Despite the fact that Wagner had learnt his trade writing pseudo-Italian operas, by the time he reached his maturity, he had moved decisively and deliberately away from an Italian style. Instead of a series of clearly defined solos, called arias, narrative prose-like singing that carried the plot, called arioso, duets, and sweeping choruses, with a bit of ballet thrown in, as was the Italian way, Wagner preferred a continuous musical flow, with all those elements mixed in together. Thus an Italian opera, typically, was a series of well-defined ‘numbers’, a glorified variety show, with something for everyone and plenty of opportunity for lead singers to have their turn at impressing the audience. A showy solo in an Italian opera might elicit spontaneous applause and even encores. Such a reaction at a Wagner performance would have been considered blasphemous – to dare to interrupt the master’s unstoppable narrative flow. For Wagner, nothing was allowed to distract from the unfolding musical story and he would happily intertwine chorus, solo, duets, instrumental interludes so that you could hardly tell when one ended and another began.
The other bonus of this approach, as far as he was concerned, was that it treated the symphony, not other operas, as a structural starting point. Whereas opera in his lifetime was dominated by Italians and Frenchmen, the symphony was still considered the quintessential German form (the Austrians being honorary Germans, in his and many others’ minds). In his many hundreds of pamphlets, articles, books and letters, Wagner’s contempt for the French was second only to his hatred of the Jews, seeing both as a threat to Germany’s destiny, which was to lead Europe and impose an ethnically cleansed culture upon it. Inventing a uniquely German form of opera, therefore, for Wagner, was a political choice.
A nationalistic approach also began informing his choice of subject matter, especially after the Germans defeated the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Wagner aimed to honour a resurgent German Reich and he seized the moment to sell the idea, in his next batch of operas, of an invincible race of Aryan superheroes put to the test against various human or supernatural foes. Some of his operas even reinvented Germany’s medieval past. In Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg he reworked ancient legend-fables so that his contemporaries would be uplifted by the chivalric pride inherent in the tales. The cod-historic world of these operas is one in which Teutonic moral strength is associated with poetry and lusty singing, of which there is an enormous amount, Wagner being a stranger to the notion of musical restraint.
This wasn’t a unique experiment, though, and nor was patriotic heroism confined to music. Over the North Sea in Britain’s Victorian empire, artists, writers and composers were dredging Albion’s Arthurian roots, too. The Pre-Raphaelite group of painters were particularly fond of their St Georges, Sir Galahads and Ladies of the Lake in spotless glistening armour or see-through negligées, as captured, for example, in Edward Burne-Jones’s Sir Galahad (1858), Saint George and the Dragon (1868) and The Last Sleep of Arthur (1881–8), Emma Sandys’s Elaine (1865), John Everett Millais’s The Knight Errant (1870), John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sir Launcelot in the Queen’s Chamber (1857) and Before the Battle (1858), and the model in that picture, artist Elizabeth Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott (1853) and The Quest of the Holy Grail, or Sir Galahad at the Shrine of the Holy Grail (1857). The unprecedented international popularity of historical fiction such as Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810), Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) and Ivanhoe (1820), and the comparing of Britannia’s invincibility with the legends and deeds of dragon-busting knights, inspired many an overture, play, pageant or opera. Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose comic operettas written with W. S. Gilbert successfully lampooned Victorian pomposity, wrote one serious opera, Ivanhoe (1891). As suitable subject matter for Wagner, never mind Sullivan, Scott’s legend of Ivanhoe ticked nearly all the boxes, telling as it does the struggle, in 1194, in the aftermath of the Third Crusade, of a noble Saxon against nasty Norman Frenchmen. But that it also concerns itself with unfair treatment of England’s medieval Jewish population would have ruled it out for the arch anti-Semite Wagner.
When they are not concerned with mythical Teutonic heroism, Wagner’s music dramas focus on sacrifice and self-denial, like Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, or they tackle the inevitability of the corruption of power – or all of the above at once, as is the case in his monumental four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung.
It took Wagner twenty-six years to create his Ring cycle, completed in 1874. It is far and away the most ambitious undertaking in the history of European music. What’s more, he wrote the libretto as well as the music, and drew up the specifications of the purpose-built theatre at Bayreuth in which it was to be performed. His aim was to produce nothing less than a modern equivalent of the drama of the Ancient Greeks. Works like Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy had hoped to distil and dramatise the experiences of a whole society and this is what Wagner meant to do for his: a recently unified Germany still finding its feet as a modern nation. He sifted through many sources for his material but in the main he concentrated on a set of ancient Icelandic documents known as the Eddas. He mixed in various plot lines from Austrian, Norwegian and German sagas, and set about moulding them into a coherent dramatic whole.
The plot initially hinges on the idea that the love of gold leads to corruption and disaster, but it soon becomes embroiled in the legend of Siegfried, an innocent, brave nature man who sacrifices his life for the common good and has an incestuous relationship with his aunt. The story, spread over the four separate operas, begins with the theft of a precious Golden Ring from the depths of the River Rhine, which represents indomitable, deathless Germany. Along the way, there is internecine strife between the gods and some flying Hell’s Angels, the magnificently apocalyptic Valkyries. The Valkyries, with their leader Brünnhilde, are the warrior daughters of Wotan, a Zeus-like overlord, and have the second opera of the sequence named after them. Their job is to fly around the world picking up dead warriors to act – when resurrected – as bodyguards for the gods’ home of Valhalla. So they are airborne undertakers, in a way.
In the final opera of the four, The Twilight of the Gods, Wagner made mayhem with the Icelandic concept of Ragnarok – the destruction of the gods as preordained by fate. Valhalla is razed to the ground in a staggering climax, which includes Brünnhilde riding her flying horse into the flames and the Rhinemaiden mermaids leaping out of the overflowing river and reclaiming their stolen Golden Ring.
Wagner’s vision was the product of a restless, angry age. All Europe was reeling from the implications of Charles Darwin’s two shattering books, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin himself had come hard on the heels of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), in which he showed that the world had not begun with a single act of creation, and Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863), which questioned the Bible as historical truth. God himself, it was now being suggested, had been made in man’s image, and not the other way round. This idea is now a commonplace, but in the middle of the nineteenth century its effect was devastating, not dissimilar to the revelation five centuries earlier that the earth travelled round the sun and not vice versa. So, in a monumental piece of symbolism that defined his age, at the end of the Ring Wagner annihilated the gods altogether in his musical Armageddon. That said, it is only fair to point out that Wagner’s keenest interest was not the fate of the gods but rather what happened to humanity.
Without God, without judgement, without fear of retribution, mankind’s biggest bullies could now, in theory, rule supreme. The formidable advance of science and technology in Wagner’s time, instead of making people confident and liberated, made them fearful and vulnerable, ripe for exploitation. Throughout Europe, industrial capitalism, coupled with military force on a frightening scale, loomed ominously. It seemed to many, including Karl Marx who published the first part of Das Kapital in 1867, to promote nothing but widespread poverty, inequality and hopelessness
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The power of much of the Ring’s music reflects this dark, foreboding image of industrial might: during the first opera, The Rhinegold, we are taken down into the depths of a menacing and fiery mine, with dehumanised workers slaving to extract gold. Other artists shared this sense of despondency. The French writer Emile Zola, for example, thought that the Industrial Age had brought to working people untold misery and cruelty. The vast, devouring machine of technology in Zola’s Germinal, set in a grim coal-mining landscape with money-crazed bosses brutally abusing their workers and treating their women as little more than sex slaves, finds considerable resonance in the Ring. Zola himself also embarked upon a project as vast and all-encompassing as Wagner’s Ring, a twenty-book epic called Les Rougon-Macquart, which follows the fortunes of a family living in mid-nineteenth-century France.
But the greatest single influence on the Ring cycle – and indeed on two of Wagner’s other operas, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal – was not Karl Marx or Charles Darwin but rather the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s theories, like Wagner’s operas, could not be described as succinct, and they are consequently hard to summarise briefly, but the idea that caught Wagner’s imagination was that we humans are essentially irrational, emotional animals. As Zola also sought to demonstrate in Les Rougon-Macquart, the trajectory of our lives is predetermined by our genetic inheritance. All efforts to reform or control our desires are therefore pointless. Our sexuality, our cravings and our longings totally dominate our minds, and since our appetites can never be satisfied we are always projecting our happiness into the future: we are always preparing to live.
In Schopenhauer’s world view there is no God, no afterlife, no heaven, no redemption – just oblivion. The only way to kill off our insatiable desire is through death. One can interpret the end of the world in the Ring’s finale, The Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), as the destruction of greed and overbearing authority, or as a sort of Buddhist oblivion. Either way, the outcome is nothingness. According to this philosophy, Tristan’s and Isolde’s forbidden love (she is married to his friend Mark) can only be properly consummated in death. (Schopenhauer’s deeply pessimistic outlook can also be detected in the novels of Thomas Hardy, for example Far from the Madding Crowd, which was completed in 1874, the same year as Wagner’s Ring. Hardy’s characters are buffeted around by their fates, over which they have absolutely no control. In the end, the good and the bad get roughly the same deal from life.)
Above all, Wagner’s focus was on the psychology of his characters. Their actions were merely the symbolic manifestation of their deeper desires. In this respect he was pre-empting Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary way of looking at the motives and behaviour of men and women. Wagner’s characters were archetypes: models for Everyman. In the Ring, he was much more interested in what his heroes and heroines felt than what they did. As Freud was to do some years later, Wagner tackled taboo and controversy head-on. His operas are unabashed in their treatment of sexuality and eroticism, race, death and incest. All this in the 1860s and ’70s.
In order to help us perceive a character’s feelings or motivations, Wagner needed tools at his fingertips to be able to enrich and layer the music. One such technique is his use of fragments of melody, or rhythm, or harmony, as calling cards of a character, a place, an idea, an object or a memory. These musical cells, from which he created the whole web of the music, he called leitmotif. He did not invent the leitmotif, the credit for which lies squarely with the opera composer and distinguished writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, sixty-odd years earlier, and it owes a fair amount to the idée fixe in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique too, but he did ultimately make it his own, such was the power, breadth and ingenuity with which he deployed it.
At its simplest, leitmotif is a straightforward association of a nugget of tune with a character. Every time the character appears, or is mentioned or thought of by someone else, we hear that nugget. In the Ring, every character has his or her own leitmotif, or signature tune. Other motifs in the story are attached to concepts, for example ‘transformation’ or ‘love’ or ‘servitude’, or to things, such as a ‘spear’, the ‘gold’ or the ‘River Rhine’. There are in fact hundreds of leitmotifs in the Ring, which can be layered simultaneously on top of each other or introduced in quick succession. By the end of each opera they are cropping up at an astonishing rate, sometimes several in every bar. They become a vast tapestry on which the music and the story hang.
Thus the orchestra, instead of merely providing the musical backing for the characters to sing to, was able to express or hint at the meaning of the stage action, even in passages without singing. While in Verdi’s dramas the orchestra reflected and underpinned the human drama acted out by the singers, in the Ring it was the opposite: what was seen on the stage was a visual representation of the music. Not content with the orchestra as inherited from the concert hall, the demands of the Ring’s score included instruments that needed to be especially adapted for the purpose, or even prompted the development of new instruments altogether. For example, though Verdi had used anvils as part of a gypsy chorus in his opera Il Trovatore in 1853, Wagner outdid him in The Rhinegold and Siegfried by employing eighteen bespoke tuned anvils – that is to say, they were calibrated to sound particular notes as determined by the score. The Ring also called for the invention of subsequently dubbed ‘Wagner’ tubas, a hybrid that combined elements of the French horn, trombone and euphonium.
To stage the Ring, Wagner had his own theatre erected at Bayreuth. Much about its design was revolutionary. Instead of having a distracting orchestra pit in front of the stage, he instructed his designers to hide the musicians underneath it and had their sound waft up into the auditorium. He ordered the modernisation of the stage and lighting effects, had scenery moving silently on and off sideways, had a steam curtain invented and played optical illusions with perspective to make his giants giant and his dwarfs dwarfed. Wagner’s theatre was an early attempt at what we would associate with the cinema, rather than the theatre, experience. It was a darkened magic lantern show, fantastical and all-embracing. For the Rings first complete performance, Wagner decreed that the house lights should be dimmed. This was such a novelty at the time it drew gasps from the audience.
Wagner’s ambition was nothing less than the creation of the art form of the future, in which all the arts would combine and fuse, led by the unequally greater power of music. The Ring may have aspired, through ancient myth, to explain and explore basic human instincts, yet it was still, by and large, a series of oversized operas. But having destroyed the old gods in its finale, The Twilight of the Gods, Wagner’s next move was to found a new religion.
In his final piece, Parsifal, of 1882, Wagner turned the theatre into a temple, the plot into a sacramental ritual and the leitmotifs he bestowed with sacred power. Instead of calling it an opera, or even a ‘music drama’, Wagner omnipotently referred to Parsifal as ‘a festival play for the consecration of the stage’, insisting that the exclusive rights to perform it should remain in perpetuity at Bayreuth, other theatres and opera houses being thought unworthy of doing justice to such a precious creation. In fact, the exclusion lasted only until 1903, not the end of the world, as he had hoped.
Though this proviso may sound far-fetched, Wagner’s admirers had indeed begun to see Bayreuth as a very special place, the holiest of holies, well before he embarked on Parsifal. Audience members saw themselves as communicants, humble supplicants at the high altar, even while Wagner was still very much flesh and blood. It is ironic that, as a young man, Wagner had raged against the arts world as a nauseating, bourgeois, elitist clique that was closed to the masses, the Volk, who needed its balm and illumination most. He frequently extolled the all-encompassing virtues of Ancient Greek theatre, which drew its audience ‘from the government and judicial buildings, from the country, from ships, from military barracks and from the furthest regions’. His operas would be for the common people, at sensible, knock-down
prices. His operas would rip to shreds the comfortable and suffocating morality of the middle classes.
The reality was that Wagner could only have a theatre built for him and his own pieces put on there thanks to the generosity of the very people he had previously so detested. And there is no opera house in the world more exclusive than Bayreuth. A few years after Wagner’s death, Mark Twain gave a striking impression of what the unsuspecting visitor might expect from a visit there:
I have seen all sorts of audiences – at theatres, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals – but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention, absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. This opera of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.
George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, was one of the adoring congregation, reporting, ‘most of us at present are so helplessly under the spell of the Ring’s greatness that we can do nothing but go raving about the theatre between the Acts in ecstasies of deluded admiration.’
For musicians, the Wagner shrine at Bayreuth became a place of pilgrimage, sure enough, and because of the cutting-edge style of the vast, demanding music dramas mounted there, it also became a rallying point for all that was modern and progressive in music. Wagner followers gloried in the alarm his work often provoked among outsiders. The more difficult the mountain was to climb, the more avant-garde, the better, they believed. Indeed, it is possible to date the chasm that was to develop between the populist mainstream and the classical avant-garde in music to this place and time. The schism was to last over eighty years. Wagner’s acolytes were happy to have retreated into their private Valhalla, where only the initiated, the learned and the bold would venture to tread. The composer Arnold Schoenberg, an admirer of the way in which Wagner seemed to mould audiences to his will, declared in 1946: ‘Those who compose because they want to please others, and have audiences in mind, are not real artists.’
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 21