Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  It is clear from this that the accusation of dilettantism went hand in hand with the idea of improvisation, an idea that applied with particular force to an artist like Wagner, who availed himself of several different arts in order to create his total artwork. If we were to question Wagner himself, we would encounter an interesting ambivalence, for on the one hand he tended in later life to stress his conviction that the “symphonic fabric” of his scores need not fear comparison with that of established symphonists, while at the same time he saw himself—as we have already observed—in the difficult role of the “improviser” who “belongs entirely to the moment” and who would be “lost” if he kept having to think of what came next.

  At this juncture we may begin to suspect what lies behind the charge of “dilettantism”: it is the listener’s fear of being forever at the mercy of the music instead of being able to watch its structure unfold in a logically understandable way. That the composer, too, is at the mercy of his music emerges from another remark by Wagner: “My music making is in fact like magic making, for I just cannot produce music coolly and mechanically. [. . .] In a mood of ecstasy I can lead my voices through the most hair-raising contortions without a moment’s hesitation; it all pours out so steadily, as if from a machine; but I can do nothing coolly.” And in this context he criticized that “donkey” Eduard Hanslick for “speaking of Beethoven’s naïveté” but “naturally” with “no idea of the wisdom of genius, which, though it comes and goes like lightning, is the highest there is.”4

  We must also dismiss as “donkeys” those listeners who not only do not like Wagner—for that is their right—but who accuse him of professional incompetence. Great art is incommensurable, and in that sense we can no more compare Wagner with Brahms or Schoenberg than we can compare Monet with Böcklin or Mondrian. Of course, Wagner’s musical language may make us feel comfortable or uncomfortable even without our examining his artistic intentions. But to the extent that we are willing to do so, then we need to confront the “poetic aim in all its important elements,” as Wagner explained to Liszt when setting forth his plans for the Ring.5 Of course, the audience does not need to understand every aspect of the plot but must be willing to experience music and action as related to one another and commit to this relationship without any preconceived ideas.

  In many respects this was already true of Wagner’s earlier works and even of Mozart’s operas. To take an example: listeners can truly enjoy the Letter Duet in Le nozze di Figaro only if they are able to appreciate the niceties of the plot. The Countess is dictating a love letter that Susanna writes down. It takes the form of a canzonetta designed to expose the Count as a philanderer. But we can also listen to this number as an “autonomous” duet: its charm and meaning are not entirely lost if we do so. In the Ring, too, there are many passages that make sense on a purely musical level and that can be enjoyed in purely orchestral arrangements. As we have already noted, Wagner had nothing against such “tone pictures.” While not replacing the stage action, they can at least help to recreate that action before the mind’s eye, reminding listeners of what has already happened.

  But this does not help us very much in the case of Das Rheingold, for here Wagner’s statement in A Communication to My Friends—“I shall write no more operas”6—reveals the work’s whole revolutionary force: not in relation to its overall compositional level, which is distinctly uneven when compared to the later parts of the Ring, but in regard to the innovative manner in which Wagner was able to think primarily in terms of the action and staging and leave behind him the traditional formal world of opera. His decision to forget all that he knew about current systems in the aesthetics of music and the theory of opera before he began work on the score of Das Rheingold is vaguely reminiscent of those Renaissance painters who were fully conversant with the new device of a central perspective, which they could handle to virtuosic effect, but who preferred to ignore it in favor of a medieval perspective, a technique well illustrated by Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, for example.7

  The prelude is an excellent illustration of this. Unlike the prelude to Lohengrin—to say nothing of the overture to Tannhäuser—it can no longer be described as an independent number that could be performed in the concert hall. As Wagner observed at the time of its first performance in 1869, it is completely subsumed by its function of constituting “the world’s lullaby,”8 which it does by dint of its wave-like motion, emerging, as it were, before the listener’s ears. A composer relying on his own experience of opera and concerned with his own reputation would probably not have risked opening his Ring cycle with a prelude lasting 136 bars of a single E-flat major chord to depict the flowing waters of the Rhine. But what we find here is not an egotistical artist but a medium that at the creation of the world knows only about the quality residing in this natural E-flat major. Wagner later claimed that the decisive impulse for his conception of this music came to him during a somnambulistic state after a strenuous walk through the hills surrounding La Spezia. Although this account ill accords with what we know about the outward circumstances of his life at this time, it has an inner truth to the extent that, as we have already noted, Wagner believed that an “insane somnambulistic state” was an integral part of the compositional process.

  But this mystification of the creative process was also useful in boosting Wagner’s courage: it was not he himself who was forcing his audience to concentrate on a single seething tonality for four whole minutes but the myth. Of course, the conscientious biographer, working to scholarly criteria, has a responsibility to himself and to his readers to get to the bottom of such acts of self-mystification on Wagner’s part, and yet this objectivity cannot preclude a sense of admiration for his subject’s achievements: how could he have summoned up the reserves of energy needed for such a gigantic project over a period of several decades if he were not constantly able to assure himself of his spiritual reserves? But, regardless of this, even those Wagnerians who are unable to read a note of music are fully aware that the naïveté of the prelude to Das Rheingold is achieved only by dint of the greatest sophistication and refinement. Initially, of course, the music cannot modulate in a harmonic sense because Wagner was convinced that such modulations are linked to changes in the underlying emotions within a poetic-musical period. All the more takes place, therefore, in the fields of rhythm and meter, thereby reflecting the arbitrary moods of nature.

  What Wagner has created here is an expression not of “the amorphous,” as Adorno claimed was the case,9 but of the impulsive momentum of life, which we can sense in the incessant flow of the Rhine presented in a highly structured form as a sequence of symmetrical groups of bars. But Wagner has also produced an elaborate balance between rest and motion: the pedal point on E-flat that is maintained from start to finish and the triadic figures that rise and fall in changing configurations, while remaining thematically undefined, provide an element of rest within the “billowing waters” that are mentioned in the stage directions. Little rhythmic and metrical shifts and the imperceptible increase in dynamics ensure that the flowing motion is constantly revitalized.10 Vitality is not the same as chaos, of course, for the clear metrical order and tendency to structure the music in four-bar periods ensures that the apparently infinite space in which Wagner begins his act of creation in E-flat major is soon reduced to the manageable confines of the bed of the river Rhine.

  It made sense, therefore, that in his 1976 production of the Ring Patrice Chéreau had the waves of the river beating against the foot of a hydroelectric dam, for this pointer to modern technology makes it plain that Wagner treats his orchestra like a complex apparatus that does not simply provide an echo of nature, as suggested by George Steiner, but actually produces it in an extremely up-to-date way, without, however, giving away the details of that production process. Even Wagner’s own audiences were unable, of course, to hear such scenes of nature in an entirely naïve way but enjoyed the successful phantasmagoria whose tendency to imply hypothetical alt
ernatives Adorno was to find so troubling.

  For Wagner, conversely, music was not “true” or “untrue” in the sense understood by Adorno. For him, all that mattered was whether or not it was suited to the drama, its aim being to convey the contents of the drama to the audience’s feelings. In terms of the Ring, Wagner was enough of a dialectician to know that at the start of Das Rheingold nature appears to be unspoiled only from the standpoint of the Rhinedaughters, whereas the truth of the matter is that it was violated long ago, when Wotan hewed a branch from the World Ash Tree in order to make a spear for himself. The tree then withered, while the god continued to delude himself into believing that the runes carved into the shaft of his spear might guarantee his lasting rule by dint of the one-sided contract that they enshrine. And so Wotan, too, knows that the ululating sounds of the Rhinedaughters guarding their gold are a passing idyll, throwing a spotlight on a world that has long since lost its innocence.

  Does this means that the Rhinedaughters have already left their natural innocence so far behind them that it is possible to present them onstage as whores, an interpretation that is now the rule rather than the exception? (In his Essen production of Das Rheingold in 2008 Tilman Knabe even thought it appropriate to have the Rhinedaughters couple with Wotan during the prelude.) Here we have an example of the narrow line that is trodden by modern directors, for on the one hand it makes eminent sense to emphasize the actuality of Wagner’s characters by placing them in a modern context, even to the point of alienation, while at the same time today’s audiences need to see primeval, archetypal figures who affect us in the depths of our collective unconscious.

  If the Ring contains characters who defy a modern presentation, then they are the two triadic groups of the Rhinedaughters and the Norns, and the figure of Erda. No one has power over them, and although they are ultimately powerless in the face of the power struggles taking place in the world, they are also the only creatures whose timeless existence is unaffected by the great conflagration that engulfs the earth at the end of Götterdämmerung. This aspect of the work is well illustrated by Wotan’s encounter with Erda, in the course of which Wotan—“the sum total of the [failed] intelligence of the present” who “resembles us to a tee”11—conjures up “the eternal world’s primeval Vala,” as Wagner called her in one of the preliminary drafts for the Ring, only for him to dismiss her again and send her back into the primeval depths from which she had emerged.12

  But let us return to the Rhinedaughters. We may accept Ruth Berghaus’s view of them as children who cruelly exploit their charms,13 but we can also see them as naïvely animalistic women who have no desire to see a “hairy, hunchbacked dwarf” as the father of their offspring, an interpretation that the present author would prefer to resist. But they are emphatically not whores who sell their bodies for money. By contrast, Alberich is not only the natural faun who spends his life pursuing nymphs, but he is also Wotan’s shadowy alter ego who gains more from power than from love, and if this power is insufficient to win him love, he can still use “pleasure” to assure him of world dominion. At the same time, we may share Dieter Schickling’s belief that Alberich is the leader of a proletariat of dwarfs eager to destroy the ruling gods. As such, he too is guilty of an abuse of power, but he is the only main character to survive the final Götterdämmerung, for, according to Schickling’s surprising logic, “Wagner wanted Alberich to survive as a liberator.”14

  In November 1848, buoyed up by his mood of revolutionary optimism, Wagner had ended his prose draft The Nibelung Myth with the words: “Loosed be the Nibelungs’ thralldom, the Ring no more shall bind them. Not Alberich shall receive it; no more shall he enslave you, but he himself be free as ye.”15 When viewed from a nonpolitical standpoint, Alberich is ultimately a despised underdog who, according to Chéreau, would “probably not have cursed love” and traded it for power “if he had not been provoked by the Rhinedaughters.”16 This reading receives some support from an entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary: “R. tells me that he once felt every sympathy for Alberich, who represents the ugly person’s longing for beauty.”17 It may be added here that Wagner himself does not seem to have toyed with the idea of depicting Alberich as a downtrodden Jew, a view that gained currency only after his death. At all events, a further entry in Cosima’s diary for November 17, 1882, reads: “This morning we went through all the characters of the R. des Nibelungen from the point of view of race: the gods white; the dwarfs yellow (Mongols); the blacks the Ethiopians; Loge the half-caste.”18

  If we see this largely whimsical comment against the background of the aforementioned interpretations of Alberich, we shall see that it makes no sense to seek to examine every last detail of the dwarf’s character, still less to reduce it to a few constants, for Wagner’s art was such that he could create characters which, although grounded in myth, reveal such varied features that it is impossible to get a handle on them. Nor should we attempt to do so. Their true lebensraum is the music—music which, for all its mimetic flexibility, is rarely garishly obvious. In a word, it does not tell us how to view a particular character. This art can be understood only by those listeners willing to follow it step by step, like a child implicitly believing the person recounting the fairy tale and being amply rewarded in consequence. Readers who regard this as an imposition will presumably concede that the narrative flow of a Verdi opera guides them in much the same way, the major difference being that Verdi’s characters are more clearly drawn, Otello, for example, being neither able nor willing to stand comparison with Alberich or Wotan in terms of his multifaceted personality. And this is true, no matter how subtle the singer’s portrayal may be.

  This also lays bare a fundamental difference between the two composers, for whereas Verdi regarded the stage as the self-evident setting for a performance of his opera, Wagner felt that the theater was no more than a makeshift solution. Of course, not even his music theater can survive without a space in which the stage illusion can unfold, a space enclosed within everyday painted flats and set pieces. But it is the music that creates the true space within which these music dramas are played out, the music that offers the acoustic space in which the singing actors can “improvise” their roles. And there is no part of the Ring that illustrates this point as clearly as the “preliminary evening” of Das Rheingold. Of course, the prelude is intended to create the illusion of flowing water, an illusion bound up with the concept of time. More important, however, is the creation of a backdrop of sound against which the Rhinedaughters can act. From this point of view it is immediately clear why Wagner increasingly reduces the initially vast space in which this world of sound is created, an aim he achieves by means of increasingly precise rhythms: the orchestral action moves from the wide-angle shot of the opening to the spotlight that focuses on the Rhinedaughters and their initial dialogue.

  The first words that the Rhinedaughters sing are “Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle.” They show that the element of improvisation to which we have just referred not only concerns Wagner’s general demand to his singing actors that they should bring the greatest possible animation to their roles; it is also meant to be taken literally. Neither dramaturgically nor in terms of the work’s compositional history is there any formal precedent for the vocal writing for Woglinde, Wellgunde, and Floßhilde, for it does not launch the action in the way that we find with Mozart’s accompanied recitative, for example, or with a crowd scene à la Lohengrin. Rather, the Rhinedaughters talk among themselves, just as they have been doing since the dawn of time—and presumably they will continue to do so after the action of the Ring has come to an end. Wagner needed new compositional resources for such a “conversation”: Woglinde’s “Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle” reflects an ancient, primeval language, which is why it is purely pentatonic, without the halftone steps that are an integral part of the major-minor system.

  In general, the Rhinedaughters are permitted to revel in natural sounds—derived from the harmonic series—as their vocal line is almost enti
rely free from individual features, representing, as it does, the principle of unity in triunity. Soon, however, the focus narrows yet further, when a loner—Alberich—introduces a note of unease. Only in the course of the later action does this loner acquire any proper physical contours, although even here, at the very beginning, he is already associated with a number of characteristic motivic particles. By the time he sings the words “Garstig glatter glitschriger Glimmer! wie gleit’ ich aus!” (Sleek as slime the slope of the slate is! I slant and slide!), the whole scene has struck a different note and focuses on the disgruntlement of the dwarf as he seeks in vain to capture the Rhinedaughters. He now operates within a totally different set of sonorities notable for their occluded orchestral tone colors and disjointed, dissonant motifs—this is in striking contrast to the “organic” naturalness of the earlier part of the scene. These “disruptive tones,” as Tobias Janz has called them,19 are among Wagner’s “motifs of presentiment” even if they are not leitmotifs in the strict sense of the term: listeners experience this initial “disturbance of the existing harmony” as portending threatening events that are yet to be seen onstage.20 (All of this is a small but typical pointer to the oft-mentioned affinity between Wagner’s compositional techniques and those associated with film music.)

  The very way in which Wagner notated Alberich’s vocal line implies a particular type of delivery for which there was no precedent at that time: although the traditional accompanied recitative had proved itself over the generations as a means of conveying dramatic dialogue, it offered little help when it came to an almost naturalistic treatment of language, ascribing to each performer a specific idiom geared to the particular situation onstage. (We might be inclined to call it “prose melody” if, in Opera and Drama, Wagner had not explicitly rejected the kind of vocal style implied by this term.) Compositional elements such as these (music example 16), being naturalistic and illustrative, ran counter to audiences’ traditional experience of opera inasmuch as they were as new to Wagner as they were to his singers. Even before he had started work on the score of the Ring, he explained to one of his friends in Dresden, Theodor Uhlig, that he was setting foot on uncharted territory: “I’m telling you—the musical phrases are formed around these verses and periods without my needing to make the least effort; everything springs up out of the ground like rank vegetation. The beginning is already sketched out in my head; also a few graphic motifs such as Fafner.”21 A few years later—in his 1861 essay “Music of the Future”—Wagner struck a more theoretical note, arguing that within the context of the drama, the music must develop “an entirely new capacity for speech,” for this alone would allow it “to affect our feelings with such certainty that our powers of reason, being based on logic, are confused and disarmed.”22 In this context, the twenty-first-century composer Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf has spoken of “local criteria.”23 Although they are by no means lacking in logic, they are effective only in the light of the drama’s specific situation.