The Wagner Operas

"This has also been published under the title Wagner Nights . This book is just extraordinarily good. Some say it’s out of date, but only because some small scale research has improved our knowledge of the precise order in which something has been written. Each opera gets something between fifty and one hundred pages. He explains how it was written in an extremely helpful way, elucidates the plot, then goes through the opera, quoting from his own translations. It is scholarly in the sense that he doesn’t make any mistakes, but it doesn’t bog you down in scholarship. It also gives you musical examples of motifs, which some find daunting, like ‘renunciation.’ He didn’t have any question that there were such things as leitmotifs and that they had names. Actually, the best thing to accompany this is the CD by Deryck Cooke , who is a supreme Wagnerian authority. He takes you through The Ring with orchestral excerpts specifically played to show you the motifs. Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic are playing them, and he gets certain motifs played over and over again to show how they change. He was utterly musically revolutionary, but gradually. Nietzsche said that Wagner was the latest developing of all the great composers. That may be true, although nowadays people are looking more kindly on his first two operas: Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot . Rienzi , his third opera, is never performed in full because it lasts longer than any other Wagner opera. He panic-strickenly cut it after the first performance because it was so long. And, actually, because Winifred Wagner gave the manuscript of Rienz i to Hitler as a birthday present, it seems to have gone up in flames the same time that he did. So, we don’t have the original complete score. We only have a piano transcription which has been orchestrated by Edward Downes. Anyway, it’s such a bad opera that the shorter it is the better.. It’s his Meyerbeerian grand opera, in the bad sense: lots of pomp, lots of dancing, processions, heavy scenery, historical plot, and so on. It is alleged that Hitler said that it all began when he heard Rienzi . Except he couldn’t have heard it to the end, I think, because Rienzi comes to a very bad end… But the two previous operas are quite good. Die Feen is a kind of Mendelssohnian fairy music. It’s a charming work and is very much on the Undine theme—like Dvořák’s Rusalka —about a mortal man and an immortal spirit and the danger of their coming together, with her sacrificing her immortality and so on. Das Liebesverbot is his drastic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure . This is a strange concoction of Italian opera. You would think it was Donizetti mainly. It’s rather good, although considerably too long. The overture starts with castanets for the first few bars. The Italian bel canto—these long floating melodies—was something that appealed to Wagner all his life long. Wagner actually loved Bellini and wrote an aria to be inserted in Norma , which is really strange. It doesn’t sound at all like Bellini to me, and it’s strange that it ever sounded like it to him. Wagner said that he wanted his later music dramas to sound as if they were bel canto operas. This is all very well—he may have said that—but you couldn’t perform them that way because the vocal lines just cannot be made into bel canto lines. The Flying Dutchman is only revolutionary in its quality, really. One of his versions of it is straight-through for a whole two and a half hours. That’s the version that I like best, and is his most Bellini-like work because it alternates between the passionate noble Wagnerian declamation—of the kind that you get in the later operas—and arias of a very Bellinian kind by each of the main characters. It’s one of the greatest operas there’s ever been. Tannhäuser is a kind of backward move in some ways, but it has a gigantic ‘everybody standing still and singing their respective reaction’ type of finale in Act II which is extraordinarily fine. I think it is the greatest grand opera finale there is—better than any by Verdi. Lohengrin is interesting because it shows Wagner’s orchestration becoming completely individual. That’s what defines Lohengrin . The sounds that Wagner makes are just utterly different from what anybody else had ever done. The prelude immediately shows a transcendental orchestrator doing things that nobody had ever dreamt of. And it’s an odd mixture, again, of very gorgeous traditional melodies—long flowing melodies of the kind that Wagner never wrote again—and a great deal of marching, countermarching, outbursts of swearing of revenge, and all of that kind of stuff. Of course, there’s the famous wedding march—which shouldn’t sound anything like what it normally does sound. Then, there’s the famous five year gap during which he didn’t write any music at all. He attempted to write The Ring but it just didn’t happen. And then, finally, he allegedly—this is almost certainly Wagner being creative in his autobiography—woke up after a bad dose of diarrhoea in La Spezia, having dreamt the prelude to Das Rheingold . Now, if anything is revolutionary it’s the prelude to Rheingold. I’m always amazed by that page-to-page in Rheingold , the technique and the effect of his orchestration is completely unlike anything one has heard before. As for Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, we can discuss those in more detail later. “The sounds that Wagner makes in Lohengrin are just utterly different from what anybody else had ever done” But Wagner wasn’t consciously avant-garde in the way that Stravinsky or Boulez might be, in wanting to smash various idols with a schedule. He just thought that music-drama should be of a certain kind and aimed to do that. The result in his last opera Parsifal was revolutionary, hence the rather riddling name of ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel, a stage-consecrating festival drama. What exactly he meant by consecration is unclear. He certainly didn’t mean it to be religious in the sense of it being like the St Matthew Passion as I’ve argued over and over again. He wasn’t aiming to convert people to religion. The knights in Parsifal are a pretty awful lot actually. It’s not just that Amfortas needs healing with his wound, the whole community is extremely sick. Anybody with ears to hear can hear that from the Prelude to Act III which is some of the illest music ever heard. It evokes a kind of extraordinarily painful spiritual barrenness which is really amazing. It’s continuous musical accompaniment which is not only accompaniment of the action but is the action itself, as it were. Also, it’s the beginning of the use of the leitmotif—these leading and recurring musical motifs—throughout the works. This is not a name that he used. He may not have approved of it and contemporary commentators may not approve either. Nonetheless it’s just true that, for The Ring , the ring motif is the ring motif and the sword motif is perfectly obviously for the sword, and Valhalla is Valhalla. However many mutations they go into and however many inflections they may have, they are motifs. And the way that he uses motifs in The Ring is completely different from the way that he uses them in any other opera. They are much more nameable in The Ring . With a few odd exceptions, it’s much clearer what any motif might be for—even if it’s quite a recherché thing like the motif of murder which only occurs in the strange scene between Alberich and Hagen in Act II of Götterdämmerung . There’s a very quick nervous motif which is the motif of murder, as Alberich suggests to Hagen what he should do. But you must be careful with leitmotifs. One example is the so-called ‘redemption by love’ motif which Sieglinde thrillingly sings in Act III of Walküre . It shouldn’t be called ‘redemption by love.’ A chemist wrote to Wagner about the motif. Cosima replied and said, The master says that if it’s to be named at all —which he didn’t approve of— then it’s the ‘glorification of Brünnhilde.’ It’s not as if Brünnhilde is glorifying herself at the end of Götterdämmerung but it is glorifying her. She is obviously something much larger than she has been before that point. It’s never clear, actually. As far as I know, he never said anything definite on that score. It’s unclear whether he’d be the kind of cook who didn’t want you to know what went on in the kitchen. On the other hand, it’s not only what goes on in the kitchen, it’s also about what’s on the plate. There’s no question that if you do know the motifs, particularly in The Ring , it does add a dimension to your understanding. There are ironic quotations, enforced quotations, motifs that were originally in the major and then go into the minor, other key changes, or they are put in combination. For example, take the prelude to the third act of Siegfried , which is when Wagner went back after a twelve year break to recompose The Ring . It’s enormously complex, it’s Wagner saying this is me getting back in my stride . And the number of motifs that he throws around, like Jove hurling rocks at you, is absolutely flabbergasting. I think you do need to recognise that there is Wotan’s spear and the hunting motif. It adds a dimension of excitement, even though you’re being swept along by the music. Yes. When the motif of Valhalla is introduced, it is itself a transformation of the ring motif. The introduction of the ring motif in the opening scene of Rheingold is threatening and oddly unobtrusive. I think it’s Flosshilde who is saying something about renouncing love and then the ring motif just kind of crawls in. But then, after Alberich has stolen the gold and gone off, you get it much more clearly as the transformation music takes place to take you into the rocky height. And you gradually hear the motif in thirds moving until it becomes, before your very ears, the Valhalla motif which is quiet and enormously noble. It quite quickly receives grand—and even pompous—treatment. At the end of The Ring , it takes on an extreme grandeur that is crushed. There’s something about the Valhalla motif which suggests that although it’s very grand, it’s also liable to crumble and disintegrate."