Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  The use of chromaticisms and enharmonic modulations had long been established by Wagner’s day, even as modest a composer as Schubert taking us to the remote regions of E-double-flat major in the opening movement of his late Piano Sonata in B-flat Major. In order to simplify things for himself and the pianist he turns this E double flat into D-flat and treats the following C double flat as B-flat major, so that he is already back in the tonic by the start of the recapitulation. But this point perfectly illustrates the difference between Schubert and Wagner, for whereas Schubert—only sixteen years older than the composer of Tristan und Isolde—explored the major-minor system in the certainty that he could end up back in the home key when the time came, Wagner places almost unbearable strain on the leading notes of this major-minor system: in the spirit of his “endless melody” they are not resolved in the traditional way (or at least only at particularly striking points in the score) but taken in the direction of a new leading-note chord combination which for its part leads to another such new combination, and so on. This procedure is well illustrated by the opening bars of the prelude, with its famous “Tristan” chord (music example 23).

  23. The opening bars of the prelude to act 1 of Tristan und Isolde.

  Scores of books and articles have been written by scholars keen to prove or disprove the theory that this chord can be analyzed in terms of traditional harmony. Or should we treat it, rather, as sui generis?72 The obvious response is that it depends on the analyst’s standpoint. A more substantial answer might be that the “Tristan” chord is just one of a whole range of examples in which Wagner achieves a precarious balance between psychological insight and musical logic. According to the contemporary composer Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, the score is “a miracle of existential and emotional urgency and formal concision.”73

  In order to prove this point, we do not necessarily need complex examples that make little sense to the layman. Even the monophonic “traurige Weise” (sad tune) that the Shepherd plays on his pipe—nowadays normally an english horn—at the start of the final act speaks for itself (music example 24).74 Although this passage clearly reworks elements of the traditional ranz des vaches that Wagner will have heard on his many walks through the Swiss Alps,75 it is not intended to provide any sense of naïve local color redolent of folk music. It is possible, of course, to describe the effect of these forty-two bars by recourse to technical categories and analyze it as an attempt to render the natural language of music unrecognizable by means of arbitrary melodic writing, rhythmic and metrical freedom, and harmonic ambiguity. In this context Thomas Grey has noted the combination of the “artificial naïveté of the folk-like material with the highly modern, ‘sentimental’ artifice of the Tristan idiom itself.”76 We may also agree with Carl Dahlhaus when he argues that in the spaciousness of the pipe’s notes Wagner’s “endless melody” becomes conscious of “its archaic origins.”77 As listeners, finally, we may also feel that we are hearing the “traurige Weise” through the ears of the dying Tristan before he himself recognizes in its strains the tragic “primal sound and basic note of his life.”78

  24. The english horn solo in bars 52–77 of act 3 of Tristan und Isolde.

  But none of this is of much use in helping us to put into words the underlying gesture and character of the “traurige Weise,” a passage admired by Proust, among others, in his magnum opus, for the sounds of the Shepherd’s pipe express more than merely the idea of time standing still, the desolation of the landscape, and the unbearable torments of a man incapable of either living or dying, even if they fall short of evoking the “apotheosis of the Void,” as Mario Bortolotto has claimed.79 Rather, the listener is aware of a hidden optimism that characterizes the carefree nature of the Shepherd playing his pipe, a man who sympathizes with Tristan’s fate but who is by no means obsessed with death: Tristan will die, but the sounds of the pipe will continue to be heard, embodying Ernst Bloch’s “principle of hope” almost more convincingly than Isolde’s “Transfiguration.” Proust describes this passage as follows:

  Before the great orchestral movement that precedes the return of Isolde, it is the work itself that has attracted toward itself the half-forgotten air of a shepherd’s pipe. And, no doubt, just as the orchestra swells and surges at the approach of the ship, when it takes hold of those notes of the pipe, transforms them, imbues them with its own intoxication, breaks their rhythm, clarifies their tonality, accelerates their movement, expands their instrumentation, so no doubt Wagner himself was filled with joy when he discovered in his memory the shepherd’s tune, incorporated it in his work, gave it its full wealth of meaning. This joy moreover never forsakes him. In him, however great the melancholy of the poet, it is consoled, transcended.80

  Of course, the mood remains ambivalent: Wagner allows his fatally wounded hero to become one with nature, which, like him, suffers and longs for redemption. “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” we read in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (8:22). And despair and hope is interwoven in an altogether unique way here, as Tristan hovers on the cusp of a return to a world marked in turn by suffering and hope.

  Wagner admired Dürer’s copper engraving Melencolia I, a copy of which he owned in the form of a reproduction left by Nietzsche on one of his visits to Tribschen in June 1870. Looking at the print, he was moved to draw a comparison between Dürer and Bach: “Both [were] endowed with this rich and mysterious imagination, dispensing with beauty but achieving sublimity, which is greater than all beauty.”81 It is the ambivalence of the precise detail of the craftsmanship and the fantastical imagination of the content that even today continues to provide a link between Dürer’s engraving and Wagner’s “traurige Weise,” which share the same quality of melancholy. Perhaps we could speak of a mystic fire that lights up the darkness of melancholy and offers us the certainty that in spite of everything the earth will continue to turn on its axis. Only the siren call and its repeated echo (music example 25) allow us to glimpse this. But we do not need to return quite so far back in the past to see links between music and the visual arts, for many of the Harlequin figures that Picasso painted during his Cubist period treat the subject of melancholy with the same ambivalence of precision and ambiguity.

  25. Bar 56 of the prelude to act 3 of Tristan und Isolde.

  One of Wagner’s greatest admirers was Richard Strauss, a composer inimitable in the field of illustrative music. But while Strauss’s naturalism tended in the direction of materialism, in Wagner’s case realism consorts with metaphysics independently of the action and the poem. Thomas Mann knew very well why his enthusiasm for Wagner extended beyond the heroic and rhapsodic side of the composer and embraced little gems like the “traurige Weise.” By using a clearly and intelligibly articulated melody in which one note follows another with strict precision in order to throw a sharp light on the scene while leaving that situation indescribable, he brought together being and existence, essence and existence in an altogether inspired way, creating a link more succinct than any poet could have done.

  Mann’s virtual opposite was Martin Heidegger, who in his book on Nietzsche complains about music’s increase in power:

  The dominance of music is intentional, bringing with it the dominance of a state of pure emotion: the raging and rutting of the senses, the great convulsion, the blissful horror of melting away in enjoyment, the sinking into the “bottomless sea of harmony,” the plunging into a frenzy of passion, and dissolving in pure feeling as a form of redemption: the “experience” as such becomes decisive. The work is no more than a stimulant designed to excite that experience. All that it depicts is intended to create the impression of something superficial, a façade aimed at leaving an impression and creating an effect by churning up the emotions—in short, “theatre.”82

  Aimed exclusively at Wagner, Heidegger’s rhetoric anticipates comments made a generation later by the German writer Peter Härtling, who was no less critical of Tristan und Isolde:

/>   The monomaniacal music distracts me and fails to explain the images. It is long gone, overreaching itself, its hideously glorious excesses reminding me yet again that it is open to any interpretation, any mystification, and every form of megalomania. Those people who unthinkingly and unresistingly join forces with it just want to puff themselves up like the diminutive Saxon.83

  Is this really the case? Of course, this particular Wagner existed—a self-publicist who stage-managed his own life. And equally certainly his music contains floodtides of sound that wash away the difference between singers and instrumentalists and turn the musicians into one vast orchestra. Wagner himself speaks of “the ceaseless play of musical motifs, emerging, unfolding, uniting, severing, blending anew, waxing, waning, battling with each other, at last embracing and well-nigh engulfing one another.” And he invites his listeners to reflect that “these motifs have to express a life of the emotions that ranges from the extreme desire for bliss to the most resolute longing for death and therefore requires a harmonic development and an independent motion such as could never be planned with this kind of variety in any purely symphonic piece.”84

  At this point it is less Wagner the sorcerer whom we should be admiring than Wagner the constructor, a figure who once advised his later adversary Eduard Hanslick: “Do not underestimate the power of reflection; the unconsciously created work of art belongs to periods remote from our own: the work of art of the most advanced period of culture can be produced only by a process of conscious creation.”85 Even if Wagner was himself responsible for promoting the myth that he composed intuitively, it is impossible to ignore the element of rigorous planning that went into the composition of Tristan und Isolde. Indeed, it is enough to note the consistency with which the composer retained the same number of bars in his orchestral sketch and full score as he had already employed in his very first composition sketch to appreciate this point.86 And just as everything is in its rightful place here in this initial sketch, the individual scenes likewise attest to a rare degree of “structural cohesion and common ground in terms of their motivic substance.”87 This is confirmed even by a writer like Eric Chafe, who sees Wagner through the eyes of a scholar versed in Bach’s music and who has examined in detail the Love Duet in act 2.88

  Even a writer as critical of Wagner as Adorno might not have dissented from this view, although he would undoubtedly have dismissed as specious and superficial Wagner’s motivic writing and grasp of structure when seen against the background of symphonic developments in the Viennese classical tradition. But instead of taking his cue from Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Schoenberg, he might also have considered Verdi, where the problem of symphonic development through lack of any corresponding substance simply does not arise. And whereas Wagner’s supporters have little reason to wax enthusiastic about a “symphonic opera,”89 the champions of “absolute music” have even less need to demand that the symphonic writing of the musical drama should display any sense of inner unity.

  The final scene of Christoph Marthaler’s 2005 Bayreuth production of Tristan und Isolde. Tristan dies alone in a hospital ward in an image of extreme sobriety, leaving the music alone to provide the emotional charge with which Wagner invested this scene. The question is whether the scene is enhanced or reduced in consequence. (Photograph by courtesy of the Richard Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth, Zustiftung Wolfgang Wagner. Photographer: Jochen Quast. WS6Q4045-JQ.)

  Nietzsche will hardly have described Tristan und Isolde as “the actual opus metaphysicum of all art” simply because he saw the work as the ne plus ultra of “absolute music.” Rather, he was attempting to sum up a work whose “insatiable sweet longing for the mysteries of night and death” and “mystery of death in life” are so “distant from life” that it almost inevitably acquires a metaphysical dimension and in doing so raises questions that lie beyond our empirical world. He called this “philosophizing in sound,” thereby cultivating his own particular view of the total artwork.90 But however we choose to define this “total artwork,” it remains a fact that one hundred and fifty years after the work’s first performance, it is no longer the grandiose idea of finally granting equality to music alongside its sister arts but, at best, an aesthetic concept that still has to defend itself against the charge of dilettantism.

  In terms of the respective weighting of the action and the music, I agree with Wagner on this point. Although he laid so much emphasis on the libretto that he had two thousand copies of it printed before the score was published, he still regarded the music as the truly exceptional aspect of the work—even more so than in the case of the Ring. It was above all in the music that he was able to “push himself to the limit” and usher in a revolution in the history of composition. For the philosopher Bryan Magee, the subject of the work—“the fundamentalities of feeling and experiencing and relating”—is, as such, something that is genuinely musical: “So it is now the music that is the drama.”91

  From this point of view, it seems pointless to examine the plot in detail and draw attention to possible inconsistencies or explore alternatives of a philosophical or dramaturgical kind. The subject of Eros and Thanatos is now so all-pervasive in any number of impressive variants in stage plays, poems, and novels that it is little more than an intellectual game to ask, as Slavoj Žižek does, “What if, toward the end of Act I, when Tristan and Isolde discover their love for each other and simultaneously acknowledge the hopelessness of their situation, they were to drink the cup of poison?”92 Such games can ultimately have only one aim, which is to score points off Wagner. What if—instead—we were to accept the plot of Tristan und Isolde as it is and if, above all, we were to examine the music from an intellectual standpoint? This music remains so unique that Alban Berg, when confronted by a precocious anti-Wagnerian, retorted: “Yes, you can talk like that—you’re not a musician.”93

  All that has to be effortfully distilled from the libretto and plot finds wordless expression in the music. It is the music that guarantees transcendence in a godless opus metaphysicum of all art, the music that stands for the unfathomable nature of human experience and the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure,”94 the music whose sheer lack of moderation reflects the violation of the rules of self-control, the music that runs the whole gamut of emotion from megalomania to fatal despair, the music that describes the continuing destruction of the personality and yet proclaims the “principle of hope,” and the music, finally, that illustrates both the constant fluctuation of all living things and the physical theory of entropy, which describes the heat death caused by the exhaustion of all kinetic energy.

  During his years in Bayreuth, Wagner referred to Tristan und Isolde as “a mystical pit, giving pleasure to individuals.”95 It would be wrong to criticize him for patting himself on the back in this way, for his remark is related to a work which, unlike most of his other music dramas, requires no ideological correction. We may choose to reject its over-inflated language, or else we may agree with the Wagner director Hans Neuenfels that “most of the writings that seek to interpret Wagner amount to little more than an expression of the fear, shored up by information, that if we allow a composer or poet to get too close to us, we may end up feeling confusion, devastation, even rapture—and yet it must be said in advance that there is no art without conflict and no work of art without an anarchistic impulse.”96

  A Word about Ernst Bloch

  Now we advance into ourselves, just as quietly as deeply. The others are agitated and always lead back out again. Tristan and Isolde have fled the bustling day, they do not act. It is our own inmost dreaming, to be found where words and steps no longer hasten. It is we who go along, we obscure ourselves chromatically, we move in a state of yearning and float toward the dream taking shape in the advancing night.1

  These are sentences of an altogether expressionist power, and they have affected readers—Wagnerians and non-Wagnerians alike—over several generations. And yet these comments are without any musicological or aesthetic relevance to t
he matter in hand. Rather, their author—Ernst Bloch—avails himself of a series of powerful metaphors. And it is these alone which, according to Umberto Eco, are capable of producing the shock that we need to bring us closer to the work that we are trying to interpret. And, their vagueness notwithstanding, they are not as noncommittal as they may appear at first sight to Bloch’s critics. If we were to attempt to apply them to Parsifal, La forza del destino or Die Zauberflöte, we would see how specific they are. First published in 1923, The Spirit of Utopia is an early work that deals with music in general. Allotted a “primacy in what is otherwise unsayable,”2 music, for Bloch, had a particular metaphysical dignity. This seems to suggest an affinity with Schopenhauer, whom Bloch nonetheless criticizes for his “utterly false definition of music as ‘Will generally.’” For although such a definition may “apply to Wagner here and there,”3 its regressive tendency denies the utopian element in all great music. Such music is part of a constant journey undertaken “in the darkness of the lived moment,” the “docking of our dream boat with ourselves.” By dint of its “central magic,” music allows us to encounter ourselves, an encounter that is otherwise restricted to a utopian world.4 The overheated language of this radical return to basics may be deemed untimely, but it certainly offers little scope for listeners anxious to dismiss Wagner’s music as musty or antiquated. Above all, it invites us to listen to this music closely.

  Bloch was anything but an uncritical Wagnerian content to luxuriate in the music’s sonorities. In his late essay—the austerely titled “Paradoxes and the Pastorale in Wagner’s Music”—he adopts a distinctly wayward approach to this music by avoiding all reference to passages that might be described as sentimental or mawkish. Instead, he displays an astonishing knowledge of these scores by throwing light on the paradoxes that they contain and by examining the “seemingly incidental” and “surprising,” in other words, passages that “transmit a sense of surprise even after repeated hearings, often a delight in the fragment, and an abundance of tricks, capers and subtleties that go against the ordinary grain.”5 Bloch is no longer concerned with Wagner’s “total artwork” but with “musico-scenic subtleties” and “incidental episodes” that reveal how “a Wagner who had been all too clandestine obtained his freedom.”6