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Wagner: Totalizing master of endless melodies
GUNDULA KREUZER
TLS. September 19, 2019
Gundula Kreuzer considers the expanded sound worlds and holistic visions of one of Germany’s most celebrated and contentious composers
Richard Wagner would have loathed this article. His achievements were too grand, he’d have thought, to be condensed into “notes”, and too unique to be part of a series. Nor did he appreciate rubbing shoulders with other composers or – worse – with “mere” musicians. After all, large parts of his influential mid-nineteenth-century treatises The Artwork of the Future (1849) and Opera and Drama (1850–51) were devoted to pointing out how instrumental (or “absolute”) music had lost its way after divorcing from its sister arts of poetry and dance. Even opera, he held, had long succumbed to the fallacy of music’s primacy, allowing compositional conventions rather than dramatic necessity to determine its structure, in particular the form and length – indeed, the very existence – of arias. Opera, he announced in 1851, was based on the error of treating music not as a means but as an end.
Instead of such indulgence in musical fancy, Wagner pursued a viscerally effective stage drama. Among his models he counted Sophocles and Shakespeare more than Mozart and Rossini. Yet even Shakespeare, “the most powerful poet of all times”, had lacked the proper performance conditions – ones that would have allowed his words to be received not just intellectually but directly by the senses. Those conditions, Wagner believed, had been revealed when Beethoven introduced singing into his final symphony (the so-called “Choral Symphony”). Accordingly, Wagner set off to merge Shakespearean flesh-and-blood characters with Beethovenian orchestral expressivity – and a whole lot more. If Beethoven had called himself a “tone poet”, Wagner aspired to be a poet in the largest sense: a total artist creating drama out of all human art forms, from poetry and music to painting and architecture. Even dance (in dramatic pantomime) and sculpture (the blocking of singers) were included. He dubbed the overall result variously the collective, or communal, or living, or perfected, or united work of art, though the terms that ultimately stuck with his ideal were “music drama” and Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.
This focus on drama was fostered by Wagner’s upbringing, which included relatively little musical education. A painter and actor, his step-father Ludwig Geyer had taken young Richard to the theatre. Wagner did for a short while study composition in his home town of Leipzig. But he was never a proficient instrumentalist, which narrowed his path to a musical career. With what became his typical mixture of determination and cunning, he made a virtue out of necessity and simply declared the orchestra the grandest of instruments. (Indeed, he later wrote one of the first modern conducting manuals.) Above all, though, he learned on the job. In early 1833, at the age of nineteen, he began a series of seasonal engagements as chorus master and music director at various minor theatres as well as a touring company. These gave him valuable insights into the state of provincial opera performances, introduced him to the actress Minna Planer (soon to become his first wife), and opened the opportunity to mount a first operatic attempt. But he could not support the comfortable, silk-bedecked lifestyle he craved. Escaping his creditors, he spent two poverty-stricken but formative years in Paris, then the centre of the operatic world.
After two rather derivative, journeyman operas of the 1830s, Wagner’s breakthrough as a composer came in 1842, albeit not in Paris as he had hoped. At the recommendation of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who had also helped Wagner make connections in Paris, the Dresden Court Opera premiered his grand historical work Rienzi. Its success gained him the position of music director there, which allowed him to stage his next two works, Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, in short succession. By then the impressions of his travelling years had solidified into dogma: what he saw as the Latin-dominated operatic genre lacked a solid German tradition, and German performance standards were dismal – especially regarding design and acting.
To rectify both these shortcomings, Wagner began to envision a new type of opera. His aesthetic goal was thus from the beginning shot through with nationalist zeal. And it gained messianic overtones after the failed pan-German revolutions of 1848–49, in which he actively participated. That the Royal Saxon music director manned the Dresden barricades cost him not only his job but almost his freedom. He spent the next decade in exile in Switzerland, cut off from German theatres and dependent on personal benefactors. one of the most important was Franz Liszt, who premiered Wagner’s Lohengrin in Weimar in 1850. Most of the others had never heard a note of Wagner’s but were intrigued by his writings, composed in exile to plug his ideas. Disseminated widely across Europe, these radical post-revolutionary texts made Wagner the first composer to give rise to anism.
Wagner argued that a corrupt industrial society – for him always implying the splintered German nation – could be truly reformed only by educating and reconnecting the people with their ideal natural state. And this mental transformation was best achieved by exposing everyone to the new Gesamtkunstwerk: audiovisually absorbing its spectators, this holistic form of art would transport them right into the stage action, letting them experience a different reality. It follows that this “action” (another label Wagner applied to his mature works) had to present idealized subject matters from the wellspring of Germanic mythology, since historical subjects were fraught with human error. But he was painfully aware that society wasn’t yet ready to receive these works. Hence he dialectically proposed his vision as “the artwork of the future”.
Artistically, three aspects were to distinguish the Gesamtkunstwerk from conventional opera. First, each art form would contribute only according to its natural capacity and when necessary for the overall drama. For instance, there would be no pre-set alternation of recitatives and arias; rather, the sung word entered merely when required to propel the plot or specify a character’s feelings that were otherwise expressed in the orchestra. Everything visual likewise had to be dramatically motivated to avoid becoming an empty “effect without cause” – an artistic death sentence with which Wagner charged much of Meyerbeer’s oeuvre, and particularly the sunrise ending Act 3 of Meyerbeer’s celebrated 1849 Paris opera Le prophète. (Indeed, the success of this opera fuelled Wagner’s paranoid antisemitism and his racist diatribes against both Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, the most popular German-Jewish composers.) Second, Wagner demanded that the artificiality of each participating medium be veiled to let it appear natural. His technophobia was such that he strove to hide even the orchestra (his sound technology) so as not to dispel the stage’s illusionism. Third, the Gesamtkunstwerk’s conceptual unity resulted from a unified dramatic vision – a single authorial mind overseeing each aspect of the stage production.
It was for the latter reason that Wagner wrote his own libretti, although he called them “poems” to emphasize their difference and (putatively) heightened aesthetic value. Likewise, he circulated pamphlets to detail how his works should not only be sung but also acted and designed – those hitherto neglected aspects on German stages. Unashamedly building on the model of French grand opéra he so despised, Wagner was after psychological and visual realism, and his strict demands ultimately changed the standards of operatic staging.
All these Gesamtkunstwerk ideas manifest most clearly in Wagner’s magnum opus, The Ring of the Nibelung. He first conceived of an opera about the death of the legendary dragon-slayer Siegfried in the revolutionary year of 1848. Yet soon after he began work, he decided it necessary also to explain the hero’s life and then his origins. Thus, a four-opera cycle was born that would amount to almost fifteen hours in performance – a major influence on such epic multi-volume novels as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (which took many other cues from Wagner as well).
True to Wagner’s all-inclusive vision, the Ring “poem” is shot through with unprecedentedly detailed stage directions. It also eschews end rhymes and, thus, formal distinctions between recitative and aria. The characters moreover do not indulge in traditional operatic asides or solitary emotional outpourings. Instead, they express themselves in – lengthy – conversations, occasionally emphasizing their musing through alliteration. Nor was Wagner above inventing or repurposing words to fit his rhetorical needs. Take the opening verses of the cycle’s first instalment, Das Rheingold, sung by a mythical “Rhinemaiden”:
Weia! Waga!
Woge, du Welle,
Walle zur Wiege!
Wagalaweia!
Wallala weiala weia!
Only lines two and three contain proper words (“Billow, you wave / Undulate to the cradle!”) – a poetic invocation for the Rhine waters to flow. The rest is alliterative vocal play.
Musically, too, Das Rheingold comes closest to Wagner’s earlier Gesamtkunstwerk declarations, although the score, composed in 1853–54, does assign orchestral music the most prominent place. (Wagner later adjusted his theory accordingly and reinstated music as the point of origin of his unified drama – a shift partially due to the influence of the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, who considered the non-representative medium of music to be the unique, metaphysical expression of the cosmic Will.) The libretto’s four scenes are through-composed, amounting to roughly 150 minutes of uninterrupted music. This means that the orchestra bridges the scene changes, sonically evoking the visual transformations on stage: any interruption, Wagner believed, would have catapulted the spectators out of the mythical realm and back into the everyday routines from which he strove to liberate them.
The orchestra’s descriptive and dramatically foundational role is immediately evident at the cycle’s bold opening, an object lesson on how to combine opera’s different systems of communication à la Gesamtkunstwerk. Das Rheingold starts with a sustained E-flat in the double basses, so soft and low that its beginning is easily missed. Wagner then slowly adds further wind drones and the overtone series on E-flat in eight horns, each pursuing its own pattern and creating a complex, ever-louder tapestry of sound. Next, the strings enter successively with undulating and steadily rising E-flat-major arpeggios. only when no further increase in texture, pitch range and dynamic seems possible does the curtain open to let the acoustic waves spill onto the stage, where they soon wash up the first Rhinemaiden. And only when the nixie’s swimming pantomime has exhausted its signifying power does she sing (those onomatopoetic alliterations, set to an equally wave-like melody) while triggering a first harmonic change: after the huge span of 136 bars, over four minutes of orchestral Wagalaweia in E-flat major, Wagner moves to A-flat major, the subdominant. Rarely had a composer stretched the most basic elements of tonal music to such grandiose effect.
This effect owes everything to the gradually unfolding orchestra, announcing the importance of sheer sound for Wagner. Small wonder that his orchestra grew larger and larger (accusations of noisiness and his ruining of singers’ voices were legion). But he also developed its colours by complex combinations and subdivisions of instrumental groups – what Theodor Adorno dubbed his “mixed sound”. Even before the Ring, the beginning of the Lohengrin prelude has three flutes and four solo violins float above the remaining four violin parts (and nothing else) for the stratospheric evocation of the grail regions from which the title hero comes. To fill gaps in his orchestral palette, Wagner even bred a new instrument out of the French horn and the tuba, yielding the so-called Wagner tuba. And he employed sixteen actual anvils to acoustically render the clattering underground smithy – a stroke of genius that would spark the inclusion of ever more real-life sounds even into non-operatic music.
Some commentators construed this emphasis on sound as a mere veneer camouflaging a lack of melodic invention. A particularly hostile critic coined the term “endless melody” to denounce the tedious absence of virtuosic arias and catchy tunes. Wagner slyly adopted the phrase as a rallying call for music-dramatic declamation, personally training his singers to enunciate audibly above his rich orchestral textures. Nor are his works devoid of musical structure. A large number of distinct, often illustrative melodic fragments – so-called leitmotifs – appear throughout the dramas each associated with an important character, object, action or idea. The undulating arpeggios of the Rheingold opening, for instance, return later in the cycle to signify the Rhine even when the river is not shown on stage; and their transformation into ever faster and shorter rising figurations at the end of the first scene suggests the change of locale from the riverbed, via evaporating mists, to a cloudy mountaintop. More significant are motifs that express concepts, such as the rising half-diminished chord, falling octave and triumphant rising fifth with which the titular Nibelung curses the ring. Henceforth we need to hear only a fragment of this angular gesture to understand that the curse is in action and danger looms. Although French operas had long used reminiscence motifs (albeit sparingly), Wagner considered his dense leitmotif technique an inheritance from Beethoven. And it bestowed his orchestra with the capacity to interpret the action – another instance of Wagner’s totalizing ideal: nothing about his drama was to be left to the spectator’s imagination.
As the “curse motif” demonstrates, melodic beauty is not the defining characteristic of leitmotifs: distinctness is. To this end, they draw on all musical parameters – but typically each one gains its mnemonic power from one particular aspect: perhaps its timbre, or rhythm or harmony. This last became particularly characteristic and innovative as Wagner’s style developed. His appetite for through-composition necessitated the near-constant avoidance of cadences, leading to chromatically enriched chords that stretched the limits of tonal harmony. Premiered in 1865, Tristan und Isolde explored most thoroughly the programmatic potential of such suspended harmonies. The opera’s first chord is an enigmatic pre-dominant structure consisting (from the bass) of an augmented fourth, a major third, and a perfect fourth – a spacing and sonority so distinctive that it became known simply as the “Tristan chord”.
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Beginning of the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with “Tristan chord” encircled
Its transgressive idiosyncrasy secured its recognition value not just as a symbol of the unconsummated love of the adulterous title characters but in a host of works by later composers as well.
Wagner’s music did, then, lead into a future of expanded sound worlds and nonfunctional harmonies. Yet the Ring was of the future in a more mundane sense as well: it seemed impossible to stage. Which theatre would risk premiering not one but four operas by an exiled and notoriously cantankerous composer? Besides, its demands on singers and directors were unparalleled, with those singing nixies and open transformations, or the longest operatic fire scene ever conceived. By 1851 Wagner decided that he needed his own theatre, along with the latest stage technology and the best musicians. And he dreamed up a festival exclusively devoted to the Ring premiere but akin to the popular singing events that were dotted around German states on pop-up stages in summertime.
It was both Wagner’s greatest triumph and a bitter irony for this former revolutionary fighter that he realized this extravagant dream under the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. In 1864, in a truly operatic turn of events, the newly crowned king invited the destitute but now amnestied composer to Munich, where he was expected to complete and produce the Ring cycle and other works. Successful premieres of Tristan and his single mature comic opera, Die Meistersinger, ensued. But Wagner had to retreat once more, this time because of his undue impact on the Bavarian budget and politics as well as his scandalous liaison with Liszt’s daughter Cosima, then married to the conductor-pianist Hans von Bülow, whom the king had hired at Wagner’s behest.
Undeterred, Wagner managed to wed Cosima and found a suitable site for his theatre in the small Franconian town of Bayreuth, still in Bavaria and supported by King Ludwig. After years of construction, fundraising schemes and summer training camps for the musicians, the first complete Ring production opened in 1876. By that time, Germany had become unified; and Wagner’s megalomaniacal endeavour had stirred so much national and international attention that the inaugural festival became a media event: a host of international critics, aristocrats and luminaries including Bruckner, Grieg, Liszt, Nietzsche, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, King Ludwig and the Brazilian and German emperors all made their Wagnerian pilgrimage. An entirely new artistic experience was born – the model of high-profile music festivals giving rise to many others, from Glyndebourne to Salzburg.
![Paul von Joukowsky's set design for the Hall of the Grail, Bayreuth 1882](https://www.the-tls.co.uk/s3/tls-prod/uploads/2019/09/Bayreuth-1882.jpg)
Paul von Joukowsky’s set design for the Hall of the Grail, Bayreuth 1882
Apart from the four-day festival idea, Wagner’s theatre at Bayreuth was the most revolutionary ingredient of the 1876 production. To this day, it offers unique acoustics and viewing conditions. Its amphitheatrical seating dispenses with boxes and offers unobstructed sightlines for almost everyone (if not free entrance, as Wagner originally desired). The orchestra plays invisibly in the “mystic abyss” below the stage, its sound emanating from a narrow gap at the stage front. No prompter’s box disturbs the stage, which is framed by a double proscenium that perceptually distances the image. In 1876, novel curtain technology magically revealed the stage in deliberately choreographed speeds. And a technical glitch cast the first audience into complete darkness: in this and several other features, Bayreuth foreshadowed the cinema.
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Bayreuth Festspielhaus
But Wagner’s relationship with technology remained fraught. Even though he had set out to redeem humankind (or the Germans, at least) from the adverse effects of industrialization, he remained embarrassingly reliant on those machines that his Gesamtkunstwerk theory had tried to spirit away. Emblematic of this dependence was his pioneering use of water vapour to shroud and then realistically animate his stage transformations. The precursor of modern-day dry-ice effects, it became famous as “Wagner steam” and a visual icon of the Ring. But it was produced by discarded railway engines behind the theatre; and its hissing and smell reminded spectators less of mythic times than of the train station or the laundry room, undermining Wagner’s attempts at complete artistic illusion. However advanced, technology never entirely morphed into higher nature.
In the end, the total artist realized that he had given birth to nothing but “an ordinary theatrical child”. What is more, to settle the festival’s financial debt, he had to release the Ring for performances elsewhere without his supervision, eventually selling even his décor. Unable to mount another Ring production, he turned to religious redemption for his final music drama, Parsifal, which featured in the second Bayreuth festival of 1882. By the time of his death from a heart condition less than a year later, the festival had become a formidable artistic institution as well as a shrine to Wagner’s last work, which was exclusively performed there for the duration of its copyright.
Still, the evident conceptual failure of the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal and his totalizing ambition earned Wagner many critics. The most notorious attack came from his erstwhile admirer Friedrich Nietzsche: the philosopher accused the composer of shameless dilettantism and self-aggrandizement, with unhealthy consequences for his fanatic followers. His unapologetic nationalism and antisemitism attracted further critique, with his attack on Meyerbeer a particularly brazen example. Were it not for Wagner’s pen, the powerful grand operas that were once his models would not have vanished so thoroughly from the repertory. In addition, Wagner’s hateful polemic Judaism in Music, published under a euphemistic pseudonym in 1850 but reissued under his own name in 1869, propagated a racially based, blanket denigration of Jews and their cultural achievements. Although Wagner continued to depend on Jewish musicians and supporters, his writings laid the foundation for the extreme antisemitism and cultural chauvinism of the Bayreuth festival under the direction of his widow Cosima and his daughter-in-law Winifred Wagner. That Hitler was an ardent Wagnerite and personally backed the festival does not help matters. More problematic still is the question first raised by Adorno, of how Wagner’s antisemitism sedimented in his operas. Much discussed examples are the characters of the uncreative and cruelly ridiculed town clerk Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger or the wandering femme fatale-cum-sorceress Kundry in Parsifal: tellingly, her curse lifts only with her final baptism.
From his xenophobic diatribes, his potted historical discussions and his two-volume autobiography down to his rose-coloured silken dressing gowns, Wagner was ultimately a master of self-staging. He designed his divisive, grandiloquent rhetoric to mask his dependence on prior operatic practices; in reality, hardly any of his celebrated innovations were entirely new – not even the term Gesamtkunstwerk or the covered pit. Instead, Wagner synthesized, realized and moved contemporary stimuli onwards. His profound influence on European musical, theatrical, and artistic life must therefore be assessed against a larger historical backdrop, even as listeners continue to be lured by his endless melodies.
Gundula Kreuzer is Professor of Music at Yale University and a specialist on nineteenth-century opera and stage technology.
- This piece was amended on September 20 to remove Tolstoy from the list of people who attended the inaugural Bayreuth festival