Wagner Without Fear

by William Berger

  OPERA: WHAT, EXACTLY, IS IT?

  A Brief Outline for the Nonexpert

  At first glance, this must look like a remarkably dumb question. Everybody knows what opera is, don’t they? Isn’t that the place where overdressed people go to hear overweight performers sing overwrought music from long ago? As apt a description as that may be, it is not a good definition of the art form known as opera. Few people indeed could define the medium of opera, so don’t feel bad if you aren’t among them.

  Opera is a form of drama (not music) in which the words are sung rather than spoken.

  Stories are told in song in every culture around the world. Some traditions are quite elaborate, with series of songs, solos and choruses, dance, mime, and nonvocal musical instruments. But there is no beast quite like opera in the European sense. For the opera-free individual who is approaching Wagner from the point of view of intellectual or cultural history, it will be necessary to have an understanding of this unique medium and its special properties before proceeding. (The next chapter is directed at the casual operagoer who is now ready to tackle Wagner’s operas.)

  Opera was born in Florence in 1597, and its origins are important to those who wish to know Wagner, who was obsessed with defining and redefining the genre. A group of educated art lovers in Florence formed a camerata, a sort of chat group where they could explore their various artistic interests. One of their favorite topics was the theater of ancient Greece. They were aware that Greek drama had a musical element central to it. Indeed, musical instruments appeared to have been used by the Greeks to accompany the spoken words. The rhythm of poetic meter being inherent in the speeches, one could conjecture that these dramas were more sung than spoken. What if a drama were to be produced in this way? What would be the result?

  To this day, nobody knows what musical scale was used by the Greeks in Aeschylus’s time, and even the sound of the spoken language is open to wide interpretation. We will probably never know. The genius of the camerati lay in their choice not to waste any time worrying about authentic Greek music, but to approach the spirit of Greek dramas within their own musical and linguistic idiom. A poet named Ottavio Rinuccini supplied the words to the mythological story of Daphne, written in Italian according to the form of Greek drama, with monologues, dialogues, and choruses. A notable composer of church and secular music named Jacopo Peri wrote musical accompaniment, very lightly scored so the words would remain clear and primary.

  We can only conjecture the result from secondary evidence, since all traces of this first performance are lost, but we may be allowed to imagine these creators staring at each other in wonder at their hybrid creation. They did not even know what to call their piece, and they named it an opera in musica, a “work in music.” The libretto (Italian for “little book,” referring to the words) was published in 1600 and again in 1604, which testifies to the immediate popularity of the piece. In 1600, Peri wrote a second opera, Eurydice (another Greek myth), presented as part of the wedding festivities for Maria dei Medici and King Henri IV of France. A fellow member of the camerata named Caccini wrote another opera for the same event, which featured Caccini’s daughter Francesca in a lead role. Caccini wrote some florid music to display Francesca’s vocal abilities, scandalizing the “purists” who insisted on the importance of the text over flashy music, but the die was cast.

  What is striking about this story is how all the elements that would define the world of opera were present right at the beginning. The debates about words versus music, the purist ideal versus innovation (or decadence), an odd connection to ancient Greek art, the acceptable level of vocal showmanship, and the clash of egos, all emanating from a bastard art form, have filled the opera world for the subsequent four hundred years. Another important feature of opera seems to have been present right from the start—the expense of producing it, evidenced by the royal patronage. All these issues would be central to Wagner’s life work.

  So what was all the fuss about? What was it about those first few operas that captured people’s imaginations so thoroughly? There are several factors. The first is that opera can dramatize situations that can only be described by other media. In plays, two people who speak at the same time cannot be understood by the audience. In opera, there is the duet, which allows two characters to express themselves simultaneously. Opera can even portray two characters who are saying or thinking opposing feelings at the same time, thus giving us in the audience an overview of the entire situation. Nor does this paradigm need to stop at two people. The various expressions of several individuals can be combined at once, and even contrasted against large segments of their society represented by the various divisions of the chorus. Italian nineteenth-century composers were especially good at this.

  Opera is also uniquely able to portray conflicting emotions within a single character. Where Shakespeare must use thousands of words to show us how Hamlet is divided against himself, an opera composer can contrast words, sung melody, and the various instruments in the orchestra to show the same situation in a matter of minutes. A famous example of this is found in Iphigénie en Tauride by Christoph Willibald von Gluck, a composer adored by Wagner. In that opera, the tenor languishes in prison, singing to himself words to the effect of “I’m fine—no, really! I’m fine!” while the nervous figures in the strings tell us he’s actually a wreck. Wagner, it will be seen, exploits this feature of the operatic form to the fullest in characters like Isolde, Hans Sachs, and, especially, Mime, whose “public” personae are often in conflict with their inner selves.

  The voice of the individual is the basic unit of operatic currency. It is, in the final analysis, what matters most. A certain type of voice has become standard in opera houses, a powerful, agile voice whose intensity has never been permitted in church music, popular songs, or concert singing. Why? The operatic framework of drama allows us to believe in the extremes of the human condition, and therefore the voice. Opera, while capable of the most nuanced subtleties, can tackle the really big questions of the human experience in ways that a three-minute song cannot. To express its full potential, the medium of opera relies on words, music, and visual presentation.

  THE ETERNAL PROBLEM OF WORDS AND MUSIC:

  AN OVERVIEW

  The genius of the camerati that “invented” opera is apparent in, among other things, their choice to create a work in their own language rather than one in classical Greek, which could only be understood by scholars. All languages have found expression in song, but the Italian language has always had a special connection to music. For the dramatic expression necessary to the newly created form of opera, Italian was perfect. The clarity of the vowel sounds and the inherent consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel structure of the language made the words comprehensible through the music, while the built-in rhymes and metric pliability made Italian a delight for the librettist.

  Which is all very well and good, except that only a tiny fraction of the world’s population speaks Italian. How, then, could people beyond the Alps approach this medium? Here, roughly, were the choices:

  Learn Italian.

  Read a libretto during the performance, with the Italian on the left and your own language on the right, and try to follow.

  Ignore the words entirely, and trust in the music and the stage action to convey the meaning.

  Perform the work in translation, thereby losing the direct link between words and music but at least knowing what’s going on.

  Pretend you know Italian, and hope you are laughing or crying in all the right places.

  Dispense with Italian opera altogether and create an opera in your own language.

  Denounce all opera as a waste of time.

  Interestingly, this problem has continued unabated to the present day, complicated by the fact that the works in question are now in German, French, Russian, Czech, English (in all its varieties), Spanish, and several other languages, as well as the old standby, Italian. It’s a big problem.

  In the early eighteen
th century, Georg Friedrich Händel, a German, wrote his operas in Italian for audiences in London. The Londoners went wild, causing the more sober upstanding segments of xenophobic English society to deride them for spending money on effete foreign entertainment presented in a language they didn’t understand. The language charge was not really fair, since we must remember that the audiences of that time sat in fully lit theaters and were in the habit of following the Italian with the help of their trusty libretti. In any case, the baroque style in opera, no less than in the visual arts, dictated that one should never say with one gesture what can be said in a hundred. Anyone who has sung in a community Messiah is familiar with Händel’s habit of repeating a single line of verse dozens of times, and in his operas he was even more, well, baroque. Thus when the stage lovers sing, for example, “Addio, amore mio! Addio per sempre!” twenty-seven times in a row, moving toward opposite ends of the stage to the sad accompaniment of the oboe, even the most nonlinguistic dolt in the audience can comprehend that they are not commencing a love affair.

  The “follow-along-with-a-libretto” approach to opera in a foreign language was successful for many years, until “guess who” came along and eliminated this option. Among Wagner’s radical reforms in opera was a demand for a darkened auditorium, concentrating people’s attention on the stage and eliminating the fabled distractions in the audience itself. Technological history was thus very obliging to Wagner in creating electricity just in time for him to put it to this handy use. People have insisted on darkened auditoriums ever since, but something was lost.

  When Toscanini conducted the Italian premiere of Tristan at La Scala in 1897, he insisted on giving the opera in the original German and dimming the lights. The audience was annoyed. How on earth were they to know what was going on?

  Of course, there has always been, and there still is, the option of performing opera in translation. The arguments in favor of opera in translation always sound entirely sensible on paper: the audience can understand the words, have a more direct experience of the piece, and not be made to feel uncultured or ignorant by the hateful polyglot elite. Government-funded opera has always leaned toward translations, since the bureaucrats can more easily convince themselves that they are providing “popular” entertainment for their public (which lets you know what they think of the imaginative capabilities of their publics). Comic opera, it is argued, is especially appropriate in translation, since the audience is meant to laugh along with the stage action. Only snobs and killjoys would insist on comic opera being performed in a language the audience does not understand.

  Which is all perfectly logical, except that the medium in question is opera, where logic, per se, holds no place. Opera in translation is, at best, a compromise. The mystical union of word and music is lost. This may sound arcane, but it’s true. This is most apparent to English-speakers when they hear very familiar popular songs, such as a Beatles’ song, sung in translation. It just doesn’t ring right.

  Each of the solutions to the problem of opera in a foreign language outlined above has been tried at various times with varying degrees of success. In the early seventeenth century, Austrian composers began creating operas in German, but the public largely ignored them and continued to flock to Italian operas. The French were the first outside of Italy to get on their own somewhat shaky feet. The Germans lagged behind, much to the irritation of German composers. Wagner claimed that the standards of production in German opera houses in his youth were atrocious, and we have every reason to believe him. Either one heard German singers singing Italian words they didn’t understand, and making a big mess out of them, or one heard horrid German translations that were inherently at odds with great Italian poetry. Think of the witty refrain to Leporello’s Catalogue Aria in Don Giovanni, an opera that ruled the stage in Wagner’s youth. The number of female conquests the Don has racked up in Spain alone is “mill’ e tre,” a thousand and three. The German for this is “drei und ein tausend.” Clearly, the German requires a different musical setting.

  Beethoven inspired many of his time by composing a German opera, Fidelio. Carl Maria von Weber followed with Der Freischütz, and Germans saw that they could, after all, compose operas in their own language, as long as they didn’t try to imitate Italian music directly. Wagner was very insistent that the words gave birth to the music. Not only did he insist on writing in German, but he felt he was the only person who could write the words of his own operas, since there was, in his mind, no separation between the word and the sound.

  This is the basis of the whole issue known as “music drama.” Wagner began to think of his works as being so far evolved beyond the conventional operas of his time, when he saw nobody caring about the union of words and music and everyone only interested in florid vocal fireworks, that he couldn’t even bear to call his creations “operas.” Subsequent generations have seen less of a difference between these two definitions. The field of world music has become so vast that “music dramas” look a whole lot like “operas” in the great scheme of things. Yet there was a reason this was once such an issue.

  Wagner’s librettos are not studied these days as masterpieces of German literature, as he assumed they would be, and few composers since Wagner have emulated him in writing their own words—unless we look to the wide realm of popular music. In any case, there is a remarkable unity of word and sound in Wagner’s work. Even people who don’t understand German can understand this fact. Nowadays, simultaneous translations in the theater have largely, though not entirely, replaced the option of singing in translation, and the audience has benefited. However, Wagner’s words can be murky and obscure. Often they are employed more for their sound than their actual meaning. With Wagner, even more than other opera composers, it is imperative to know what is supposed to be happening on stage. Armed with a little knowledge, anyone can derive a profound experience from these works, no matter how “foreign” they appear at first.

  The Strange Life and Career

  of Richard Wagner

  The drama surrounding Richard Wagner begins, appropriately enough, before birth. We know he was born on May 22, 1813, in the city of Leipzig. His legal father was Friedrich Wagner, a police official, and his mother was Johanna, daughter of a baker. Wagner states in his autobiography that he was baptized two days after his birth, but records show that the event occurred three months later. In the interim, Johanna was visiting an actor-painter friend of her husband’s named Ludwig Geyer. Geyer enjoyed intimate relations with the Wagner family, although the exact level of this intimacy is much debated. When Friedrich Wagner died in December 1813, Geyer took responsibility for the family. He and Johanna were married the following August.

  No one would care which of these two buddies sired little Richard, except that Wagner himself wondered about it (all but one of Wagner’s operatic heroes are fatherless in one form or other), and that Geyer is traditionally regarded as a Jewish name in Germany. This, and the fact that the Wagner/Geyers lived in the Jewish quarter of Leipzig, is enough for some biographers to explain Wagner’s obsessive and hysterical anti-Semitism as a form of self-loathing. If only it were all that simple.

  We know that Geyer was, in any case, the only father Richard ever knew, since Friedrich did not even leave a portrait of himself behind. Geyer was a man of the theater, and he moved the family to the city of Dresden, capital of the kingdom of Saxony, in 1817. The children all began to take part in theater life in one form or another. Young Richard attended school, but his imagination was only fired in the theater.

  There was less of a distinction between theater and opera in that time and place. For one thing, they were invariably in the same building, and “singers” on one night often were “actors” on another, since the pay was pretty miserable. Also, music figured prominently in dramas. The abundance of German “incidental music” of that period, of which Felix Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most famous example, demonstrates this. Richard began writing epic pla
ys; he tells us he studied music merely so he could write his own incidental music. The quest for the “Total Work of Art” had begun.

  Wagner downplays his musical training in his autobiography, claiming that he studied basics and counterpoint for a mere six months before he surpassed his teacher. Naturally he wanted people to think that his genius was born full-grown out of his own soul with no help from others, but it is still apparent that he had less formal training than any of the other men known as “great composers.”

  Wagner wrote several orchestral pieces, including a symphony that received warm applause in Leipzig in 1833, and an opera, Die Feen (“The Fairies”), which was never performed in his lifetime. On the strength of his compositions, he received a conducting job in Würzburg, and then at the theater of Magdeburg. The fragmentation of Germany into dozens of separate little countries was a disaster politically and economically, but it meant that every small town had a theater and a musical life of its own, as compared to united France, where everything tended to occur in the capital. Two interesting experiences awaited Wagner in Magdeburg.