Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

  Wagner’s reference in his essay to this intricate combination of the two motifs associated with the Rhinegold and Valhalla covers no more than a single tiny detail of Wotan’s monologue, which is a paragon of compositional skill. A more comprehensive analysis of this passage and its musical context is provided by the musicologist Bernhard Benz.19 It will be sufficient to refer to his study and, rather than quoting from it, to sum up its findings: in the Ring and, indeed, in Wagner’s works in general, there is no other “great narration” in which plot, vocal line, and orchestral melody are merged in such an ingenious way as they are in Wotan’s monologue, creating a whole which, however contradictory, is nonetheless coherent. On the relatively superficial level of the work’s rhetorical language, Wotan delivers his monologue in a “very low voice,” beginning with the recitative-like setting of the words “Als junger Liebe / Lust mir verblich” (When youthful love’s delights had faded) and building to a series of dramatic outbursts that follow on from one other, each wave more powerful than the last. For a while he grows drunk on his own idea of “gathering hosts of bold warriors in Valhalla’s hall,” but it is not long before he begins to feel tormented and to express those feelings of oppression, as the stage directions make clear: “Wotan’s demeanor passes from an expression of the most terrible anguish to one of desperation,” we read just before the lines

  Fahre denn hin,

  herrische Pracht,

  göttlichen Prunkes

  prahlende Schmach!

  [Farewell, then, imperious pomp! Godly show’s resplendent shame!]

  And the singer is instructed to “rise to his feet in bitter anger” at the lines

  So nimm meinen Segen,

  Niblungen-Sohn!

  Was tief mich ekelt,

  dir geb’ ich’s zum Erbe,

  der Gottheit nichtigen Glanz!

  [So take my blessing, Nibelung son! What I loathe most deeply I leave as your legacy.]

  In terms of Wotan’s vocal writing, this might recall the sort of emotional outburst found in King Philip’s aria “Ella giammai m’amò” (She never loved me) in Verdi’s Don Carlo. But in Wagner’s case there are two further layers of interpretation. In the first place, Wotan’s narrative is not only emotional but also argumentative: although he desires the “end” and ensures that his monologue builds to a rhetorical climax, his narration deals in the main with the past, a past beneath which he has still not drawn a line. Rather, everything revolves around the question of why the world has taken a turn so unfavorable to the leader of the gods. Behind his reflections, which inevitably contain an element of self-deceit and self-pity, there is clearly the vague hope that it may yet be possible to steer events in a different direction.

  A composer like Verdi would never have written anything as complicated as this and would not even have seen any point in doing so. But Wagner is able to risk such an approach by relying on his orchestral melody, investing it with a function that goes beyond anything he had ascribed to it in Opera and Drama. In the second act of Die Walküre, the orchestra is no longer limited to the task of commenting on the protagonist’s remarks in the manner of a Greek chorus or even in revealing his unspoken memories and forebodings. Instead, it acts as a partner, telling its own version of Wotan’s story, while keeping half an eye on the global events in which Wotan is caught up. Each party stimulates the other: in the course of his narrative, Wotan is struck by more and more new ideas, which are, of course, old ideas and which he then takes up and discusses, while the orchestra is likewise provoked into drawing its own conclusions by Wotan’s line of argument. Ultimately it is impossible to decide which of the two is the more dynamic, the singer or the orchestra. In turn, it is hard to say what is more important here. Is it an impotently egocentric god who cannot decide whether he wants to abdicate or not and who, to quote Wagner, resembles “us intellectuals” to a tee? Or is this god merely the medium for an unending story within which his position could be assumed by any other person? Or, to put it another way, has such a modern character as depicted by Wagner ever found such a home in a myth that deals in eternal verities?

  Taking as her starting point a “theory of musical narrative,” Carolyn Abbate has argued that in the monologue by this “liar” and “myth-maker,” “music’s voice” represents “a solipsistic enunciation that originates in an immoral god.” In order not to fall into a trap, we need to mistrust it because “that voice may ring false.” But it is very much in this deceptiveness that Abbate sees one of the reasons for “opera’s terrible fascination.”20 But what is the point of judging this duplicity by ethical standards, since it is specific to the Ring? True, Wotan is a questionable hero at best in terms of his words and actions, but the music turns him into a mythic figure not without an element of tragedy.

  How distorted would Wotan’s music have turned out if Wagner had made him obsessed with power politics to the exclusion of all else, as Udo Bermbach claims? Or if he was no more than the starting point for what Manfred Frank has termed “a series of brutal murders”?21 It is no accident that in the foreword to his edition of his revolutionary writings in his collected works, Wagner advanced ideas that allow for the possibility of investing Wotan’s character with utopian features:

  Far though it was from my intent to define the new political order that would grow from the ruins of a deceitful world, I nonetheless felt inspired to sketch the outlines of the work of art that should rise from the ruins of a deceitful art. To hold up this work of art to life as a prophetic mirror of its future seemed to me to be one of the most important contributions that I could make toward the task of damming the flood of revolution and restoring it to the channel of the calmly flowing river of humanity.22

  In this sense even the reference to a “series of brutal murders” that Manfred Frank, borrowing an expression of Kafka’s, imputes to the myth of the Ring is bound to give rise to serious misgivings. Of course, it is true that Fafner kills Fasolt, Hunding kills Siegmund, Wotan kills Hunding “with a contemptuous wave of his hand,” Siegfried kills Fafner and Mime, and Hagen kills Siegfried and Gunther. But Frank’s suggestion that all the evil in the Ring stems from Wotan ignores the fact that for the most part Wagner leaves us in the dark about the cause of the evil that pervades the world of the Ring. According to Richard Klein, it would be wrong to locate this cause in the characters of Wotan or even Alberich and equally wrong to echo Frank in his insistence on the “implacable logic” of the events that unfold in the work.23 Rather, Wagner was at pains to make it clear to us that “the complex underlying actions that are the cause of all that happens are a necessary element in motivating the whole and at the same time a structural force of history.”24

  Wotan may not be a good god, but nor is he a political or criminal monster. “He resembles us to a tee,” Wagner insisted, and his great-granddaughter, Nike Wagner, likewise argues that Wotan is a “true-to-life figure, true to life in his conflict situation as a man and as a politician.”25 He is both guilty and innocent, disdainful, cynical, and deceitful in his encounters with the giants and dwarfs who threaten his power; he is loving and then cold toward his wife; he brings feelings of great warmth to his dealings with his son Siegmund, while his attitude toward Brünnhilde turns from tenderness to harshness; while wanting to raise his grandson Siegfried as his better self, he reveals himself to be confused by feelings of rivalry; and in confronting his potential adviser Erda, he proves arrogant and high-handed even when forced into a corner. Wagner had good reason for telling Röckel that “in announcing my intentions I was obliged to keep within extremely narrow bounds in accordance with my own feelings on the matter.”26 And in his own subtle analysis of the character, Wolfram Ette has spoken of Wotan’s tragic and “increasingly dramatic attempts to pick a fight with himself.”27

  The subtlety with which Wagner shapes Wotan’s monologue rests in the fact that it includes different attitudes that we as listeners can not only adopt toward the matter in hand but which we can also observe in ou
rselves. And what makes this scene so important from an artistic point of view is that music and text move far apart in order to depict this contradiction, while remaining interconnected in the spirit of the total work of art. Wagner himself referred to this dialectic in the essay from which we have already quoted, “The Stage Consecration Festival Drama in Bayreuth in 1882.” “Which of us,” he asked on that occasion, “can spend his whole life gazing freely and openly at a world of murder and robbery that is organized and legitimized by lying, deceit, and hypocrisy without occasionally having to turn away with a feeling of shuddering disgust?” Happy those people who can see a true reflection of the world in the form of a message that “comes from its innermost soul” and “prophesies redemption.”28

  Wagner gives his listeners a chance to see both the hopeless corruption of this world and the insatiable desire for a better alternative. It seems to have been a kindly fate that decreed that he should have allowed himself to be touched by Schopenhauer’s philosophy at the very time that he was working on Wotan’s monologue, for the Sage of Frankfurt may well have confirmed him in his decision to equate Wotan’s destructive self-will with the will of the world as such, a will that Schopenhauer famously argued was represented by music. In doing so, Wagner equally famously placed a stretch of clear blue water between himself and Schopenhauer, for whom music was as blind as the world-will itself, whereas for Wagner music contained within it an element of hope.

  Wotan’s monologue is an outstanding example of the high level on which Wagner operated in terms of what he termed the “word-tone relationship.” It reveals the unique dialectics of independence and reciprocal dependence between action and music that stems from the flexibility of the relationship: sometimes it is the vocal line and, hence, the text that plays the leading role; at other times it is the orchestra that sets the tone. Sometimes both messages are conveyed together, while on other occasions the individual phrases may be displaced. Sometimes the action onstage and the drama in the orchestra reinforce one another, while at other times there is a standoff between them. And although small and large gestures alternate all the time, the rhetorically logical structure of the monologue ultimately ensures that no matter how open the form may be, the result is coherent according to the motto of “Concordia discors.” This is unique in the whole history of opera, for whereas the orchestra may be treated as an independent entity by other composers, it is always a willing partner of the singers. The closest we come to this autonomous involvement of the music within the overall picture is in Schumann’s piano-accompanied songs.29 But Wagner was almost certainly not thinking of Schumann’s distinctly marginal innovations when striking out in this direction. He is far more likely to have cast his gaze back to Beethoven’s Ninth.

  Beethoven’s decision to fall back on the sung word in the final movement of his last completed symphony is one that writers usually justify by claiming that he wanted to present the ideas contained in his music in a clearer form than was possible through the medium of pure instrumental music. In this particular case he had recourse to Schiller’s Ode to Joy. But if we adopt Wagner’s standpoint and regard the Ninth as the forerunner of his total artwork, we also need to take into account the sheer size and musical variety of the symphony’s final movement, elements that suggest that Beethoven’s aim was not only to broadcast a humanitarian message but also to create a new artistic medium and establish a vocal and symphonic field of tension in which the human voices and instruments would unite to form a single, tremendous overall sound. This meant renouncing the traditional distribution of forces within the world of musical genres, according to which instrumental music prevailed in its own particular area but assumed a subordinate role when it came to the aid of singing. The result is a twofold blurring of boundaries in the Ninth. First, there is no longer a clear-cut distinction between poetry, which is committed to expressing a particular idea, and music, which sets the idea only indirectly through the medium of the poem, for in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven is far from abandoning his symphonic ambition of introducing ideas directly through his music. On the other hand, the only music that can do justice to this symphonic ambition is one in which the barriers between vocal and instrumental design are raised in favor of a musical language that combines them both by blending them together and that can engage directly with Schiller’s ideas on the level of equals: the hierarchy of idea-word-tone is transformed in this way into a partnership between idea and a word-tone art.

  Even those observers who see Beethoven’s music as playing a more essential role in the history of music than Wagner’s will not overlook the tremendous progress achieved by Wagner when compared with Beethoven, for although the final movement of the Ninth Symphony is ethically impressive and compositionally monumental, it teeters on the brink of aesthetic disaster as the lack of clarity and excessive complexity of the formal musical language scarcely allow the rhetoric to unfold organically, a feature of which Beethoven had previously been so proud in his symphonies. Of course, a choral movement like this is difficult to compare to an excerpt from the Ring such as Wotan’s monologue, but it is still possible to identify a number of differences on shared points of generic detail. In the case of the final movement of the Ninth, neither the words nor the music escape unscathed, as Beethoven’s act of creating his new word-tone language is necessarily a violent process, whereas Wotan’s monologue is finely balanced rhetorically, psychologically, and musically. And while the present attempt, however rudimentary, to examine Wotan’s monologue in terms of its dialectics of musical logic and intended meaning has proved fruitful, it would be a futile labor of love to adopt a similar approach to the final movement of the Ninth Symphony, a movement that is far more coarsely woven from this point of view or which—at best—is more carefree in its al fresco manner.

  Wagner’s extremely detailed approach to the character of Wotan continues throughout the rest of Die Walküre, especially in the final scene, often performed in the concert hall as “Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music.” In a letter to Ferdinand Praeger, Wagner described Die Walküre as a whole as “the ne plus ultra of anguish, pain, and despair,”30 while in an almost contemporary letter to Liszt, he spoke of the final act as “a terrible storm of the elements and of hearts that gradually dies down with Brünhilde’s [sic] magic sleep.”31 The cycle of confused emotions that is so typical of the Ring is briefly brought to a rest here. Thomas Mann was living in Princeton when he noted in his diary on January 3, 1942: “‘Walküre’ on the radio in the evening. Not for the first time I was forced to think of Erika during the Farewell.”32 According to Nike Wagner, the Lohengrin Prelude and Wotan’s Farewell were among Mann’s favorite pieces of music, a preference she attributes to the fact that in both cases the music succeeds in “creating the idea of pureness.”33 Musically speaking, the idea of purity can be produced in different ways, of course: in the Lohengrin Prelude, it is “pure” sounds that dominate, whereas the famous sleep motif, to the sound of which Wotan kisses his daughter “lingeringly on her eyes until she sinks back, with eyes closed, into his arms,” is very different in character (music example 22).

  22. The sleep motif from bars 1617–25 of act 3 of Die Walküre.

  It is no accident that Bruckner quotes this motif at the end of the opening movement’s development section in the early version of his Third Symphony, where it is gesturally and structurally effective as what Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen has termed a “calming zone.”34 There is no doubt that Bruckner was fascinated by Wagner’s ability to create an inimitable atmosphere by a degree of compositional refinement that the listener simply does not perceive as such, Wagner being a magician whose sleights of hand are by no means as straightforward as the phrase “simple tricks” would imply but which are in fact extremely sophisticated. The listener registers a “dreamlike” flow of “sequences of sound”35 that create the “impression that they are weaving into each other and disguising themselves” in the presence of a “mysterious figure”
that seems “sealed away by a whole range of structural relationships, rather like a magic formula.”36

  These interpretations stem from the writings of music theorists capable of analyzing Wagner’s command of the tools of his trade. Ernst Kurth—to quote only one of his least technical observations—speaks of “lines of tension that are interwoven to enhance and deepen” the impression that results from “the interaction between tonally distant chords and a curious iridescence of tone colors that grow brighter and paler by turn.”37 Eckehard Kiem notes, among other things, the existence of a “two-bar model” that descends sequentially in thirds, while at the same time a “bass model ascends four times in sequence.”38

  Conversely, if Thomas Mann was moved by Wotan’s Farewell and, hence, by the sleep motif, this was due, above all, to his sensitivities as a poet: what he admired here was Wagner’s exemplary ability to achieve his aim of “emotionalizing the intellect.”39 According to Opera and Drama, the poet’s “inadequate means of expression” obliged him to “divide the content into an emotional and an intellectual component.”40 The “poetic musician,” on the other hand, would inevitably be “humiliated to see his drama received by a public that devoted its sole and specific attention to the mechanics of his orchestra.”41 With the best will in the world, then, the spoken theater could do no more than place an actor onstage who, playing the part of Wotan, would kiss the eyes of the actress taking the role of Brünnhilde, whereupon Brünnhilde would “sink back in his arms.” It would be the audience’s task to go beyond an intellectual understanding of this scene and create a sense of the mythic or fairy-tale element that is inherent in it. Only then would they be able to respond on an emotional level. In the musical drama it is the music that takes over this transfer effect. In the case of the sleep motif, its compositional “mechanics” are extremely complex, but in spite of this it impinges on the listener’s feelings as if it were some entirely natural occurrence.