success. When once she had to perform in Fidelio in London eight times in a row, she had to put it aside afterward for some time; her diary attests to the fact that this occurred in other instances as well. Once, following a performance ofFidelio, she writes:
Today I could not get the gears of my feelings properly going; these seemed to grind and rattle most disconcertingly amid Beethoven’s divine harmonies. Our dreadful, drafty temple of the muses* (if only hell would send a fire to destroy it!) caused my whole body to shiver with the bitter cold, and the physical cold transferred itself to the soul, which today seemed to me a veritable icicle, from which the heavenly tones of the Master could thaw but a few, isolated drops.26 One’s enthusiasm cannot always be raised up to the proper pitch. Today I simply lacked moral strength, nor is it easy to draw one’s warmth from the feeble souls of the public; no matter how hard one strikes, no sparks are to be had from that quarter.
HENRY CHORLEY
Glimpses at Dresden in 1839-40,
with matter concerning a later period
Chapter 1. The Opera and its Envrions—1839.
(London, 1854)
Thirteen years ago, the railroad travelling of Germany had features which were all its own. In England, the tendency, from the first, was to whirl “the human parcel” from place to place along with an irresistible rapidity entirely precluding the possibility of thought, or conversation, or enjoyment; and to make of the journey a disagreeable, bewildering dream, compounded of several blasts of the shrill steam-whistle—a few tunnels—a few broken clamours, timid or troublesome, of passengers on their entrance and exit—perhaps a few broken limbs—the best part of which is its close…. But betwixt Leipsic [sic]and Dresden was to be seen, in 1839-40, a national propensity in its ripest development; —I mean the disposition of the best-hearted hosts, and soundest instrumentalists of Europe, to stop on every possible occasion—“etwas zu essen.”27
I cannot describe how whimsically this wonderful appetite struck me on my journeys to Dresden in 1839. The train I used started from Leipsic an hour after the early dinner; when the copious repast might surely, one would have thought, have sufficed for a part, at least, of the afternoon. No such thing. At every one of the six or eight stations between the two towns—fruit, cakes, cups of broth, glasses of brandy, squares of sodden pastry with plums imbedded therein, biscuits, sandwiches, plums, pears, and other garden et cetera, were proffered to the caravan, from baskets of hawkers, and in the station-houses. Nor were they proffered in vain: old and young, women and men—already provided, in nine cases out often, with a travelling provision against famine—partook of them with a zeal and an intrepidity which, every time I witnessed it, recalled to me Petruchio’s disdainful exclamation—
“Nothing but sit and sit, and eat and eat!”28
Comfortable in beguiling the way as were these interludes, such are not precisely the best imaginable preparations for Dresden. The Saxon capital, both on first sight and on a subsequent visit, has impressed me with a peculiar feeling of its elegance which is not to be described without the entertainer of it being considered Della Cruscan29 and fantastic—at least not in work-a-day prose.
On the Bruhl Terrace,
October, 1840
THERE hangs a tranquil and peculiar spell
O’er dome, and ample bridge, and rapid stream,
And dim fantastic palace, where the gleam
Of ghostly shapes, methinks, would glimmer well
At dead midnight. Autumn should ever dwell,
Rich, fading town, with thee! Here I could dream
Whole days away o’er some sweet solemn theme
Of mystic Fancy, careless how the bell
Of noisy life importunately tolled
Its children to their tasks. Ay, and such hours,
By some esteemed more worthless than the flowers
Which drop in silence ere their bells unfold,
Show not our heaviest debt for wasted powers,
On Truth’s eternal chronicle enrolled!
Even the excitements of the far-famed gallery,30 with its Madonna del Sisto, its Reading Magdalen, and its Christo della Moneta, —where I lingered for two hours every morning, till eye and mind could receive no more, —could not neutralize the agreeable and soothing impression which the stately Saxon city produced on my mind. Of the ways of its people I know nothing beyond the universal report, which apportions to it a cheerful and cultivated society of refined intelligences. But I have never stayed in a town in which the idea of complete insulation brought with it so little of dreariness—where so many thoughts, and feelings, and fancies, seemed to rise up as companions. I can picture to myself no better residence for any one occupied in the absorbing task of imaginative creation; and, to push speculation one point further, I never passed the door of the house of Herr Tieck,31 who then lived in the Altmarkt, without feeling as if a certain harmony existed between his fantastic and spiritual tales, and the city of his adoption. This perhaps may be fond trifling; but the musical pleasures of Dresden, in 1839-40, were solid and real—marked with “a white stone” in the calendar of my experiences. —There, on my visit in 1839, I first made acquaintance with the “Euryanthe” of Weber….
The environs of Dresden are beautiful: the suburban houses show more marks of a refined taste in floriculture than I have elsewhere seen in Germany. The road rises gently; and the city, seen as I then beheld it, —with the mist of early day wreathing the beehive-like dome of Our Lady’s Church32 and the spires round it, and the Elbe below and behind the bridge lying under a mantle of deep empurpled shadow, —makes as fair a town-picture as one of those splendid clusters of Italian architecture which Gaspar Poussin loved to build in his landscapes.33 Advancing further, the banks of the Elbe are striped and dotted with vineyards, among which the rough road winds; almost every half mile curving so as to pass through or escape some of the clean red-roofed witz-es (witz being as favourite a termination to the names of villages near Dresden as rode is in the Harz) which, half composed of garden-houses, half of cottages, are as tempting nooks as poet or musician could retreat to for summer residence.34 Tottering over the road, like the last tower of a brokendown fortress, and clinging to the wall which keeps the soil up to the roots of the vines, a tiny closet is shown, where Schiller wrote his “Don Carlos.” Another little mansion—but a modest one even for a house in a German weinberg35—saw the birth of Weber’s “Oberon.” This last is about half-way betwixt the beautiful city and that wild and elvish district, where gigantic rocks, of every menacing and capricious form, strangely overlean the Elbe,36 and seem to tell of some such miracle performed in the days of “the good people” as was wrought by him who
…“cleft Eildon hills in three.”37
I gazed wistfully at the cabinets where the poet and musician had carried on their alchemy; but more, I confess, to possess myself of a distinct impression of their aspect, than with that intense enthusiasm which some enjoy on all due occasions: —happy in having feelings like chimes, which cannot fail to answer to the touch, whatever be the mood of the moment, or whose-ever hand it be that puts down the key. —Yet it was impossible, even for my slow self, not to be alive to the influences which such a picturesquely placed habitation might have exercised over one whom I have always fancied to have been largely acted upon by the sights and sounds of Nature. —In another point of view, however, on regarding them from a distance, the environs of Dresden seem to me less friendly to the genius of Weber. Not far from this summer residence of his is Pillnitz—the country palace of the Kings of Saxony. I only looked towards it that morning as towards a building of the heaviest possible architecture; the work of some German Vanbrugh.38 Had I known as much as I have since done, it might not have been the least suggestive station of my Elbe pilgrimage in 1839.
In that dull and grand-looking mansion was preserved, in the composer’s time, and, for aught I know, exists to this day, a rag of feudalism, to speak metaphorically, —one of the old condescensions of Royalty, by which the earthenware was allowed to approach the porcelain of society, and Cloth of Frieze to become acquainted with the splendours of Cloth of Gold. The rulers of Saxony dined in public, and dined at two o’clock. More than one friend has graphically described to me the primitive and old-world figures that feasted the eyes of those admitted to the balcony, where common men might learn what and how their rulers eat. There came homely old princes, with white hair, and breeches which never knew what braces meant; —a watch in each fob (in the exploded macaroni fashion), and long, long queues, those simplest of all symbols of etiquette. There might be seen stately and substantial ladies, decorated in all the German grandezza which so amused Bettina when Goethe’s mother dressed herself to receive Madame de Stäel.39 There might be smelt the miscellaneously arranged odours of things savoury and things sweet which distinguish a German dinner. There might be heard (O shame to a music-loving family like the Royalties of Saxony!), among the noises of knives and forks and the bustling of perspiring servitors, the tinkle of a pianoforte, or the screech of an Italian air, sung by some well-worn cantatrice, who had been lured from the macaroni and polenta of her own land to become a fixture at the court of Saxony.40 And those who looked to see who the pianist might be (compelled, poor soul! to wear a full court dress for the occasion) must have turned away, wondering at the odd forms taken by the much-vaunted patronage of Music in Germany, —especially if they were gifted with the spirit of prophecy, and had already picked up the conviction that a new and brilliant genius was abroad in the person of Carl Maria von Weber!
I confess, whenever I reflect upon such an appropriation of the services of Genius as this—when I think of the “Concert-Stück” disturbed by the stirring of a salad, or of the exquisite Sonata in A flat, Op. 39, passing unheard in the midst of the discussion of those mighty puddings in which a German cook excels—the corruption of Radicalism rises strong within me. I verily believe, that had I known the nature of the duty which the position of Weber at Dresden demanded from him, while I was in the full glow of enthusiasm consequent on the enjoyment of “Euryanthe,” I must have shaken the dust of Pillnitz from my feet, with something of a bitter and disdainful feeling, —instead of turning round and admiring the fine but heavy group which it made when seen in conjunction with two embrowned chestnut trees, ere a sudden bend in the road to Löhmen hid it from my sight.
HENRY CHORLEY
Glimpses at Dresden in 1839-40,
with matter concerning a later period
Chapter 3. The Opera from 1840 to 1848.
(London, 1854)
In the interval betwixt the years 1840 and 1848, the losses of the Dresden Opera were heavier than its gains. The great actress [Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient] who threw all her strength and emotion into Weber’s Shakspearian [sic] opera, ceased to appear on the stage;41 and the creative efforts made in the theatre, did not bring to light a new genius so much as a new element of decay and destruction for music.
The decline of Madame Schröder Devrient was more rapid than it should have been in a singer who is some years younger than the century. —But, in truth, a singer the lady never was, though she promised to become one in the early days when she appeared as Pamina in “Die Zauberflöte” at Vienna.42 Her voice, since I have known it, was capable of conveying poignant or tender expression, but was harsh, and torn—not so inflexible as incorrect. —It is a mistake to fancy that the German prime donne decline to attempt making an effect with executive brilliancy; they are as prodigal of roulades and shakes as the rest of the sisterhood—giving, however, the attempt in place of the reality; and only when their incompetency is made evident by comparison, falling back on that classical defence which sounds so well, costs so little, and has deceived so many, —“What would you have? I am a German singer.” —Madame Schröder Devrient resolved to be par excellence “the German dramatic singer.” Earnest and intense as was her possession of the parts she attempted, her desire of presenting herself was little less vehement. —There is no possibility of an opera being performed by a company, each of whom should be as resolute as she was never to rest, never for an instant to allow the spectator to forget his presence. She cared not whether she broke the flow of the composition, by some cry hardly on any note, or in any scale—by even speaking some word, for which she would not trouble herself to study the right musical emphasis or inflexion—provided, only, she succeeded in continuing to arrest the attention. Hence, in part, arose her extraordinary success in “Fidelio.” That opera contains, virtually, only one acting character, — and with her it rests to intimate the thrilling secret of the whole story, to develope [sic] this link by link, in presence of the public, and to give the drama the importance of terror, suspense, and rapture when the spell is broken, by exhibiting the agony and the struggle of which she is the incessant victim. If the devotion, the disguise, and the hope of Leonora, the wife, were not for ever before us, the interest of the prison-opera would flag and wane into a cheerless and incurable melancholy. This Madame Schröder Devrient took care that it should never do. From her first entry upon the stage, it might be seen that there was a purpose at her heart, which could make the weak strong, and the timid brave; quickening every sense, nerving every fibre, arming its possessor with disguise against curiosity, with persuasion more powerful than any obstacle, with expedients equal to every emergency. Though in what may be called the culminating point of the drama—the grave-digging scene in the vault—Malibran43 was the more fearful of the two, by her intense southern fervour, which blazed the brighter for its having been so forcibly constrained, —as regards the entire treatment of the part, Madame Schröder Devrient had the advantage. There was a life’s love in the intense and trembling eagerness with which she passed in review the prisoners, when they were allowed to come forth into the air—for he might be among them! There was something subduing in the look of speechless affection with which she at last undid the chains of the beloved one, saved by her love—the mere remembrance of which makes the heart throb, and the eyes fill. —In “Norma,” and “La Sonnambula,” Madame Schröder Devrient failed, owing to her deficiency in vocal accomplishment. In the former, too, she too freely indulged in the tendency of the Germans to attitudinize, when a queen or a priestess is the personage to be enacted. —I thought her Valentine, in “Les Huguenots,” too much of a virago. There was not a touch of the French noble’s daughter in her demeanour; she was the impetuous, angry, persecuted woman, whose hour of virgin elegance and virgin reserve had long been over. — But in another less popular work, the impression left by her on me was deep. This was in M. Chélard’s “Macbeth;” an opera which, in spite of the preposterous arrangement of the libretto, and of some music little less preposterous in its difficulty (considering it as calculated for German songstresses), contains some good points—some fine concerted pieces.44 None of these, however, dwell in my memory so vividly as the demeanour of the Lady Macbeth. One could not look at her without at once recollecting the ideal which Mrs. Siddons is reported to have conceived of this “grand, fiendish” character (to use her own epithets).45 “She had an idea,” says Mrs. Jameson, “that Lady Macbeth must, from her Celtic origin, have been a small, fair, blue-eyed woman. Bonduca, Fredegonde, Brunehault, and other Amazons of the Gothic ages, were of this complexion.” Save in stature, the great German operatic actress (daughter by the way to the great Lady Macbeth of Germany, “die grosse Schröder”)46 gave full justification to this fancy. With an alluring and dignified grace of manner was combined an aspect of evil—a sinister, far-reaching expression in her eyes, all the more terrible for their being at variance with those hues and contours which we have been used to associate with innocence and the tender affections. That which makes the flesh creep, in the name of “the White Devil,”* spoke in every line of Madame Schröder Devrient’s face—in her honeyed and humble smile, as she welcomed the doomed King; in the mixture of ferocity and blandishment thrown by her into the scene of the murder; in the ghastly soliloquy of the soul that waked when the body was asleep. When I think of Pasta, as Medea,47 watching the bridal train pass by her, with her scarlet mantle gathered round her, the figure of Madame Schröder Devrient’s Lady Macbeth, too, rises, as one of those visions concerning which young men are apt to rave and old men to dote. Apart from its musical interest, the stage has had few more striking personations.
But, except in the right of this inborn, inbred genius, the German and the Italian artist can hardly be mentioned on the same page. What Pasta would be, in spite of her uneven, rebellious, uncertain voice—a most magnificent singer—Madame Schröder Devrient did not care to be; though Nature, I have been assured, by those who heard her sing when a girl, had blessed her with a fresh, delicious soprano voice. In this respect, she is but one among the hundreds who have suffered from the ignorance and folly of German connoisseurship—from the obstinacy of national antipathy, which, so soon as Germany began to imagine the possibility of possessing an opera of its own, made it penal to sing with grace, taste, and vocal self-command; because such were the characteristics of the Italian method. —Had she been trained under a wiser dispensation, Madame Schröder Devrient might have been singing by the side of Madame Sontag at this very day; and, when she retired, might have left behind her the character of a great dramatic vocalist, instead of the fame of a powerful actress who appeared in some German operas.
The Opera House at Dresden, during the years preceding the Revolution of 1848, also witnessed the production of certain musical dramas, by one who has since made some noise in the world, and who is likely to make more—noise, strictly speaking, —not music. I mean Herr Wagner, whose “Rienzi” had already been given in Dresden at the time of my second visit thither, and who was named as kapellmeister by the King of Saxony under conditions of almost friendly generosity. In 1840, Herr Wagner was not openly revolutionary; being in composition apparently an imitator of the least amiable peculiarities of Herr Meyerbeer, and showing, it may be apprehended, few signs of that spirit, which, in later times—those of the German riots of 1848—sent him out upon a barricade with the purpose of discrowning the very King whose bread he had been eating.* “Rienzi” was pronounced to be dull, overcharged, and very long. It was endured as a work belonging to Dresden, as other operatic pieces of dullness in other German capitals have been, but, I believe, followed the common lot of local successes, and never travelled far beyond the barriers of the Saxon capital.
It would seem as if the favour with which this “Rienzi” was received, and the position in which its composer was placed, ripened to fever heat that desire to distinguish himself in progress by destruction, which passes for a generous ambition with persons imperfectly organized or crookedly cultivated. But earlier than this, a prophet, an innovator, a celebrity, Herr Wagner had resolved to be; and—weak in musical gifts—he appears to have entered on his quest of greatness by a profound contempt of all other musical celebrities. The confessions which he has recently published,48 reveal an amount of arrogant and irritable disdain for all opera composers save himself, happily rare in the annals of artistic self-assertion. —His point of departure was to be the union of poetry and music. Operas were to be made of an exquisite completeness, in which both arts were to find the very fullest expression; and since librettists, however ingenious, are not always the best of poets, Herr Wagner (wisely enough) resolved to be his own librettist.
In this capacity he has proved himself to be strong and felicitous as an inventor, though less excellent as a lyrist, than his self-commendation would have us believe. The wild sea-tale of “The Flying Dutchman” was a happy choice for his second opera, in one desiring to please by legendary interest, grown weary of grand historical pictures in which there is no history; or of comic intrigues of “cloak and sword,” in which there is more intrigue than comedy, and more “cloak and sword” (or costume) than either! —This second opera was completed, —words and music, —while Herr Wagner was resident in Paris; and was offered by him to the managers of the Grand Opera there. —They were wise: —recognized the strange, supernatural capability of the drama, but were repelled by the extravagance and crudity of the music. Accordingly they rejected the score, and purchased the poem. —They were less wise, however, in entrusting the latter to be set by their worthy chorus-master, M. Dietsch, since he succeeded in producing music less acceptable than even the original composition by Herr Wagner might have been —and thus killed the story.
Herr Wagner’s “Fliegende Holländer” was produced complete at Dresden; and there, in spite of direct royal patronage, in spite of a certain novelty of style, in spite of the acceptance of “Rienzi,” and the vogue brought to every theatre by fitting up a genius of its own, the opera, I am assured, failed on its representation. Such immediate failure we know to be no criterion of ultimate success, or intrinsic merit; but it seems to me explained, since I have perused the music.49 A spinning song and chorus is to be remembered as pleasing, characteristic; a wild sea-tune, too, as being audaciously broken in rhythm, and built on a phrase of the most desperate platitude; but the rest of the work produced on me merely an impression of grim violence and dreary vagueness, which, till then at least, had never been produced in such a fullness of ugliness by the music of a clever man.
Next in order came Herr Wagner’s “Tannhaüser” [sic].50 This opera was given for the first time at Dresden in the year 1845, with Madame Schröder Devrient, Mademoiselle Wagner,51 and Herr Tichatschek52 in the principal characters; and at Dresden excited the highest temporary enthusiasm on its production. Though the rapture was, at that period, communicated to no other German theatre, considering the events which have followed the rehabilitation of the opera by Dr. Liszt at Weimar, —it is a work to be spoken of in some detail, as the latest appearance in composition previous to 1848, that may make some figure in the annals of German opera….53
Meagre as is the above sketch, it will be seen from it that “Tannhaüser” has no common opera book; and that with such a theme, a picture of romantic and elevated beauty might have been wrought by a hand worthy to treat it. If ever subject was musical this is—simple, suggestive, rich in colour, rich in contrast, rich in poetry. —But how am I to speak of the manner in which the musician has set his own drama? I shall hardly be able to represent my impressions without appearing to those, who have not suffered under this extraordinary opera, in the light of one indulging in hyperbole and caricature; for, in truth, I have never been so blanked, pained, wearied,* insulted even (the word is not too strong), by a work of pretension as by this same “Tannhaüser.” I could not have conceived it possible that any clever person could deliberately produce what seems to me so false, paradoxical, and at such fierce variance with true artistic feeling, on system, before I sat through the opera, and read the “Hallelujah” vented by its maker in homage to his new revelations, which he has been tempted by his own vanity and by the injudicious praise of others, to put forth.
The first general idea derived from Herr Wagner’s music to this romantic story, was its entire discordance with its subject. For how could be imagined [any] tale which gave wider scope for melody? —melody sacred in the pilgrims’ canticle—melody voluptuous in the court of Dame Venus—melody chivalresque in the minstrel contest. In accordance with this spirit a large part of the libretto is written in tolerable rhymed verse. Yet it may be asserted, that no opera existed before “Tannhaüser,”—since the cradle-days of Opera—so totally barren of rhythmical melody; the two subjects on which the overture is based being absolutely the only two motivi deserving the name from beginning to end of the drama. Now, wherefore (on system or no system), if the pilgrims were allowed a tune, the minstrels were to be denied one, it would puzzle Herr Wagner to tell. What is more noticeable, one of the two said melodies, the pilgrims’ hymn, is as utterly clear of the character of a canticle as the notturno in Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” music, being a tuneable and graceful strain, but in no respect, either as regards intrinsic character or established form, religious. It would seem as if chance had determined the proceedings of a musician more poor in melodic inspiration than any predecessor or contemporary; that when a tune had presented itself, he used it without caring for its fitness—that when tunes would not come, he forced his way along by a recitative as uncouth and tasteless as it is ambitious,—and as if his system had come upon him as an after-thought, by way of apology for himself, and depreciation of his betters. —To return,—in the magic cave, so harsh, shrill, crackling, and grotesque are the sounds of chorus and dance which surround Dame Venus, as to spirit up associations anything rather than voluptuous or fascinating—strange whimsies of skeleton dances in the air, with their distant (but not dulcet) sound of lean bones rattling.
—Then the minstrel contest, instead of its offering a flow of song, growing deeper, wider, more musical, and more impassioned, as enthusiasm kindles enthusiasm in the strife, is but a heavy preachment of several men, set to meagre and formless harp accompaniment. A wearisome straining after literal, verbal expression in music (which, however plausible, is utterly false as a principle if it is perpetually employed) is maintained throughout this work, till the ear no longer retains the power of being moved; and by the time that the great scene of the third act was reached—that in which Tannhaüser narrates his pilgrimage to Rome to his brethren in song—my attention, wearied by unfulfilled expectation, and abused by one discordant scene after another, refused any longer to follow a work in which every sensation of pleasure, and every principle of beauty, were so ceaselessly outraged. I remember the howling, whining, bawling of Herr Tichatschek (to sing, or vocally to declaim this scene is impossible) accompanied with and disturbed by an orchestra, infuriate where it was not confused, but all idea of art or poetical sensation is gone. What the new thing may be which Herr Wagner has put in its place, let others dispute and decide—it has, at all events, no affinity with that which the masters of the musical stage have done before him.
But allowing this opera to be accepted as a symphony,* accompanied by scenery, bearing part in a drama intoned rather than sung, I cannot fin[d] its symphonic or orchestral portion much more admirable than the wild and over-wrought recitative, which it is to check, support, and alternate. “Fidelio” may, in some respect, be called a symphonic opera also, inasmuch as there, too, the instrumental part is more interesting than the vocal portion of the work; but who that knows “Fidelio” does not know it by the wonderful variety and spirit of Beethoven’s orchestral devices? Or, to take a newer instance, on a first hearing of Herr Meyerbeer’s operas, the ear, if it can receive nothing else, is cognizant of new and peculiar sonorities. I remember, as if it was only yesterday, the delicious impression first produced on me in 1836, by the scoring of the first and second acts of “Les Huguenots”; in such scenes as the one where Raoul is among the gallants peeping through the window at Valentine; or, in the interlude of the second act preluding the grand aria ofMarguerite de Valois. No such felicities did my ears derive from “Tannhäuser.” To me the instrumentation of that opera is singularly unpleasant—as too preposterous to be overlooked, too untrue to its own conditions to be accepted as a charming monster after its kind. From the pianoforte arrangement of the overture (in which, as I have said, the only two motivi deserving the name have been wrought), I had expected striking effects of crescendo, brio, and, if a noisy orchestra, a rich one also. —The reverse is my impression. The sound is strident, ill-balanced, and wanting body. An awkward treatment of what may be called the tenor part of his band, leaves Herr Wagner often with only a heavy bass to support a squeaking treble poised high aloft. He seems to be fond of dividing his violins, as Weber and Mendelssohn did before him; but neither of these masters of the orchestra considered that by such division alone richness of tone was ensured. Such a full, brilliant, well-nourished sound (to adopt the French phrase), as we find in Mendelssohn’s tenor orchestra, even when his theme was the wildest—as in his “Hebriden” overture, his “A minor symphony,” his “Walpurgis Chorus”—is no where [sic] managed by Herr Wagner.54 There is a brilliant violin figure at the close of the “Tannhaüser” overture, —more than once used by Cherubini, —which was intended to work up the composition with amazing fire. This, however, is so stifled by the disproportioned weight of the brass instruments that deliver the pilgrim tune in contrary tempo, as merely to produce that impression of strain which accompanies zeal without result—how different from the brilliancy which Cherubini and Weber could get in similar situations, by means of one half the difficulty, when they tried for a like effect! Throughout the opera, in short, beyond a whimsical distribution of instruments, such as a group of flutes above the tenor voice,* or some lean stringed sound to harass, not support the bass, —I recollect nothing either effective or agreeable—but grim noise, or shrill noise, and abundance of what a wit with so happy a disrespect designated “broken crockery” effects—things easy enough to be produced by those whose audacity is equal to their eccentricity.
Of the fate of “Tannhaüser,” at Dresden, on its first production, I have already spoken. It was not till the Revolution of 1848 came, that Dr. Liszt began to interest himself for the composer, and devoted all his generous heart, soul, and spirit (all his ingenuity of enthusiastic paradox, and sophistry of brilliant wit, it must be added), to the production and recommendation of Herr Wagner’s music; neither was it, till the composer had made himself a martyr, been brought out of prison (as it were), and defended as such, that Herr Wagner bethought himself of his system; to make room for which, he has modestly vituperated and condemned all former opera writers, as weak creatures who weakly conformed to the modes of the hour in which they wrote.
With the rehabilitation in question, however, and its possible influences on German music, I have happily here no concern, still less with Herr Wagner’s self-glorification and destruction of old idols. But though I am exempted, by the nature of my task, from examining the old pretexts which in the case of Herr Wagner take the form of new paradoxes, a general remark on the subject must still be offered.
The cardinal fault in the new manner of composition (or decomposition) which has produced fruits so little satisfactory, may not solely arise from Herr Wagner’s perversity and poverty in special gifts combined. It may be a necessary consequence of the times we are living in, and of the ferment which is brewing around us. Being progressive, we are also expected to be universal. History must now be as amusing as a romance —romance must be as profound as a history. Poetry must run into the loops and knots and ties of didactic prose; prose must borrow all the garnitures of poetry. We have pictures painted, the subject and scope of which are not to be understood till we have read the book which describes them. We have books written which are not to be endured until they have been informed with a meaning, by aid of “pleasant pictures.” So, in Music, the symphony, besides being a good symphony, must now express the anguish of the age, or of some age past. There must be story, inner meaning, mystical significance—intellectual tendency. To what interpretations of Beethoven’s quartetts [sic] and sonatas have we not been exposed! Then, the opera must be a great poem—picture, drama, and symphony in one. —This extension of desire (not to call it a misuse of imagination) may be lamented, but it cannot be helped. The waters are out—there is no calling them back. But, for the present, unless creative invention should develope [sic] itself in some form totally unexpected, such an increased and multiplied variety of requisitions is a hindrance rather than a help to the artist. If one ingredient [should] elude his management, the composite work loses all symmetry, proportion, and power to charm sound taste. It is his comprehension of this difficult truth, and conformity to its conditions, which distinguish M. Meyerbeer, and which will so long maintain his grand operas on the stage. It is some sense of its force, and more unexpressed consciousness of his own incompleteness, which have driven Herr Wagner to the strange lengths of his unmusical proceedings, and which have tempted him, because he is unequal to the strain laid upon him, to break in pieces all the ancient and beloved things which have been worshipped, in place of adding to their number. That his countrymen, for the sake of some unmusical merits in his opera-books, are all, or any of them, willing to stand by and see the special graces of musical drama utterly tumbled into chaos, as so much obsolete rubbish, is a sight suggesting other considerations—suggestions of a disorganization, if not disease, of artistic taste, which is not cheering. For the present, there seems not much chance of the ferment working itself clear; but it is, perhaps, better for the sake of Music, that it should at once boil, and bubble, and overflow the caldron, than struggle darkly beneath the surface, in a state of morbid compression, as was the case before the year 1848. The open proclamation of anarchy is less to be mistrusted than the discontents and plottings of secret conspiracy.
1. Ludwig Rellstab, in an early essay on the singer’s career, mentions in addition to these roles Rezia in Weber’s Oberon; the Jewess Rebecca in Marschner’s Ivanhoe opera, Templer und Jüdin; and the bride in Ferdinand Ries’s now forgotten operatic melodrama, Die Räuberbraut. Rellstab, “Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,” originally published in vol. 1 of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1834); and reprinted with an afterword in vol. 9 of his Gesammelte Schriften, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1860), 367-415 (here, 383).
2. H. Colin Slim, “Joseph Weber’s Diva, pinxit 1839: Visual, Musical, Societal Considerations,” Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 31:1-2 (Spring—Fall 2006): 5-50. The portrait depicts the singer at precisely the time Henry Chorley encountered her in Dresden (see the following document in this section). She sang the role of Iphigenia under Wagner in Dresden in 1845.
3. Rellstab, “Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,” 388.
4. Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray (Cambridge, 1983), 37. The discrepancies between Wagner’s official autobiography and his earlier accounts of the singer were noted by John Deathridge in his contribution to The New Grove Wagner (New York, 1984). Deathridge analyzes the role of revision and fabrication in Wagner’s construction of his life experiences, more generally, in “Wagner Lives: Issues in Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Cambridge, 2008), 3-17.
5. See “Richard Wagner: Autobiographical Sketch (to 1842),” trans. Thomas Grey, The Wagner Journal 2/1 (March 2008): 49; Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1887-1911), 1:9 (henceforth GSD).
6. See Wagner, Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde, GSD, 4:254. Schröder-Devrient also sang in Fidelio and Rossini’s Otello during the 1834 guest performances in Leipzig.
7. Ibid.
8. For first hand anecdotes of Wagner’s collaboration with Schröder-Devrient in these operas, see My Life, 226-27, 239-43, 285-87, and 304-5.
9. Wagner, “Über Schauspieler und Sänger,” GSD, 9:218.
10. Ibid., 219. The somewhat convoluted original text reads: “Durch diese wunderbare Frau ist mir der rettende Zurücktritt des in vollster Selbstentäußerung verlorenen Bewußtseins in das plötzliche Innewerden des Spieles, in welchem sie begriffen war, in wahrhaft überraschender Weise bekannt geworden.” The word Entäusserung (renunciation), can also mean “realization” in a philosophical context, and it seems likely that Wagner is drawing to some extent on both seemingly contradictory meanings: a “renunciation” of the phenomenal self for the purpose of “realizing” the virtual self of the dramatic role.
11. Alfred von Wolzogen, author of another early biography (and father of the prolific Wagnerian acolyte, Hans von Wolzogen) cautioned that even those materials left to Glümer by Schröder-Devrient after her death were “not always reliable and tended to mix fact and fiction [Dichtung und Wahrheit] in a rather palpable manner.” Wolzogen evaluates this and the various biographical essays and tributes that had appeared during the singer’s lifetime in the introduction to his biographical study, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des musikalischen Dramas (Leipzig, 1863), 1-6, here 3.
12. Claire von Glümer, Erinnerungen an Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Leipzig, 1862; 3rd ed., 1904), 7-9. The original of the translated sections presented here can be found on 19-24, 56-57, and 57-60.
13. Wagner, “Über Schauspieler und Sänger,” GSD, 9:221.
14. These detailed musical travelogues are modeled on those of Charles Burney from the eighteenth century. Modern German Music (1854) reproduces much of the earlier volume, Music and Manners in France and Germany (1841).
15. Henry Chorley, Modern German Music: Recollections and Criticism, 2 vols. (London, 1854). Excerpts from chap. 1 are taken from 1:291-96 and 314-19; excerpts from chap. 3, 1:342-52 and 360-71. The account of the Dresden opera during Wagner’s tenure as Kapellmeister in chap. 3 was added in 1854 to the material from Music and Manners in France and Germany.
16. Chorley was surprised to find Schröder-Devrient “singing the terribly difficult music of the part with a force and freshness … totally impossible to account for,” quite apart from the accustomed “power and pathos” of her acting style. He suspected it might have had to do with the advantage given her by the unusually low tuning of the Dresden orchestra under Karl Gottlieb Reissiger. Modern German Music, 1:298-99.
17. Wilhelmine’s father, the baritone Friedrich Schröder, died in Karlsbad on July 18, 1818, when she was fourteen years old.
18. Wilhelmine’s mother was a celebrated stage actress, Sophie Schröder (1781-1868). From 1798 she was engaged at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Her roles in plays by Shakespeare, Racine, Schiller and the like established her as the leading tragedienne of the German stage in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
19. The plays in question are by, respectively, Racine, Grillparzer, Schiller (Kabale und Liebe and Die Braut von Messina), and Shakespeare.
20. “Nachrichten. Wien. Uebersicht des Monats Januar. Hofoper.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 29:9 (28 February 1821): col. 145.
21. Die Schweizerfamilie (The Swiss family), Singspiel by Joseph Weigl (1766-1846), first performed in Vienna in 1809.
22. Raoul Barbe-bleu (Raoul Bluebeard), opéra comique by André Grétry, first performed at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris on the eve of the Revolution, March 2, 1789. As with a number of popular opéras comiques from the 1780s through the 1820s, a translation entered the German repertoire as a Singspiel.
23. The first part of the account of the Fidelio rehearsals is based on that contributed by Schröder-Devrient to Gustav Schilling’s Beethoven-Album, ein Gedenkbuch dankbarer Liebe und Verehrung für den grössen Todten (Stuttgart, 1846); translated in Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries, ed. O. G. Sonneck (New York, 1926; repr. 1967), 129-32. The description of her performance is not included in that source.
24. Carl August Böttiger (1760-1835), museum director and drama critic in Dresden, earlier a headmaster of the Weimar Gymnasium, a literary colleague of Goethe and Schiller, and an editor of the Teutsche Merkur.
25. Bellini composed the part of Romeo as a mezzo-soprano trouser role, first performed by Giuditta Grisi (Venice, Teatro la Fenice, March 11, 1830).
26. The frigid “old theater” mentioned here, also known as the “Moretti” theater, was replaced by Gottfried Semper’s first Dresden opera house in 1841.
27. That is, “to have something to eat, to snack.”
28. Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 5.2.12.
29. The “Della Cruscan” circle involved a circle of British poets active in Italy in the 1780s (founded by Robert Merry and including Hester Thrale Piozzi) who rallied around the name of a Florentine academy of the late Renaissance, the Accademia della Crusca, which aimed to cultivate a purified poetic Italian. The pre-Romantic movement became a byword for poetic preciosity and stylized sentiment.
30. The Dresden picture gallery (Gemäldegalerie) had been celebrated since the eighteenth century, when the Saxon Electors August II and III started collecting, above all, Italian masters of the Renaissance and Baroque.
31. Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), a leading figure of German literary Romanticism, settled in Dresden in 1801 and was still residing there when Wagner returned in 1842. Like Hoffmann, he was also an influential writer on musical aesthetics.
32. The Frauenkirche.
33. Gaspard Poussin (1615-75) was the brother-in-law of the more famous Nicolas Poussin. He specialized in landscapes of the Italian countryside, particularly the Roman campagna.
34. Among these witz-es were Blasewitz and Loschwitz, towns across the Elbe to the north where Wagner spent time in the summer during his Dresden years.
35. Vineyard or wine-growing district.
36. The so-called Sächsische Schweiz or “Saxon Switzerland” between Saxony and Bohemia.
37. Sir Walter Scott, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Canto 2, stanza 13. The line refers to the medieval theologian, scholar, and astrologer Michael Scot (Scotus) and the powers attributed him to alter the landscape with a spell: “And, warrior, I could say to thee/The words that cleft Eildon hills in three,/And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone.”
38. Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), British architect of stately homes of massive, imposing symmetry such as Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Chorley’s remark (“Had I known as much as have since done”) evidently alludes to the political insurrection of 1849 in Dresden, the cause of Wagner’s dozen years of exile from Saxony and the other German states.
39. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Baroness of Staël-Holstein (1766-1816), a notable French woman of letters, of German extraction. Bettina von Arnim (née Brentano, 1785-1859) became famous for her enthusiastic correspondence with and memoirs of both Goethe and Beethoven.
40. A footnote in the original is omitted here, quoting at length Charles Burney’s description of an episode that illustrates the condescension of eighteenth-century royalty to their musicians.
41. In a section of chapter 1, “The Opera and its Environs,” not included in the foregoing excerpt, Chorley described in some detail Weber’s opera Euryanthe as he heard it performed in Dresden with Schröder-Devrient singing the role of the heroine. Chorley likens the plot to that of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.
42. Her first operatic role, performed in January 1821 (see Claire von Glümer excerpt above).
43. Maria Malibran (1808-36), daughter of the Spanish composer, singer, and vocal pedagogue Manuel Garcia (1775-1832) and sister of the equally (though later) celebrated mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910). Malibran began her career in London in 1825 and performed both there and in Italy during the remaining decade of her career. The role of Fidelio, which she sang at Covent Garden (in English) was a rare exception to her predominantly Italian repertoire. Ludwig Rellstab, in his 1834 essay on Schröder-Devrient’s career, considers the Munich-born soprano Anna (Nanette) Schechner (1806-60) as the principal point of comparison in this role (Gesammelte Schriften, 9:383-91). Schechner had retired from the stage due to vocal deterioration by 1835. Among German opera singers in general, the soprano Henriette Sontag (1806-54) was considered by most critics and audiences as the major competitor, vocally more proficient in terms of tone quality and agility.
44. Chorley refers to the opera Macbeth by Hippolyte-André-Baptiste Chélard (1789-1861), French-born composer who moved to Germany after 1830, first to Munich, and was later appointed Kapellmeister in Weimar (1840), where he remained through Liszt’s time. His Macbeth premiered in Paris in 182V, but only met with some success when a revised version was produced in Munich during the following two years. Composed in the neoclassical vein of the tragédies lyriques of Cherubini (Medée) or Spontini (La vestale), it remained in the German repertoire into the 1830s.
45. Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), the leading tragic actress of the British stage in the later eighteenth century. Lady Macbeth was her most famous role.
46. Sophie Schröder, Wilhelmine’s mother.
47. Giuditta Pasta (1797-1865). The role in question is the lead of Giovanni Simone Mayr’s Medea in Corinto (1813), not Cherubini’s opera.
48. The Mitteilung an meine Freunde (Communication to My Friends), published in 1852 as a preface to the librettos of the three operas after Rienzi, and as an epilogue, of sorts, to the three increasingly lengthy essays or treatises on music, the arts, and operatic reform written between 1849 and 1851 (the “Zurich” writings).
49. Der fliegende Holländer was not performed in London until 1870 (at the Drury Lane Theatre in an Italian translation), the first of Wagner’s operas to be produced there.
50. Chorley’s misplaced umlaut in the title of Tannhäuser was probably carried over from Liszt’s (French-language) brochure on this opera and Lohengrin. Liszt insisted on the misspelling, claiming that it gave French readers a better idea of how the name ought to be pronounced. (See the introduction to excerpts from Liszt’s essays included in this volume.)
51. Johanna Wagner (1826-94), the adoptive daughter of Wagner’s older brother Albert. She became one of the leading German opera singers of the 1840s and 1850s, also in French and Italian repertoire.
52. Joseph Aloys Tichatschek (1807-86) was the principal tenor at Dresden during Wagner’s time there, having debuted in 1837. The role of Rienzi was one of his signal successes and he helped to define the Wagnerian Heldentenor as a vocal Fach.
53. Chorley’s detailed account of the Tannhäuser libretto (352-60) is omitted here.
54. References are to Mendelssohn’s concert overture The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), op. 26 (1830-32); the Symphony no. 3 in A Minor (“Scottish”), op. 56 (1842); and the cantata-style setting of Goethe’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht, op. 60 (1832, rev. 1842). By “tenor” Chorley seems to refer to the handling of inner voices generally in the orchestration, perhaps with particular reference to second violin and viola parts, cellos (when divided or in higher registers), middle-range woodwinds (clarinets, bassoons, French horns), etc.
* The old theater in Dresden.
* When Nature can be contradicted by the might of power and passion within the frame, the effect is always more fearful than when she co-operates with sinister deeds and emotions by sinister preparations. Thus, there are few personations that I have heard so often referred to for their terrible fascination as the Lucrezia Borgia of Madame Ungher; —an undersized, colourless woman, without any extraordinary beauty, nobility, or wickedness of countenance.
* In justification of the censure conveyed in the above phrase, the English reader must be reminded that many of the musical appointments about German theatres are direct court appointments; and that unhappily for both the aristocratic and the popular side of the question, the courts of Germany do not yet represent the people. The maestro was presented by the King to his people of Dresden rather than forced by the people of Dresden upon their King. “But Wagner meant well,” said an earnest and thoroughgoing defender of the composer with whom I was discussing the baseness and disloyalty (in the large sense) of his political courses; “he meant well, I assure you. He was really very fond of his King. He would have made him President of the Republic!”
* It is fair to state, that though Herr Wagner, by the production of the opera in question, had taken his place as one of the composers of young Germany, some years before the Revolution of 1848 (his “Tannhaüser” thus legitimately coming within the range of this work)—my own acquaintance with its music on the stage is of more recent date. Hence, I have not been called upon to mitigate my impressions under the idea which should never be lost sight of, that distance may lend exasperation to the temper, as well as enchantment to the view. —1853.
* Thus must Herr Wagner’s operas be accepted, if the composer’s thought and purpose are to be met sympathetically, and if his choir of admirers are to be believed. I was speaking to one of them of the utter ruin which must overtake vocal art, if composers followed in the wake of their idol, and, for the sake of the orchestra, like him utterly debased and barbarized the cantilena under pretext of truth in declamation. “In six years more,” said I, “if this system be accepted, you will not have an artist left capable of singing an air by Handel or Mozart.” “Well, what matter,” was the quiet answer; “there has been enough of singing.”
* Here, again, I am well aware that I may have my own example of Meyerbeer cited against me, if only on account of the octave flute and bassoon in the “Pif, paf!” of “Les Huguenots,” which gave occasion to Rossini’s sarcastic compliment on that air, as “musique champetre.” But baroque as this combination may be considered, and unquestionably is baroque—the effect is wanting. In the more recent opera by him—“Lohengrin”—there are some brilliant orchestral pages.