Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

Once again he reacted to his apparently hopeless situation with an impressive show of strength, neither obsessing over the completion of a work that threatened to be stillborn nor abandoning the plan for good. Instead, he launched into a large-scale exercise that sought to clarify the situation for himself and others, an exercise that was to go down in history as Opera and Drama. In a total of 641 printed pages he explained to the world where his problems lay and how he planned to solve them. Once again the “necessity” that he had invoked so often in the writings of his revolutionary period proved to be the mother of invention.

  Described by Richard Strauss as “the book of books about music,”7 Opera and Drama is undoubtedly one of the most important writings on the theory of music to emerge from the nineteenth century, even though Nietzsche, while admiring certain aspects, was critical of a “disturbing” quality, an “irregularity of rhythm,” and the suggestion that Wagner was “speaking in the presence of enemies.”8 Thomas Mann, by contrast, was not afraid of Wagner’s more challenging texts and praised the “astonishing perspicacity and intellectual vigour” of Opera and Drama, while not overlooking that “there is something difficult to read” in this and Wagner’s other prose writings, and “a certain woolliness and stiffness.”9 And it is undoubtedly true that the reader needs to warm to Wagner’s disjointed and eclectic style to appreciate the uncommonly creative intelligence that lies behind the text. Shortly after completing it, Wagner read it aloud to an invited audience in Zurich, apparently with such conviction that with each passing day his listeners were increasingly fired by the theses that he was expounding.

  Even without a recording of the occasion, one can sense the passion with which Wagner—drawing now on the colorful language of populist demagoguery, now on convoluted philological and theoretical arguments—brought home to his listeners the “error in opera as a genre,” whereby “a means of expression (music) has been made the end, while the end of expression (the drama) has been made a means.”10 In the Attic tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which Wagner imagined constituted a unity of words, music, and gesture, everything had still had its well-ordered place, whereas modern opera had been turned increasingly into a vocal spectacle against the background of commercial interests: Italian opera was a “wanton,” her French sister a “coquette,” and German opera a “prude.”11

  True, there had been countercurrents—notably with Gluck and Mozart. And, as we have seen, Wagner regarded his own works as a part of the Beethovenian tradition: in the Ninth Symphony, above all, Beethoven had restored the balance between words and music after music had reached “the pinnacle of madness” by wanting “not only to bear, but also to beget.” In the case of the Ninth Symphony, Schiller’s ode was to be regarded as the “fertilizing seed” that “supplies the musical organism with its ability to give birth.” This line of argument reflects Wagner’s general view of music as a “woman” who needs the “poet’s power of begetting” in order to be effective within “the drama of the future.”12

  Conceptually speaking, this “drama of the future” is rooted in the past—namely, in myth, which Wagner famously defined as being “true for all time, its content, however densely compressed, inexhaustible throughout the ages.”13 Since this myth sprang from “the folk’s common poetic power,”14 the Greek poet had but a single task—that of interpretation. Wagner cites the myth of Oedipus as an example of this process, a myth that “presents us with an intelligible picture of the whole history of humankind from the beginnings of society to the inevitable downfall of the state.”15 Oedipus’s daughter Antigone buries her brother Polyneices even though King Creon of Thebes has forbidden her to do so. Instead of placing reasons of state above the “purely human nature” that demanded the observance of certain religious rites, she sacrifices her life and ultimately touches the heart of Creon, who is “the state personified”: “Wounded deep within, the state fell crashing to the ground to become in death a human being.—Holy Antigone! I call on you! Let your banner wave in order that beneath it we may destroy and redeem!”16

  These are Wagner’s “old” ideas, which on this occasion are expressed not only in highly concentrated form but in a highly emotive manner. At the same time, however, there is already a clear indication of the ideas underpinning the Ring. Moreover, the third part of Opera and Drama includes an outline of Wagner’s thoughts on music drama in that he begins by retracing the journey that he has taken in his earlier works before sketching out his “drama of the future.” In terms of his concept of a total artwork with religious connotations, this drama would take up the tradition of ancient Greek tragedy, but otherwise it would go its own way. The function of the Greek chorus, for example, had been “to express the inexpressible,” but this function would in future be entrusted to the orchestra.17 The orchestra turns listeners into “constant accessories to the deepest secret of the poet’s aim” by offering them motifs of “presentiment” and “reminiscence”—these were later to become known as leitmotifs—as “emotional signposts” to guide them “through the whole labyrinthine design of the drama.”18

  It was this idea that lay behind Wagner’s later comment to Cosima while he was working on the Funeral March in Götterdämmerung:

  I have composed a Greek chorus, but a chorus which will be sung, so to speak, by the orchestra; after Siegfried’s death, while the scene is being changed, the Siegmund theme will be played, as if the chorus were saying: “This was his father”; then the sword motive; and finally his own theme; then the curtain goes up, Gutrune enters, thinking she has heard his horn. How could words ever make the impression that these solemn themes, in their new form, will evoke? Music always expresses the direct present.19

  To the extent that these motifs of presentiment and reminiscence are interwoven with each other throughout the whole of the drama, communicating with one another in this way, they ensure that the action appears not as intellectually arid—Wagner, striking a critical note, calls it “novelistic”—but as something sustained by a continuous floodtide of emotion.

  It is above all the orchestra, therefore, that ensures that the drama is experienced as a “unified artistic form” “bound together as a coherent whole” and prevents listeners from having to work out the message for themselves by means of elaborate thought processes. In this way two levels of understanding interlock: the conceptual post hoc rationalization and the emotional response that accompanies the aesthetic experience at the instant it occurs. In his later writings Wagner was to draw an explicit distinction between his own compositional aims and those of contemporary symphonists, arguing that although a Brahms symphony might invite its listeners to experience it emotionally at the time of its performance and afterward to think about what they have heard, these two processes are unconnected, for it is the symphony’s form alone that can be grasped conceptually, whereas feeling does not know what it can feel or why but is merely carried along aimlessly by the waves of the music. In Wagner’s eyes this is a kind of music that lacks a message, an example of decadent art.

  Greek tragedy had such a message, which is why it alone could serve as a conceptual model for the musical drama that had to be created anew. Readers familiar with Wagner’s orchestra, either by seeing it in front of them or by conjuring up its sounds in their mind’s ear, will find Wagner’s comparison with a Greek chorus farfetched and certainly abstract, but we may also regard it as an original metaphor that illustrates the extent to which the innovation that Wagner was striving to achieve was not merely compositional and technical, perhaps as the result of some progress within the material itself, but a new way of thinking about the music theater as such. His comparison between the orchestra and the Greek chorus illustrates two different points at once: the institution of “music theater” was intended to present dramas that were musical but still dramas. Although the music may be of secondary importance, it is nevertheless vastly enhanced in value, for, like the Greek chorus, it plays onstage, albeit invisibly. In short, Wagner’s orchestra no longer ser
ves to accompany the dramatis personae but is itself a dramatis persona.

  Italian bel canto opera would continue to exist, of course, in spite of Wagner’s aesthetic intervention; but no one outside its immediate sphere of influence would be able to maintain the naïve belief that opera functioned according to the simple rule of thumb of “plot + singing + orchestral accompaniment = opera.” Instead, Wagner would find audiences more or less willing to believe his claim that in music theater, too, there must be a grandly conceived dramatic idea to which action, music, and staging must be subordinated at every moment of the onstage drama. In Wagner’s eyes opera was a hybrid form that could mutate into a total artwork only if it adopted this course.

  This approach clearly demanded that singers be vocally less self-regarding and less egotistical, a demand which in Wagner’s day was far from self-evident. And to the extent that singers gained in importance as astute and credible performers, they must step back from their musically leading role in favor of an orchestra that was not only more “knowing” in respect of the plot’s mysterious profundities but which also had at its disposal a far great musical variety and richness. It is no accident that Wagner entrusted his leitmotifs to the orchestra first and foremost.

  As we noted in the case of Rienzi, the singers continued nonetheless to be central to the action as visible embodiments of Wagner’s grand idea, proclaiming the message of his myth, their singing elevated to the status of the “life-giving focus of the dramatic expression.”20 At the time of Opera and Drama Wagner was not yet entirely clear in his own mind about the details of this singing, which he described as “verse melody,” and even while he was working on the score of Das Rheingold he continued to experiment with the different possibilities of treating the melodic line as recitative, arioso, and song. In the case of two other formal elements, conversely, he already had firm ideas: Stabreim, or alliteration, and what he termed the “poetic-musical period.” The former imposes a formal structure on the libretto, while the latter guarantees the musical form of the work.

  It is easy to ridicule Wagner’s use of Stabreim, and there is little doubt that if the Ring were declaimed as a spoken drama over the course of four separate evenings, even dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerians would find this something of a trial. At the same time, however, alliterative lines, whether formulated with serious or satirical intent, tend to engrave themselves on our memories. Who, after reading Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, can forget the words of Diane Houpflé, a novelist married to a factory owner, as the dashing lift attendant helps her out of her mink coat: “You’d undress me, doughty drudge?” There is no doubt that Mann was consciously striking a note halfway between seriousness and parody, and the reader who wearies of Wagner’s use of alliterative meters might well apply this same attitude to their use in the Ring—while not ignoring the masterly and even coruscating examples with which the libretto teems and which impressed even a realist writer like Gottfried Keller: “Ihrem Ende eilen sie zu, / die so stark im Bestehen sich wähnen”: thus runs Loge’s mocking commentary as the gods enter their new fortress of Valhalla. The only English translator to seek to reproduce every aspect of Wagner’s meter and alliterative patterns was Alfred Forman, whose version of these lines reads: “To their end they fleetly are led, / who believe themselves founded for ever.”

  No less striking is Fricka’s critique of male hegemony: “Was ist euch Harten / doch heilig und werth, / giert ihr Männer nach Macht!” (What to you men / for worship is meet, / when your minds are on might?) Or take Wotan’s later remonstration:

  Als junger Liebe

  Lust mir verblich,

  verlangte nach Macht mein Muth:

  von jäher Wünsche

  Wüthen gejagt,

  gewann ich mir die Welt.

  [When love its young / delight had allayed, / I longed in my mind for might, / and worked, in reinless / reach of my will, / to win myself the world.]

  He sums up his sense of frustration and resignation in the lines:

  Zum Ekel find’ ich

  ewig nur mich

  in Allem was ich erwirke!

  Das And’re, das ich ersehne,

  das And’re erseh’ ich nie.

  [I see to sickness / always myself / at last wherever I labour! / I waste for what shall be other—/ no way what is other I win.]

  It is fair enough to mock the Rhinedaughters’ “Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle” (Weia! Waga! Waver, thou water), for these children of nature would have done far better to lecture Alberich on the bane of gold than play word games based on the Old High German Heilawâc. We can, of course, speak of “Teutonic” diction in this context, at least if we eschew the note of mockery that usually accompanies this term, for the “Teutonic” element in Wagner’s verse is not the result of some nationalistic, hyper-German whimsy but the product of literary studies and conceptual experimentation of quite exceptional breadth and depth. Wagner specifically described his librettos as “poems,” determined, as he was, that they should not be regarded as prose, for in his eyes there was something redolent of the modern novel about prose. It was, he believed, simply arbitrary. If his poems were to be universally understood, they needed the formal element of verse to round them off. He rejected end rhyme in which the final syllables of two or more lines rhyme with each other according to more or less complex verse patterns, arguing that this was a purely formal device and pointing out that few poems escape from the constraints of such a scheme, whereby it is not the meaning that produces the rhyme but the rhyme that results in the meaning. Writing from the standpoint of a German medievalist, the Swiss scholar Max Wehrli criticized end rhyme as a “game with sonority, independent of meaning and concerned only with imposing a second structure on the poetic text.”21 Of course, it is clear from countless examples of post-medieval literature that verse based on end rhyme can produce magnificent poetry. And, theoretically at least, Wagner could also have fallen back on the verse forms of Greek tragedy, including, for instance, the iambic trimeters that Schiller uses in a number of scenes in his stage play The Maid of Orleans.

  But Wagner took a conscious decision to use Old Icelandic Stabreim, which gave way to the end rhyme of early medieval hymnology in the wake of the Christianization of Europe, only to re-enter the field of interest of nineteenth-century philologists and scholars. Wagner’s attempt to restore it to high office represents an implicit critique of the manner in which early Germanic subjects had either been suppressed altogether or typically depicted and experienced. Norse myth is characterized by its unity of action, feeling, and thinking; and this unity was more effectively embodied by head rhyme than by end rhyme since the listener is not distracted by incidental final syllables but is forced, rather, to focus on the semantically important root syllables.

  Stabreim is used to forge together the semantically significant words of Wagner’s “poetic-musical period” and to create a unity that can be perceived not just intellectually but directly by the senses. When Siegmund, in Die Walküre, sings the words “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond” (Winter storms have waned at the wakening May), he is not only describing antithetical phenomena in the world of nature but, more importantly, drawing attention to the unity that prevails in nature when we see it as a meaningful entity. And this structure is present in Wagner’s musical drama not just in the abstract but—thanks to the Stabreim—on a physical and even childlike level.

  In Opera and Drama Wagner illustrates his aim by reference to the line “Die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid, doch in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen,” quaintly if serviceably rendered by William Ashton Ellis as “Love gives delight to living, but with her woe she weaves things winsome.” According to Wagner, “Liebe,” “Lust,” and “Leid” all derive from the same root: although they express very differing emotions, they are all stages in one and the same process in life. Alliterative verse makes use of this fact, representing phenomena in their totality, rather than intellectually fragmented or individualized. The composer can underscore
this holistic experience by setting the alliterative phrase as a single melodic line. Even better, he or she can use “harmonic modulation” to “exert a binding constraint on the sensuous feeling such as no other art can achieve.”22

  Whereas the poet can do no more than express the fact that “pleasure” and “pain,” “weal” and “woe” are related, the composer is able to demonstrate that all these emotions may be subsumed beneath the overriding idea of “love” by modulating back to the key in which that love was first hymned. Of course, the idea of a return to an earlier key presupposes that in the meantime the composer has modulated to a different key, which he does not simply to ensure that his music is more varied from a purely musical point of view, but to clarify the contrast between pleasure and pain, weal and woe. The path from pleasure to pain will be traced by a modulation to a different key, the return from woe to weal by a corresponding modulation back to the home key. This phrase modulating away from, and back to, the initial key was described by Wagner as a “poetic-musical period.” While earlier writers argued that such periods could cover several hundred bars, there is now general agreement that the term applies only to shorter semantic units of the kind just described.

  At the time of Opera and Drama, Wagner was undoubtedly not yet aware of the difficulty of giving musical expression to his own compositional principles, which he had had to devise from scratch and which he himself described a decade later as the “abstract expression of the artistically creative process that was taking place within me.”23 Still less will he have been able to foresee the amount of imagination necessary to present each element in the action to the audience’s emotions in a way that was both creative and appropriate to the specific situation onstage without losing sight of the whole. But this is not our present concern. Here we can only admire the intelligence and perspicacity with which Wagner assembled his theoretical tools in advance, tools, let it be added, that were to be used not in elaborately ingenious works such as Bach’s The Art of Fugue or Stockhausen’s Studie II but in music dramas that in spite of their metaphysical dimensions and ideological garb teem with sensuality and that can be heard entirely in the here and now.