Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  Symphonic poems à la Liszt were certainly an improvement on this, because they did not obey prescribed “architectural” forms but only individual “psychological” models.28 But even these left Wagner feeling dissatisfied: despite his sympathy for his friend and later father-in-law, he could not get round the fact that the programs on which such works were based did not allow the listener’s feelings to be guided in any plausible direction: no matter what images the music might conjure up, the listener quickly lost the thread. For all his sympathy for the illustrative “formal motifs” of program music,29 he nonetheless doubted their power, for it was only in connection with a performance onstage that such motifs could have any real impact.

  And how does Wagner succeed in squaring the circle and invent a musical drama that avoids a traditional formal language in favor of an improvisatory art that makes sense at every moment, while not neglecting the wider picture and the long line? Even a modernist like Arnold Schoenberg had to compromise in this respect: when it became clear to him that his method of free-tonal composition could invest only very short pieces with the degree of comprehensibility that he felt was indispensable, he “invented” the method of twelve-tone composition that was intended to guarantee the formal stability that was needed.

  Wagner, too, was prepared to compromise: in its treatment of melody and harmony, Der fliegende Holländer is in many ways more conventional than Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique of a decade earlier. And although he clearly develops the melodic lines out of the speech patterns of the libretto, he does not yet break completely with traditional musical syntax, with its tendency to create structures based on periods of multiples of two bars (2 + 2 = 4, 4 + 4 = 8, 8 + 8 = 16 bars, and so on). Nor can it be denied that in spite of its sense of drama, Der fliegende Holländer is no less made up of “numbers” than other operas of the time—operas that Wagner looked down on. He persuaded his Dresden publisher to issue nine individual numbers in arrangements for voice and piano, and it is even possible that he himself prepared these “Morceaux favoris,” as they were known. At all events, titles such as the Steersman’s Song (“Mit Gewitter und Sturm”), the Dutchman’s Aria (“Die Frist ist um”), Senta’s Ballad (“Traft ihr das Schiff”), the Spinning Chorus (“Brumm und summ, du gutes Rädchen”), and the Sailor’s Song (“Steuermann, lass die Wacht”) were undoubtedly better known in the years following the first performance of the opera in 1843 than the work’s message, for all that that message was of decisive, and far greater, importance for Wagner.

  Even so, there are good reasons for adopting Carl Dahlhaus’s terminology and describing Der fliegende Holländer not as a “number opera” but as a “scene opera,” since the practice of running together a series of numbers and creating a larger complex is now extended to the entire work, rather than just the act finales, as had been the case in the earlier period.30 The singspiel elements that commentators claim to find in the figure of Senta’s father and in the ostensible coziness of the spinning room are in fact less conventional than they appear to be at first sight, for Wagner consciously uses this “idyllic” quality as a contrast with the Dutchman’s more somber world, and his art consists precisely in emphasizing the clash between them.

  This last point is particularly well illustrated by Senta’s Ballad, which Wagner later insisted was the nucleus from which the rest of the opera grew, a claim which is difficult to sustain in the light of what we know about the work’s genesis but which makes sense in terms of its underlying thrust. For if we regard the work as a whole as a “stage ballad” in a single act,31 then this central number is like a Russian doll nestling inside another Russian doll. In other words, Wagner eschews process and development not only in staging the work but also in composing it, painting one and the same seascape which, however much it may vary on points of detail, has only one center to it: Senta’s vision of “redemption through destruction.” In this regard it is significant that in Senta’s Ballad the external action comes to a standstill, while the inner action reaches its high point.

  This is the moment when music comes into its own—music which by definition can depict the invisible. As a result, Senta’s Ballad is composed of a concentrate of quintessential motifs that have nothing to do here in terms of the outer action but which reflect Senta’s inner reality. We hear the howling winds even though we are in the comfort of the spinning room: the hum of the spinning wheels is overlaid by the imaginary calls of the sailors as they go about their work. And the Dutchman is present even though there is really only the portrait of a wan-featured man hanging on the wall. Finally, the redemption motif from the overture is heard, as if as a matter of course. It represents Senta’s innermost driving force and in its relationship to the complete ballad functions as a doll within a doll within a doll.

  The reader will be reminded of Wagner’s later handling of his leitmotifs. In spite of occasional claims to the contrary, not even in the Ring are they used to replicate the action onstage by acoustic means but tend, rather, to hint at what is not being shown there—namely, the inner lives of the participants in the drama or the deeper meaning of symbolic objects such as the sword, spear, or ring. Liszt was one of the first writers to draw attention to the fact that even in Der fliegende Holländer there are many examples of the practice of “characterizing prominent persons or situations in the drama by means of specific musical motifs that keep recurring.”32

  Instead of criticizing Liszt for slightly exaggerating, we would do better to admire the perspicacity with which he was able to assess Wagner’s method of superimposing motifs to create a musical unity that avoids processual parataxis in favor of the simultaneity of different sensorial impressions and emotional states. By replacing the abstraction of argument and juxtaposition by a concrete interplay that we can actually experience for ourselves, Wagner reveals himself—from today’s perspective—as an excellent psychologist. Of course, he himself had something different in mind, for he wanted his listeners to experience myth through their emotions, myth which, innocent of the concept of time advancing in a particular direction, tells us what was and is and will be—all at once. In what kind of time do myths about the end of the world take place? In the past, which is where they belong according to our own enlightened view of such matters? In the present, which is when they affect us? Or in the future, which they describe to us for our own greater good?

  This new feeling of musical time to which Wagner abandons himself leads away from the subjective, teleological actions of its participants, which had influenced opera until then, to a type of action rooted in the superpersonal and, however graphic, motivated only within itself. The turbulent sea is a good example of this: if the view that the main character in Der Freischütz is the German forest is vaguely condescending, the same is no longer true of the elemental force of the sea in Der fliegende Holländer. Ernst Bloch saw in Wagner’s characters “tossing ships that unresistingly comply with the suffering, the struggle, the love and the longing for redemption of their subhuman ocean and over which, in every decisive moment, instead of the encounter toward one another and toward the depth of an individual fate, breaks only the universal wave of Schopenhauer’s Will.”33 This is certainly true of the Dutchman, who does not struggle; and it is also true of Senta, who obeys the dictates of her destiny as if she is in a trance.

  Wagner’s myth about the Flying Dutchman lacks the ethical dimension found in Beethoven’s Fidelio, in which a loving couple is inspired to make a supreme effort that ultimately leads to their victory. As a result, the “signal” that leaves such an indelible impression on listeners in each of these operas has a very different function. In Fidelio the trumpet fanfare signals the arrival of the Minister and a sudden shift in the characters’ fortunes that paves the way to the happy ending, entering the hermetically sealed world of the prison from without and—its repetition notwithstanding—remaining a singular occurrence unrelated to the inner action. By contrast, the Dutchman’s horn motif pervades the opera like some primeval
symbol that exerts its magic force from first to last and places its seal on the action as a whole.

  The overture opens with an inspired idea: as at the start of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—and it is surely no accident that both works open in D minor—archaic fifths ring out, their mysterious character further underscored by the string tremolando. But unlike Beethoven, Wagner introduces into this unstable environment an extremely striking figure that enters after only two bars and that consists of two intervals of a fourth followed by a fifth to the upper octave. The repeat of this interval of a fifth is not some tasteful echo but is marked “sempre più forte,” passing into a series of repeats of the note A stated no fewer than fourteen times on the natural horns. The valve horns add to the impact of this passage by not only playing in unison with the natural horns but adding an appoggiatura to each of the notes and in that way giving rise to an irrational sense of friction (music example 6).

  6. Bars 1–7 of the overture to Der fliegende Holländer in full score.

  Although problematical in a number of ways, the opening of the Ninth Symphony is at least an internally coherent melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure that makes sense even to anyone simply looking at the score. The opening of Der fliegende Holländer, conversely, can be interpreted only as a musical event that owes its existence not to a structure determined in advance but as one that from the outset is conceived along material lines. Starting with Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner regarded his scores as functional, not so much representing the substance of the composition as serving a different purpose: the precise timing of musical events within the context of the action onstage.

  As a result, we do not need to linger over the question as to whether the Dutchman’s motif is capable of development in the sense in which Beethoven understood that term or whether it is vocal in the spirit of Rossini. What matters, rather, is that it works within the context of the drama: with the title of the opera before us and, ideally, with the plot already in our heads, we should be able—on hearing these opening bars—to imagine only “the dreadful ship of the Flying Dutchman scudding before the tempest,” as Wagner himself prescribed and described it.34

  This detail also allows us to pin down exactly what it is that Wagner was able to achieve on a more general level—namely, a musical language that can claim to introduce a mythic dimension into our world of emotions in a way that does justice to the situation that is being portrayed. What is novel here are not those elements that make up the music’s formal language but the way in which those elements are used and combined. In a letter to Liszt, Wagner explained that “every bar of a piece of dramatic music is justified only to the extent that it expresses something that relates to the action or to the character of the dramatis persona.”35 Although he was referring to Tannhäuser, his comment applies equally well to Der fliegende Holländer—and not just to the music but, more especially, to the staging:

  The first scene of the opera must create the mood that allows the audience to grasp for itself the strange phenomenon of the Flying Dutchman. [. . .] The sea between the skerries must be as wild as possible; the treatment of the ship cannot be naturalistic enough: little touches such as the tossing of the ship when struck by a powerful wave (between the two verses of the Steersman’s Song) must be graphically brought out.36

  Although this may still represent a duplication of what the music depicts, the coordination of music and staging emerges as sheer naturalism in the Dutchman’s monologue:

  The first note of the aria’s ritornello (the low E sharp in the basses) is accompanied by the Dutchman’s first step on dry land; his rolling gait, typical of seafarers who set foot on terra firma for the first time after a long sea voyage, is accompanied in turn by the wave-like figure in the violoncellos and violas; with the first crotchet of the third bar he takes his second step, still with folded arms and lowered head; his third and fourth steps coincide with the notes of the eighth and ninth bars.37

  From our present standpoint, this description reveals glaring weaknesses in what we might term the “Dutchman system”: a production that follows the stage directions bar by bar would now seem stiff and even risible, and it is inconceivable that in 2013 any director would approach the music in such a detailed manner, emphasizing every gesture, in the way that Wagner—his views conditioned by the acting style of his own day—imagined this scene. And yet even Wagner himself must have found this concept increasingly problematical, for the naturalistic style presupposed by Der fliegende Holländer was harder and harder to reconcile with the increasing interiority that we find in his later works.38 At the very least he was bound with the passage of time to realize that not even the most willing singers were capable of reacting with thespian conviction to the nuanced gestures of the music. “Don’t look too much,” Wagner advised Malwida von Meysenbug at the time of the first Bayreuth Festival; “just listen instead!”39 And in the run-up to Parsifal, he even expressed a desire to invent “the invisible theater” to go with his “invisible orchestra.”40

  It is no wonder that on hearing the work for the first time in Dresden in 1843, Wagner found its instrumentation brutal in the extreme, notably at Senta’s “surprised scream” in act 2: “The brass and timpani created too coarse and material an impact at this blow,” he reported, self-critically, to Liszt in 1853, while the latter was preparing to stage the opera in Weimar: “One should be startled by Senta’s scream on seeing the Dutchman, not by the timpani and brass.”41

  Although Wagner had already retouched the score and toned down the instrumentation by this date, he continued to have misgivings about the work. In 1881, for example, he went through the score with the Dresden conductor Ernst von Schuch and was saddened “to note so much in it that is just noise or repetition, that is to say, so many things that spoil the work.”42 On the other hand he had expressed the view only a few years earlier that “from Holländer to Parsifal—how long the path and yet how similar the character!”43 In the wake of the 1864 Munich production he had even set about revising Senta’s Ballad, perhaps with the aim of removing extraneous elements from it in the form of quotations from other sections of the work. After all, the libretto makes it clear that the ballad is a part of the repertory of Senta’s old nursemaid, Mary, and so it does not entirely reflect Senta’s state of mind at this decisive point in the action.

  This scene from act 2 of Harry Kupfer’s Bayreuth production of Der fliegende Holländer—first seen in 1978—could be the inspiration for a nineteenth-century canvas painted in the spirit of “real idealism.” As such, it reflects the director’s view of the opera as a “psychological bourgeois drama.” Senta is seen as an Ibsenesque figure trapped by her bourgeois environment. The present image dates from the 1980 revival. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: L80-48-5.)

  But we would be guilty of falling into Wagner’s own trap if we were to take over his own private philosophy and regard his later total artworks as being on a “higher” level than a “mere” opera. For if we adopt this attitude, alleged “weaknesses” in Der fliegende Holländer would acquire a weight that would otherwise not have been the case. And the researcher will then feel called upon to look for “borrowings” from other composers and to record in detail those passages that have been taken over from the world of the singspiel or grand opera and so on.44

  After all, it is by no means certain that the total artwork is the last word on the subject. That Senta’s Ballad, for example, is not such an accurate reflection of her emotional state as is the case with analogous passages in the roles of Isolde and Kundry is actually an advantage in the context of Der fliegende Holländer. By emphasizing the archetypal and the nonindividual, Senta’s performance of the ballad makes it clear that she is under a fatal compulsion to perform her act of heroic self-sacrifice. And even though modern directors may invest the character with tremendous psychological depth, that is not how Wagner himself conceived the part. Rather, he saw her as a mythic figure who pe
rforms the role demanded of her by the myth. And the same is true by analogy of the Dutchman himself. That the two main characters do not communicate with one another for long stretches of the opera but commune only with themselves is surely eloquent: in the world of myth and legend there is no room for mutual, soul-baring confidences.

  Quite apart from this, Wagner’s later “total artworks” will confront us with very different contradictions from those that we find in the case of the rough diamond that is Der fliegende Holländer. Did Wagner ever again write an overture of such elemental freshness or a choral scene of such dramatic intensity as the one that occurs at the start of act 3, with its increasingly eerie confrontation between the chorus of Norwegian sailors and young women on the one hand and the Dutchman’s crew on the other? In later years he would presumably not have been quite so carefree in composing the constant comings and goings which, however well structured from a dramaturgical point of view, are otherwise redundant: they would surely have struck him as lacking in balance and insufficiently focused on the end of the story. And yet it is very much the formal awkwardness of this scene that gives it its depth. And it is precisely because of its plot, which resembles nothing so much as a popular woodcut, and because of its exuberant orchestral gestures and its lack of what Wagner was later to term his “art of transition,” that the whole opera has an immediacy that can effortlessly hold its own in the face of the greater refinement of the later works. Above all, its subject is easily explained: the existential feeling of being damned and the uncontrollable desire to leap after a damned soul are both emotions that are part of our collective unconscious, hidden away beneath the veneer of contemporary civilization.