Part 3 — APPENDIX B WAGNER AND THE BALLET

The difficulties which have always stood in the path of a realisation of Wagner's ideals in regard to the ballet in opera are worthy of some consideration, because they are the results of a high conception of the functions of the dance in the drama. Wagner's troubles in this department began with his "Rienzi." In his "Communication" he says: "I by no means hunted about in my material for a pretext for a ballet, but with the eyes of the opera composer I perceived in it a self-evident festival that Rienzi must give to the people, and at which he would have to exhibit to them in dumb show a drastic scene from their ancient history, this scene being the story of Lucretia and the consequent expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome." He confesses in a note that this ballet had to be omitted from all the stage performances of "Rienzi."

Why? Simply because the pantomimic ballet called for imagination on the part of the ballet-master and mimetic skill in the dancers. If these elements in the ballet were wanting in Wagner's day, they are almost wholly absent now. Yet, except in cases where the ballet is seen by the spectator to be a mere entertainment for the personages on the stage, as in the garden scene of "Les Huguenots," it ought to have some connection with the drama. That later composers than Wagner have had some desires of this sort is proved by the presence of the Brocken scene in Boïto's "Mefistofele," the inferno scene in Franchetti's "Asrael," and other such episodes. But nowhere is there such an opportunity for a highly significant ballet as in the first scene of "Tannhäuser."

Whoever cares to read it, may find in the essay of Wagner on the "Art-work of the Future" a long disquisition on the nature of the dance. In brief, he says that in the dance the material is man himself, and the method of expression is motion. This motion is governed by rhythm, but its purpose is the communication of the essence of the material to the spectator. In other words—not Wagner's—dance approaches speech from one side just as absolute music does from the other. It is a painter of mood pictures, just as an orchestra is. It therefore reaches its highest form in pantomime, or mimetic action. Again, in "Opera and Drama," Wagner tells us at some length how ballet music as written by the conventional opera composer has cramped the development of this beautiful art of mimetic dancing, the very art, in a sense, from which the drama itself originated at the altar of Bacchus. By writing in the prescribed dance-forms and rhythms the composer compelled the dancer to confine himself to certain conventional steps and figures. Wagner's ideal was a symphonic poem of motion, mimetic in its essence, following the incidents of a story, and moving to the strains of an orchestral background which should free the dancer from formulas and at the same time paint in tone-colours the moods of the pantomime.

The difficulty in the way of realising this ideal at present is the total separation of the arts of dancing and pantomime. Only a few of the dancers of to-day possess the old-fashioned schooling which would make possible a performance of Auber's "La Muette de Portici." To this unique work Wagner owed much of the food for thought which resulted in his opinions upon the office of the ballet in opera. I have witnessed some representations of this work in recent years—not many—but always with sorrow at the utter inability of the impersonator of the dumb girl to realise the author's conception. She has always been a mere ballet-dancer, striving to perform her work on the strict lines of the conventional stage dance. Now what such a part requires is some one who can dance, but who does act. And that is what the Wagner ballet, especially in "Tannhäuser," needs. The conventional ballet steps and arm movements are at once seen to be absurd, or else they make the scene appear so to the thoughtless spectator, who notes only what he sees. To interpret properly the Venusberg scene of Wagner's third opera there should really be a corps of Pilar-Morins. But just here again would come a difficulty. The Pilar-Morins would not be dancers, and, while they might perform an intelligible pantomime, they would obliterate from their work every trace of rhythm, and thus once more be untrue to Wagner's almost intangible, yet not impracticable, ideal.

And of course in the end we have to reckon with a public which has no skill in the comprehension of pantomime, and hardly any in the appreciation of the dance. For in this frivolous age of pictorial dramatic art the dance means coloured lights and high kicking. Hélas! Yet I still believe that if Wagner's designs in such scenes as that of the Venusberg and the Roman festival in "Rienzi" could be properly carried out, the public would awake to the existence of a poetic and beautifully graphic art which is now quite unknown to it.

THE END