Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

  12. Bars 35–52 of the introduction to act 2 of Lohengrin.

  Wagner himself seems to have been struck by the subtleties inherent in this compositional method only after he had already completed work on Lohengrin. At all events, it is not until December 28, 1851—by which time he was planning the Ring—that we find him writing to Theodor Uhlig:

  Apropos the vocal score, I have again been glancing briefly through the music of Lohengrin:—might it not be of interest to you [. . .] to expatiate on the work’s formal thematic web and explain how it is bound to lead to ever new formal structures along the road that I myself have opened up? This struck me at various points in the score, including the opening scene of act 2. Right at the start of the second scene of this act—Elsa’s appearance on the balcony—in the woodwind prelude—it struck me that a motif is heard here for the first time in the 7th, 8th, and 9th bars of Elsa’s nocturnal appearance, which is later developed and broadly and brilliantly executed when, in broad daylight and in all her glory, Elsa makes her way to church. I realized from this that the themes I write always originate in the context of, and according to the character of, some visual phenomenon on the stage.40

  Such semantic links are also apparent at other points in the opera, so much so that according to the German musicologist Klaus Döge the two-dimensional image of a “single thread” now needs to be abandoned in favor of the idea of a more complex fabric.41 In all, it is possible to identify six motifs whose “weft” informs large sections of the score. These motifs and their metamorphoses cover six thematic groups: the Grail, the King, Elsa, Lohengrin, the forbidden question, and Ortrud. In this way “there is not a single motif in the auratic realm of the Grail that is not connected with the main theme.”42 With the exception of the motif associated with the forbidden question, each motif has its own key and instrumentation. Elsa’s music, for example, is in A-flat major, Lohengrin’s in A, a semitone higher. Wagner thus suggests the image of a woman looking up to her savior, while also implying a degree of tension between the sexes.

  A similar process may be observed in the opening movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, where the third theme in E minor that appears—contrary to custom—in the development section likewise seems like a voice from above in relationship to the initial key of E-flat major. This parallelism does not mean that while working on Lohengrin Wagner was thinking of the “Eroica,” for all that he held the last-named work in high regard. Rather, it illustrates the reason why Wagner thought so highly of the “poetic” features in Beethoven’s instrumental music—in other words, those features that go beyond any purely formal calculations. By the same token, Mahler, too, praised Beethoven for the fact that, unlike his predecessors and successors, he always had “something specific” to say in his development sections.43 Here we have an example of constants in the way in which composers have thought about music over several generations and how they have composed their music in specific semantic contexts.

  In his 1879 essay “On the Application of Music to the Drama,” Wagner examined this notion from a theoretical standpoint, drawing attention to a motif from Lohengrin as one example among many. It is the motif that is heard for the first time when Elsa enters, “immersed in the memory of her blissful dream.” This motif, Wagner explains, “consists almost entirely of a tissue of harmonies progressing into the distance.” In a symphonic movement this would seem studied and confusing, but within the context of the present scene it is convincing:

  Elsa has slowly approached, in modest grief, her head bashfully lowered; one glance at her raptly transfigured eyes tells us what is in her soul [music example 13]. Questioned, she replies only by recounting her vision of a dream that fills her with the sweetness of hope: “Mit züchtigem Gebaren gab Tröstung er mir ein” [With his courteous bearing he inspired me with comfort]. That glance had already told us something of the kind. Now, boldly passing from her dream to her assurance that it will all come true, she goes on to announce: “Des Ritters will ich wahren, er soll mein Streiter sein” [That knight I shall await: he shall be my champion]. And after further modulations, the phrase returns to the key from which it started out [music example 14].44

  13. Bars 294–97 of act 1 of Lohengrin as reproduced by Wagner in his 1879 essay “On the Application of Music to the Drama”: GS 10:191; PW 6:189.

  14. Bars 370–77 of act 1 of Lohengrin as transcribed by Wagner in his essay “On the Application of Music to the Drama”: GS 10:192; PW 6:190.

  As Wagner went on to admit, many music theorists—and it is with a certain irony that he uses the term “professors” in this context—may regard this “poetic-musical period,” as he later termed these structures, as an “eyesore” on account of their many accidentals, but what we are in fact dealing with is the subtlest psychological characterization that finds expression on the printed page in the form of abstract notes. It will be clear from this why Wagner was also thinking at that time of rewriting Senta’s Ballad in Der fliegende Holländer, where his heroine now seemed to him to quote excessively from popular tradition and to convey too little of her own personal psychological state.

  In general we are dealing here with the ideal of articulating every last detail of the musical material and ensuring that even the smallest compositional elements are fully imbued with the meaning demanded at every single moment by the work’s overall dramatic concept. In Lohengrin this ideal was still an aspiration rather than an actual achievement. Surprising as it may sound, the influence of both Bach and Beethoven is palpable here. Bach’s art of counterpoint, which Wagner was increasingly coming to love during the time that he worked on Lohengrin,45 was designed to allow everything to develop out of a single entity and to discover unity in all things. From his youth Wagner had been familiar with Beethoven’s motto “Never lose sight of the whole.” He also knew the late string quartets, which take to its furthest extreme the principle of ensuring that every detail is fully articulated as part of a dialectical engagement with what might be termed the bigger picture.46

  Wagner felt that Beethoven’s subtle motivic and thematic writing represented the ne plus ultra in the field of instrumental music. It was an ideal that he himself was not to make his own until the time of Tristan und Isolde. In his view, everything that the writers of symphonies had achieved in this field since Beethoven was willful, studied, and, as far as the public at large was concerned, unintelligible. Although a Brahms symphony might provide an opportunity for “brooding” and “raging,” its “aesthetic forms” lacked the significance that only drama could give them.47 We may be tempted to share Carl Dahlhaus’s view that in Lohengrin Wagner strove to achieve the “kind of unity associated with a symphonic movement,” except that Wagner used different means. As a result, the idea of “music drama as a symphonic opera” was already in the air.48 At the same time—as Dahlhaus is fully aware—Lohengrin remains a transitional work.

  Is there any point, however, in lingering over such specific details and wondering which passages in Lohengrin are still a part of the German romantic opera tradition, which ones are inspired by French grand opera, and which are already examples of the later musical drama? By the same token, does it make sense to ask what still constitutes an aria or a scene in the traditional meaning of those terms and which passages are already dominated by an overriding dramaturgical concept? Here it is all too easy to succumb to Wagner’s own belief in progress, a belief that we do not need to share in order to enjoy his music. And if we are looking for progress, we should not concentrate unduly on the new quality of Wagner’s motivic writing and in the process overlook his innovations in the field of harmony: “A single chord brings us closer together than any number of phrases,” Liszt wrote to Wagner under the immediate impression of Lohengrin,49 referring to the sophisticated progression with which Wagner has created a magical transition between the first two scenes of act 3, in other words, from the Bridal Chorus, “Treulich geführt,” to the intimate dialogue between Lohengrin and Elsa, starting wi
th the words “Das süße Lied verhallt, wir sind allein” (The sweet song has died away, we are alone) (music example 15). Liszt was referring here to the progression from B-flat major to the chord of the dominant seventh on F-sharp, whereby the suspension on the sixth, D, which in the chord of the dominant seventh delays the fifth, C-sharp, creates that dreamy atmosphere in Wagner’s music that fascinated Liszt but which he himself was not fully capable of recreating—take, for example, the main theme of his A-Major Piano Concerto, where the suspension on the sixth is missing. Such idiosyncratic harmonies, which were to continue to leave their mark on later composers such as Scriabin and Webern, are just as typical of the “progressive” Wagner as his novel ability to combine motifs and produce ever new derivatives from them.

  15. Bars 305–9 of act 3 of Lohengrin.

  It scarcely needs to be added that the one cannot be separated from the other and that it would be wrong to underestimate the element of a dramaturgical use of sonority that is often fascinating in its own right, above and beyond the sophistication of the harmonic writing.50 Nietzsche was one of the first writers to express his admiration and gratitude for Wagner’s discovery of “how much magic is still possible with music that has been dissolved and, as it were, made elementary. His consciousness of that is downright uncanny, no less than his instinctive realization that he simply did not require the higher lawfulness, style. What is elementary is sufficient—sound, movement, color, in brief the sensuousness of music.”51

  Nothing throws a clearer light on these lines than the prelude to Lohengrin. Even though this “Utopia in A major,” as Hans Mayer called it,52 is above all a series of eight-bar periods juxtaposed with one another and, harmonically speaking, content to make do with the tonic, dominant, and subdominant, it succeeds in becoming one of the most exciting compositions of the nineteenth century thanks to its specific instrumentation and dramaturgical handling of sonority, impressing other composers, such as Berlioz and Tchaikovsky, who were likewise fascinated by sonority, but also inspiring Liszt, Baudelaire, and Thomas Mann to comment on it in terms of rapt effusiveness.

  A scene from Hans Neuenfels’s 2010 Bayreuth production of Lohengrin. The Brabantine chorus is cast as laboratory rats: creatures that can be manipulated. As such, they are willing to torment Elsa whenever their superiors require them to do so. (Photograph courtesy of the Bayreuth Festival/Enrico Nawrath.)

  Is the romanticism of Lohengrin that is exuded not least by the prelude no more than a stage prop, as Hans Mayer would have us believe?53 And if a director puts a swan onstage, does he have some explaining to do? Should Lohengrin, on his arrival, at least carry the bird under his arm in a gesture that is recognizably ironic, as Jonas Kaufmann did in Richard Jones’s 2009 production in Munich? In his 1991 Bayreuth production Werner Herzog, working on the principle that he should “risk showing the naïveté of the fairy tale,” demonstrated how it is possible for Lohengrin to arrive with his swan and for the solution to be both beautiful and at the same time modern. A production of Lohengrin—with or without the swan—would be intolerable without the music, of course, for there is no doubt that it is the music alone that has ensured the opera’s survival. There is nothing, therefore, to prevent directors from staging it as a fairy tale about a swan knight—not necessarily a romantic fairy tale, but at least a German one.

  Central to the “typical” fairy tale are a hero and a characteristic miracle. There are other fantastical elements such as magic spells and talking animals. And ultimately the work is notable for its strict division between good and evil. When judged by these criteria, the plot of Lohengrin is closer to a fairy tale than any of Wagner’s other stage works, at least if we exclude the operas he wrote in his youth. By rehabilitating its fairy-tale elements, one would help the music above all, for the latter would then be able to cast its magic spell and reveal subtleties of which the medieval tale of Lohengrin would never have dared to dream. Thanks to Wagner’s score, the popular fairy tale has become a literary fairy tale.

  We may interpret it, then, as a literary fairy tale in terms of its contents, too: as a tale about a “melancholy hero”54 whose silver armor is resistant to feminine wiles; and as the tale of a young German who is not of this world but who imagines that he can save it nonetheless, until he is roundly rejected and thrust back into the splendid isolation of his own inner world. And Lohengrin also, of course, tells the terrible tale of a German nation that will not perish as long as it relies on God-sent leaders who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their people.

  Each of these fairy tales or narratives contains certainties deeply rooted in our collective unconscious. Music means that they do not have to be dissected piece by piece but may be allowed to flourish as part of our inner reality—even if only in their virtuality. Lohengrin does not have to be deconstructed at all costs, when the composition already presents the hero as a relatively melancholic figure of light and when the music already reveals the C major of the King’s fanfares as banal to a fault. Perhaps admirers of Wagner’s music should respond as Thomas Mann did when—in spite of all his reservations about the composer’s Teutonic aspects—he wrote in his diary: “Went outside until supper and sang Lohengrin to myself.”55

  Any listener who is not sent into raptures by every note that Wagner wrote must, of course, be prepared to make certain compromises when listening to the music of Lohengrin. To take a single example: the valiant exclamations by the King and Herald that repeatedly interrupt Elsa in her opening scene (“Einsam in trüben Tagen”) may be indispensable in terms of the action, but musically speaking they are hardly the last word in refinement. All the more, then, will the listener admire the subtlety of the orchestral writing accompanying Elsa’s initially wistful but then increasingly rapt and visionary statement.56 Even the best orchestras have difficulty doing justice to Wagner’s intentions here, for his aim was to create a dreamlike, fairy-tale mood in which the mixture of tone colors changes imperceptibly: the listener must not be aware of the entry of the oboe, english horn, flute, high strings, and so on. Rather they should strike him or her like a ray of light whose angle of incidence shifts only slowly.

  Even in Lohengrin it is already possible to speak of the “art of transition” that Wagner himself so admired in Tristan und Isolde. Moreover, while that art acquires almost suggestive features in his later works and produces an undertow that some music lovers prefer to resist, the mystical changes of color in Lohengrin—and not just in the scene under discussion—may be enjoyed like a nonrepresentational painting to which we commit ourselves without abandoning ourselves completely. Here closed eyes are as useful as ears that do not ask too insistently about the meaning of what they can hear. Paul Valéry described the language of poetry as a “prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning.”57 In this context it is worth noting that at the time he was working on Lohengrin Wagner was also toying with the idea of writing symphonies:58 the score of Lohengrin is the work not only of a music dramatist striving for semantic clarity and nonambiguity, it also opens the door to an indulgent delight in sonority divorced from all meaning.

  A Word about Arnold Schoenberg

  “A single chord brings us closer together than any number of phrases!”1 It is no accident that Liszt was referring here to the harmonic writing in Lohengrin, the subtlety of which filled Arnold Schoenberg with no less enthusiasm than it had done in the case of Liszt. At all events, the score of Lohengrin was the only one in his extensive Wagner library that contains his handwritten sketch of an harmonic analysis. Moreover, it is the passage that precedes the chord so admired by Liszt: the Bridal Chorus.2 It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that in Style and Idea Schoenberg demonstrates the “thrill of novelty” that characterizes “all great masterpieces” by reference to the “expressive power of the third, A-flat to C-flat, at Ortrud’s lamenting cry of ‘Elsa.’”3

  Schoenberg told his American pupil and biographer Dika Newlin that by the age of twenty-five he had already attended twenty o
r thirty performances of each of Wagner’s operas.4 In Style and Idea he adds that this was by no means exceptional for ordinary music lovers in Germany and Austria at that time.5 The claim is entirely plausible, for Schoenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1874, grew up in a world of musical culture dominated by Wagnerism. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the works of his tonal period—the Two Songs, op. 1; the sextet Verklärte Nacht; and, above all, the Gurre-Lieder—are clearly indebted to Wagner’s late style.