 |
Although he was undoubtedly the most controversial musical figure of the Nineteenth Century, Richard Wagner was a great literary, philosophical and political activist whose contributions to the development of German Romanticism were unrivaled by any of his contemporaries. His life and works may be said to crown the musical achievements of German Romanticism, but they are simultaneously celebrated and condemned like the works of no other composer in music history. His Music Dramas are hated as much as they are worshiped in the world today, but even among those who damn Wagner as a human being, his genius as a composer is not denied.
As one of the key figures in the history of opera, Richard Wagner was largely responsible for altering its orientation in the Nineteenth Century. His program of artistic reform, though not executed to the last detail, accelerated the trend towards organically conceived, through-composed structures, as well as influencing the development of the orchestra, of a new breed of singer, and of various aspects of theatrical practice. As the most influential composer during the second half of the Nineteenth Century, Richard Wagner’s conception of music remains very much with us even a century after his death. His style of orchestration, his intensely chromatic harmonic pallet, and even his use of the leitmotiv can be heard in many movie scores, neo-tonal symphonies, and modern program music of our time. Wagner thought his Music Dramas were to be the models for Twentieth Century opera, but he could not foresee the path of total abandonment of tonality that was to revolutionize music in the early Twentieth Century.
But in more recent days, with the widespread renaissance of tonality in serious music, many familiar sounds of Wagnerian origins are evident in new compositions heard at symphony concerts and on Hollywood sound tracks. It was not Wagner’s style of vocal composition in his Music Dramas that has remained so influential, but his orchestral language of chromatic tension and release, his brilliant use of instrumental tone color, and his flair for dramatic effects balanced with his long, sensually serene harmonic progressions that have become a mainstay in the arsenal of modern composers.
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1813 as the son of a policeman, Friedrich Wagner, who died soon after the composer’s birth. It is both fitting and psychologically congruous that a question mark should hover over the identity of the father and mother of the composer whose works resonate so eloquently with themes of parental anxiety. His mother remarried the painter-actor-poet, Ludwig Geyer, in August 1814. Many people believe that Geyer was Wagner’s biological father, since the mother and Geyer had been friends long before Friedrich Wagner’s death. There is much evidence that Richard believed this as well.
Wagner attended school in Dresden and then Leipzig. At age fifteen, he wrote a play, and at sixteen he composed his first music: two piano sonatas and a string quartet. In 1831 he attended Leipzig University, and he also studied piano and composition with the Cantor of St. Thomas Choir School, Christian Theodor Weinlig, but unlike many other prominent composers, he never became proficient on this or any other instrument. Wagner’s formal training in music was brief, and he was largely a self-taught musician. He composed a symphony, and it was successfully performed in 1832. In 1833 he was employed as the chorus master at the Würzburg theater where he wrote the text and music of his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).
His first opera was never produced during Wagner’s lifetime. It was first performed by Hermann Levi in Munich in 1888. But his next opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), was staged in 1836. He made his debut as an opera conductor with a small company that went bankrupt soon after performing his opera. Wagner married the singer, Minna Planer, in 1836 and went with her to Königsberg, where he became musical director at the city theater. But he soon resigned from the position and took a similar post in Riga where he began his next opera, Rienzi. In Riga he also gained much experience conducting the symphonies and overtures of Beethoven. His marriage suffered from displays of his personal character as the couple’s financial debts mounted in Riga. Minna Wagner came to realize that her husband was not only dishonest with money, but that he was irritable; he was tactless; he was a liar.
In 1839 the Wagners “slipped away” from creditors in Riga by ship to London and then to Paris, where he was befriended by the composer, Meyerbeer. In Paris Wagner did musical arranging for publishers and theaters. He also labored on the text and music of an opera based on the “Flying Dutchman” legend. But in 1842 Rienzi, a large-scale opera with a political theme, set in imperial Rome, was accepted for production in Dresden, and Wagner went there for its highly successful premiere. Its theme reflects something of Wagner’s own politics (He was involved in the semi-revolutionary, intellectual “Young Germany” movement). Die fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), produced the next year, was less well received, though it was a much more well-constructed Music Drama than Rienzi.
The Flying Dutchman began Wagner’s movement away from the “number opera” tradition, and his style was strong in its evocation of atmosphere, especially the supernatural and the raging seas. The action takes place against a background of the stormy sea and the selfless love of the heroine, Senta. The music most vividly depicts the storm and stress of the sea as well as the contrasting ideas of curse and salvation, which are clearly set forth in Senta’s ballad, the central number of the opera. The themes of the ballad appear in the overture, and they recur throughout the opera. The success of these two operas gained for Wagner the prestigious post as Orchestra Conductor at the Dresden court, a position that he was not to hold for long.
As a published writer, Wagner made his views known not only about music but also about literature, drama, and even political and moral issues. Wagner was largely his own librettist in his Music Dramas, and the theme of redemption through a woman’s love, in The Dutchman, recurred in Wagner’s works and perhaps his life also. In 1845 Tannhäuser was completed and performed, and Lohengrin was begun. In both of these Music Dramas, Wagner moved toward a more continuous texture with semi-melodic narrative and a supporting orchestral fabric helping to convey its sense. For Wagner, the function of music was to serve the ends of dramatic expression, and all of his most important compositions were composed for the theater.
Particularly in Tannhäuser, Wagner brilliantly adapted the substance of the German Romantic libretto to the framework of grand opera. The music evokes the opposite worlds of sin and blessedness with great emotional fervor and a luxuriant harmony and color. The Pilgrim’s Chorus from this opera contains what is perhaps Wagner’s most popular and widely-known melody. Fatefully, despite his musical successes, things took a bad turn for Wagner when, in 1848, he was caught up in political revolution, and the next year he fled to Weimar where Franz Liszt helped him. Later he fled to Switzerland and also France. Politically suspect, Wagner was unable to return to Germany for several years.
Lohengrin was first performed under the direction of Franz Liszt at Weimar in 1850, and it is the last of Wagner’s works that he ever referred to as an “opera.” Lohengrin embodies several changes prophetic of the Music Dramas that were to follow it. The story comes from Medieval legend, but Wagner’s treatment is generalized and symbolic. Lehengrin may symbolize divine love descending in human form, and Elsa may represent the weakness of humanity, unable to receive with faith the offered blessing. Such an interpretation is suggested by the Prelude, which depicts the descent of the Holy Grail and its return to Heaven. The orchestration is fuller and more subdued than that of Tannhäuser, and the music flows more continuously. The well-written choruses are combined with solo singing and orchestral accompaniment into long, unified musical scenes. The technique of recurring themes is further developed, particularly with respect to the motives associated with Lohengrin and the Grail. Using Weber’s Der Freischütz as a model to a certain extent, Wagner used tonality with his characters to help organize both the drama and the music: Lohengrin’s key is A Major, Elsa’s A-Flat or E-Flat, and the key for the evil personages is F-Sharp minor. Wagner’s use of varying keys in a symbolic manner greatly heightens the dramatic effect of the action on stage as well as the music itself.
In Zürich during his exile of 1850, Wagner wrote his ferociously anti-Semitic tract: Jewishness in Music. Some passages of this short work were an attack on Meyerbeer, who had previously befriended him in Paris. Also while in Zurich, he completed his basic statement on musical theater, Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama). Wagner also began sketching the text and music for a series of monumental operas based on the Nordic and Germanic myths. By 1853 the texts for this four-night cycle of Music Dramas, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs), were completed and published. Wagner read his texts to his friends, among whom were his generous patrons, the wealthy Swiss industrialist, Otto Wesendonck, and his wife Mathilde.
Wagner became involved in an extramarital affair with Mathilde Wesendonck who had fallen in love with him. Mrs. Wesendonck wrote love poems to Wagner that he set to music. He also composed the Piano Sonata in A-Flat Major for Mathilde. This affair inspired the Music Drama Tristan und Isolde which was first conceived in 1854 and completed five years later. The basic plot of Tristan is the theme of forbidden love. Wagner’s idea of the Music Drama may be illustrated through Tristan. The story comes from a Thirteenth Century Medieval romance by Gottfried von Strassburg.
Wagner believed in the absolute oneness of drama and music: that the two are organically connected expressions of a single dramatic idea. He considered the action of the drama to have an inner and an outer aspect: the orchestra conveying the inner aspect, while the sung words articulate the outer aspect of the events and situations of the plot. The orchestration, then, is the chief factor in the music, and the vocal lines are part of the musical texture, not arias with accompaniment. And the music is continuous throughout each act, not formally divided into the recitatives, arias, and set numbers. Harmonically, Tristan und Isolde stretches functional chromaticism to its very limits, and it is thought by many that Wagner’s intense usage of chomatics in this Music Drama represented for the first time the culmination of tonal harmonic possibilities.
By 1854 Wagner had completed more than half of the music to The Ring. But he abandoned Siegfried in the middle of the second act in 1857, not to resume work on this opera until 1869. The twelve-year hiatus was filled by Tristan und Isolde (1859), originally intended as a “practical” opera which would not require elaborate staging or scenery, and Die Meistersinger (1861), Wagner’s most beloved opera, hailed even by those who dislike his other works.
Wagner’s new kind of opera had many antecedents: the “symphonic style” of the operas by Mozart, Cherubini, and Beethoven; the continuous texture of Weber’s Euryanthe and Meyerbeer’s mature operas, in which the boundaries between the “set-numbers” were blurred; and the cyclic instrumental forms, with thematic linking, from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 onward. Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where all operatic devices are united in a whole, stemmed not only from Gluck’s operas but also from the dramas of Goethe and Schiller whose Die Braut von Messina of 1803 would have been the first Gesamtkunstwerk had there been adequate musical and theatrical resources in Weimar. Even at his most innovative, Wagner preserved links with the musical past. Wagner’s vocal melody, often just another strand in the orchestral texture and chiefly devoted to expressing the text, is sometimes perfunctory.
In 1855 Wagner conducted in London, and tensions with his wife Minna led to a prolonged stay in Paris where Minna eventually joined him in 1860. Wagner revived Tannhäuser for the Paris Opera in 1861, but its production was a failure with Parisian audiences, partly for political reasons. In 1862 he was freely allowed to return to Germany, and that same year Wagner and Minna separated permanently. Minna could accept most aspects of Wagner’s less-than-sterling personal character, but she could not endure his marital infidelity. In 1864 King Ludwig II invited Wagner to settle in Bavaria, near Munich. King Ludwig paid all of the composer’s considerable debts and agreed to provide Wagner with an annual salary so he could be free to compose.
Wagner did not stay long in Bavaria, because of opposition at King Ludwig’s court. This disdain for the composer surfaced when it became public knowledge that he was having an extramarital affair with Cosima Liszt von Bülow, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow and daughter of Franz Liszt. Hans von Bülow (who condoned Wagner’s affair with his wife) conducted the music at the premiere of Tristan und Isolde in 1865. Here Wagner developed a style richer and more chromatic than anyone had previously attempted, using dissonance and its urge for resolution in a continuing pattern to build up tension and a sense of profound yearning.
Before returning to his composition of The Ring of the Nibelungs, Wagner composed Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersinger of Nuremberg) beginning in 1866. This work was in quite a different vein, a comedy set in Sixteenth Century Nuremberg in which a noble poet-musician wins, through his victory in a music contest, the hand of his beloved, fame, and riches. The analogy with Wagner’s view of himself is obvious. The music of Die Meistersinger is less chromatic than that of Tristan. It is warm, good-humored, often contrapuntal, and unlike the mythological figures of his other operas, the characters in Die Meistersinger have real humanity. The opera was premiered with von Bülow as conductor in 1868.
Wagner had been living at Tribschen, near Lucerne, since 1866, and during this year his estranged wife Minna died. Cosima von Bülow joined Wagner at Tribschen shortly after Minna Wagner’s death, and she subsequently gave birth to two children before they were married in 1870.
The first two Ring Music Dramas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were first performed in 1869 in Munich, on King Ludwig’s insistence, since Ludwig was still providing Wagner with an annual salary years after their first acquaintance. Although Das Rheingold is the first Music Drama in the cycle, its libretto was not the first written by the composer. When Wagner commenced this mammoth project, it was only intended to be one Music Drama called Siegfrieds Tod, but when Wagner completed the libretto, he realized that the story was incomplete and would need some explaining. So the original first work completed became Götterdämmerung, and most of the Drama Cycle was in effect written in reverse order. The second drama was originally Der junge Siegfried which became Siegfried, the third Music Drama in the cycle as we now know it. Die Walküre, the second Music Drama in the final version of The Ring, contains some of the most interesting music of the cycle. Wagner was very anxious to have a special festival opera house constructed for the complete cycle of The Ring, and he spent much energy trying to raise money for it. Eventually, when he had almost despaired, Ludwig came to the rescue, and in 1874, the year Wagner’s composition of the fourth opera, Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), was finished, King Ludwig provided the necessary funds.
The theater was built at Bayreuth, and it was designed by Wagner himself as the home for his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work). The first festival, an artistic triumph but a financial disaster, was held there in 1876 when the complete Ring of the Nibelungs was performed. The entire cycle of four music dramas comprised about eighteen hours of music and was held together by an immensely detailed network of leitmotivs, each of which had some allusive meaning. The leitmotivs change and develop as the ideas within the opera take shape. They are heard in the orchestra, not merely as labels but carrying the action, sometimes informing the listener of connections of ideas or the thoughts of those on the stage.
It took Wagner twenty-two years to complete The Ring of the Nibelungs entirely, and it stands as one of the most remarkable and profoundly influential achievements in Western music. The drama cycle is not just a story about gods, humans, and dwarfs, but it embodies reflections on every aspect of the human condition. It has been interpreted as socialist, fascist, Jungian, prophetic, as a parable about industrial society, and much more.
In 1877 Wagner conducted in London, hoping to recoup some of his Bayreuth losses. Later in the year he began a final music drama, Parsifal. Wagner continued his musical and political writings, concentrating on “racial purity” as his primary theme. He spent most of 1880 in Italy. Parsifal, a sacred Music Drama based on a theme of man’s redemption through the acts of communion and renunciation, was first performed at the Bayreuth Festival in 1882. Wagner went to Venice following the festival and died there in February 1883 of heart failure. His body was returned for burial at Bayreuth.
The Ring of the Nibelungs contains the most extensive use of leitmotivs found in Wagner’s works because of the necessity for continuity in this long tetralogy depicting a mythological universe divorced from mundane reality. Leitmotivs are fewer in the other operas because they depend so much on atmosphere (especially Tristan and Parsifal). There is less need for recapitulatory reminiscences, and the few leitmotivs used are even more striking and have more of an individual character than those of the Ring. Leitmotivs are essential ingredients of Wagner’s musical fabric, which has been called “endless melody” and which is really a replacement of authentic cadences with deceptive cadences or other modulations. Though leitmotivs sometimes occur in the voice part, they are usually embedded in the orchestra.
As the leitmotiv is Wagner’s most important external unifying device, tonality is his most important means of internal structure. Wagner is often called a “chromatic composer,” but even in Tristan (his most notoriously chromatic work), he writes lengthy diatonic passages, as in the parts associated with Kurvenal. In the more chromatic sections, Wagner achieves tonal stability by using “tonal cells” which often consist of a major or minor triad (the tonic), usually inverted, and containing either a leitmotiv, a diminished or half-diminished seventh chord, or a dominant seventh, also containing a leitmotiv. This is followed by a deceptive cadence, after which another character often sings, or an orchestral interlude occurs.
The “open-ended” leitmotivs permit several possible resolutions: sometimes to the tonic, more often to the dominant or to a new tonic through a deceptive cadence, or to a diminished-seventh chord, which even in traditional practice has four possible resolutions. The longer leitmotivs, like those signifying “Valhalla” or “Siegfried’s destiny” can be treated sequentially to give the effect of rising tonal plateaus. When he interrupts the effect of tonal stability, he uses deceptive cadences or coloristic harmony. Wagner was simply a genius at structuring harmonic progressions and creating dramatic tension in his Music Dramas.
Richard Wagner has remained for many the most fascinating figure in Nineteenth Century music. His music is only now resurfacing from a political setback, having been the music most strongly supported by and endorsed personally by Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich. Hitler and Wagner shared many common ideas about “racial purity” and anti-Semitism in general. But to Wagner, such ideas were “theory” and not the basis of actions like those that Hitler imposed on the Jewry of Europe. Hitler forbade performances of Parsifal in Bayreuth during World War II. He thought its content was not appropriate to war time and to what he wanted the German people to believe.
As a man, Wagner was prepared to sacrifice his family and friends in the cause of his own music, some characterizing him as a sociopath. But when viewed as a composer alone, he was undoubtedly a man of great genius. It may be said that Wagner was a miserable failure as a human being, but as the master of the Music Drama, he was without equal. However, it is understandable that since the formation of Israel as a modern state, compositions by Richard Wagner have never been performed without scandal in that country, and the performances that have happened there remain very few in number. Justice is sometimes harsh.