I love reading Wagner on this topic, for although Actors and Singers was addressed to the condition of the nineteenth-century German stage, which he saw as simultaneously undeveloped yet decadent and derivative, so much of it could have been aimed without much re-setting of sights on our own, and those of his views that may seem hyperbolically expressed appear so only because some of the reforms he sought have been at least partially accomplished. Wagner sought an art of performance that would be authentically and unaffectedly German, and many of his complaints about the imposition of the more evolved conventions of French comédie and tragédie, which he saw as smothering in its cradle the growth of native “low” folk-theatre, pre-echo twentieth-century American efforts to throw off the influence of British spoken and written rhetorics, so that a genuine American theatre might emerge. They also often read like a proto-manifesto for the modern acting sensibility, free of artificialities, grandiosities, and academic rules, and based on the observation of daily life, so that the natural instincts of the Mime could grow from their roots.

Wagner looked to performers themselves, not directors, conductors, professors, or even authors, for the salvation of the German stage. ” ‘Tis our actors, singers and bandsmen, on whose innate instinct must rest all hope of attainment of even artistic ends as yet beyond their understanding . . . certainly by them alone can that [dramatic] art be raised again.”  (Emphasis in original.) He is fierce on the kind of acting we might term the “celebrity appearance”—the kind designed to display the performer and present him/her to the audience rather than to penetrate the character and remain within the stage world. He cites (favorably) the reports of Garrick, who “in his monologues, with open eyes, saw no one, spoke solely to himself, forgot the universe,” and while cutting some slack for “the ballet-dancer, or even the concert-singer, [who] may be excused if at the close of a brilliant tour de force she turns with her best graces to the public, as if to ask if she has hit their taste; in a certain sense, she is keeping to her rôle: but the actor proper, who has been given an individual character to depict, has to convert his whole rôle into that one question to the public; and this, considered calmly, must set him in the light of senseless ridicule from beginning to end of his work.” The German actor, he says, “can never fall out of his role, since he is never in it . . . his whole role becomes, for him, an a parte” (sic).

Wagner’s essay speaks first about acting, and this is indicative, since he wants the Mime to build his singingacting up from a more natural style of theatrical speech. When it comes to singing, it is the Italian model, not the French, that he wishes to set aside, because the inflectional arcs of Italian melody twist the German language into nonsensical shapes, and vice-versa: “The Italian canto is inexecutable in our language . . . it becomes a jumble of inarticulate vowels and consonants, which simply hinder and distort the singing without being understood as speech.” He also deplores the bifurcation of Italian opera into a “dramatic part” (recitative) and a “lyrical” part (aria), the latter so frequently departing into a purely aesthetic, “tone-accented” realm of “Affected Pathos” or “affected ornamentation” that comes loose from dramatic continuity and, at the same time, turns toward the despised personal display for which he has already admonished actors. Wagner wanted a new singing style to emerge from elevation of the Singspiel. He notes the accomplishments of Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio, and Der Freischütz, but faults them for their significant passages in spoken dialogue (often so wretchedly rendered by singers), which would not be helped by setting these as recitative, as in the Italian forms, because that would still leave the dramatic/lyrical split he is trying to eliminate. In this article he does not speak of “through-composition” or “endless melody,” but rather of “continuous dialogue,” for which the orchestra would provide not just recitative-style accompaniment, but would “carry it in Symphonic style, from beginning to end.” Thus, the task of the singing Mime is an unprecedented sustainment of character development and dramatic action, with no formal interruptions to turn him aside from that goal.