Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

  16. Bars 231–35 of scene 1 of Das Rheingold.

  17. Bars 533–62 of scene 1 of Das Rheingold, demonstrating the perfect arch form of this passage.

  This new situation demanded not only improvisatory abilities from the composer but also procedures that can certainly be described as sophisticated. Bars 533–62, for example, can be analyzed as a “perfect arch” in the sense defined by Alfred Lorenz: beginning with the Rhinegold fanfare, Wagner builds to a climax that is then rescinded, returning to the initial fanfare by means of a mirror-like symmetrical structure (music example 17).24 This form is appropriate to the situation onstage as it reflects the eternal cycle of nature, a cycle that is mirrored in turn in the vocal writing for the Rhinedaughters. Those readers who are interested in a purely formal musical analysis will find much to enjoy in this passage, as it reveals an interesting structure. At the same time, however, they are bound to be puzzled by the extent to which Wagner was conscious of what he was doing here or whether he was following the “unconscious plan” that he liked to claim was the case. Yet it is part and parcel of his ingenious artistry that we can see its underlying strategy not as some arithmetical game, as may be the case with a Bach fugue, for example, for all that such a piece may also be contingent upon other imponderables.

  Especially in the case of Das Rheingold, we should not expect to find perfection in this sense, for no matter how elaborate the theories he had already formulated, Wagner was still not clear in his own mind about the exact nature of his “vocal melody” in this preliminary evening. Of course, the practices found in traditional operas, whereby a recitative designed to carry the action forward was followed by an emotionally intense aria, had long been obsolete and in the hands of a composer like Mozart were more of a caricature than a rule of thumb. But how should a composer set a libretto in which every line was equally important for the advancement of a plot that never stands still and which leaves it to the orchestra—heard synchronously with the vocal line—to reflect and comment on events?

  This is a question that had already exercised the exponents of early Italian opera, a medium intended to bring about a revival of classical tragedy, for audiences had very quickly tired of the never-ending recitation tone, persuading composers to break up the passages of recitative with more appealing vocal writing based on songs and arias. In turn, these songs and arias soon became the focus of attention, leading to a loss of interest in the actual plot. Wagner was determined to improve on this—which also meant improving on those aspects of his own romantic operas which, however musically gripping, distracted from the developing action.

  Wagner’s main problem lay in breaking free from the stereotypical forms of traditional opera—unaccompanied and accompanied recitative and arias—and inventing vocal forms appropriate to the situation onstage. The difficulties that this problem initially caused him emerge from Loge’s great narration in scene 2 of Das Rheingold, starting with the words “Immer ist Undank Loge’s Lohn!” (Ingratitude ever is Loge’s wage). Wagner begins by adopting the tone of a traditional recitative, something almost entirely inconceivable in later sections of the Ring. But during the words “für Weibes Wonne und Werth” (for woman’s delights and worth), the mode of performance changes with remarkable suddenness, and at the stage direction “All express astonishment and various forms of consternation,” the motif associated with the renunciation of love blossoms not only in the vocal line but also in the orchestra, the function of which had hitherto been limited for the most part to a series of inconspicuous accompanying chords. This motif provides the emotional context, for audiences can still recall its earlier occurrence at the words “Nur wer der Minne Macht” (Only he who forswears love’s power). If it is repeated now, it is to remind the assembled gods of what they will be losing by abandoning love, embodied in Freia, for power, symbolized by Valhalla.

  When Loge goes on to ask, rhetorically, if there is anything “in water, earth or air that man might deem mightier than woman’s delights and worth,” his vocal line, now far more expressive in character, encourages the orchestra to add a commentary that becomes an independent strand in the narrative, weaving together the tale of the Rhinedaughters, the Rhinegold, and Alberich’s renunciation of love in favor of world domination to produce an independent orchestral melody.25

  This scene encapsulates the challenges that Wagner faced when composing the Ring and demonstrates how he tackled them: it was a difficult balancing act that required him to ensure on the one hand that his musical language revealed the universal validity demanded by the mythical elements in his total artwork, while at the same time being able to react flexibly to the subtleties of the plot. A century before Wagner, composers faced with this situation would have spoken of the well-nigh insoluble task of combining three different styles—“high,” “middle,” and “low”—within one and the same work. It is certainly possible to argue whether Wagner was as successful in achieving this aim in Das Rheingold as he was in the later parts of the Ring and whether the stylistic inconsistencies that are found in the vocal writing in Das Rheingold are the result of a lack of experience, or whether, conversely, they make sense precisely because the work is set in a strange, archaic world to which a cultured philosophy of beauty cannot be applied. After all, if certain elements of Das Rheingold were not so rankly luxuriant, they would not be able to show any signs of degeneration in Götterdämmerung.

  Be that as it may, Hanslick was being unjust when, in his polemically worded review of the Munich production of Das Rheingold in 1869, he complained about the “perversity of Wagner’s one-thing-after-another style”: “One after the other, the characters have their say, slowly and over-emphatically, while the other characters look on, mute and bored.”26 Here Hanslick is guilty of ignoring not only the sense of drama found in many of the scenes of Das Rheingold but also the different kinds of recitative: at one moment Alberich is heard cursing and swearing; at the next Fricka launches into her litany of woes, only for Wotan to strike a note of high emotion—to say nothing of the Rhinedaughters’ timeless and weightless vocal lines.

  From the standpoint of the vocal lines, the spectator may indeed share Hanslick’s view that the world of Das Rheingold is unbalanced and even long-winded, but when seen from the perspective of the leitmotifs, it is undoubtedly startling and succinct. Indeed, it takes the breath away to note the assurance with which Wagner finds his leitmotifs, all of which are eloquent in the spirit of the action and characterization, while at the same time being easy to recognize. Moreover, Wagner successfully discovered a succinct musical expression for symbols and archetypal images which, grounded in our collective unconscious, take on material form in specific colors and highlights, depending on the context in which they occur, without their identity suffering in the process.

  The motifs in question represent animate creatures such as gods and goddesses, giants, dwarfs, heroes, and villains but also elements and objects such as water, fire, light, a sword, a spear, the ring, and the castle that is home to the gods. Even abstract processes such as brooding and the signing of treaties are reflected in such motifs. Wagner describes them as motifs of presentiment and reminiscence because they serve as pointers to concrete connections within the action of the Ring, but they can also allow us to experience what we already know about the world. In this way they are independent of the various strands in the plot.

  The triadic motif that dominates the prelude to Das Rheingold is a good example of this, for not only does it remind us of a particular river serenely flowing along, but it captures the archetypal experience of flowing water in general. After all, the motifs of presentiment and reminiscence can fulfill their function only by speaking a musical language already familiar to listeners as part of a mimetic tradition that has existed for centuries, if not for millennia. Pentatonic scales and triads carry associations of nature for the simple reason that they are directly derived from the notes of the natural harmonic series, notes that primitive man (and woman) could produce on
the simplest of bone flutes. Of course, modern composers, including Wagner, use the triad in very different contexts, and yet it continues to represent the elemental as opposed to the differentiated.

  18 and 19. The Rhinegold motif as it appears in bars 515–17 of scene 1 of Das Rheingold and the Valhalla motif in bars 769–70.

  It is no accident, therefore, that the motifs that Wagner himself described as “natural” are based on pentatonic scales and triads: here one thinks, for example, of the motifs associated with the Rhine, the Rhinegold, the rainbow, and Erda. All these motifs are generally close to nature, but each of them also includes a specific gesture. Take the Rhinegold motif (music example 18), an ascending figure notable not least for its striking rhythm and heard on the solo trumpet: almost inevitably it suggests an elementally trail-blazing energy, in this case the positive energy of the earth that becomes a lust for power only when it is misused. Scored for winds, the Valhalla theme (music example 19) is also one of these nature motifs and acquires a sense of stolid solemnity, especially in the key of D-flat major, a key which according to the characteristics traditionally associated with the different tonalities is relatively remote from nature. As a result, this solemnity is appropriate to the sight of a proud citadel built upon solid foundations. Even so, it is audibly derived from the Rhinegold motif: ultimately, the giants who built Valhalla will receive the Rhinegold as a reward for all their hard work. To the extent that Wotan has to give the giants the ring that has been made from the Rhinegold, it is only logical that the motifs associated with the ring and Valhalla are based on the same musical material: the ring is the symbol of world dominion, Valhalla the symbol of the power of the gods, a power whose material expression—the castle—comes at a very high price. And it is clear from Wagner’s music that a curse lies on this ring, for although the descending and ascending thirds that make up the motif form a perfect circle, this circle is formed from thirds which, no longer natural, are somehow tainted. Taken together, they form the chord of a diminished seventh, a highly unstable and ambivalent structure (music example 20).

  20. The Ring motif as stated in bars 599–604 of scene 1 of Das Rheingold.

  It was in honor of Valhalla’s splendiferous motif that Wagner devised the tubas that are named after him. Listeners who, on hearing this motif, are reminded of nationalist or even National Socialist pomp and circumstance or claim that the composer had a positive opinion of power can certainly appeal to the work’s reception history. But it is a reception history that flies in the face of Wagner’s own intentions: by deriving the apparently stable sounds of the Valhalla motif on its first appearance from the unstable sequence of thirds of the Ring motif, Wagner makes it clear that Valhalla is built on sand. This is something that any perceptive listener can work out without studying the score in detail: having in the meantime assimilated the threatening gesture of the Ring motif, we feel that its transformation into the resplendent Valhalla motif during the transition between scenes 1 and 2 is all the more magical in consequence. As listeners we feel an almost archetypal sense of hope that evil may be mysteriously turned to good. Wagner himself is not interested in beautiful appearances, which he exposes in the subsequent course of the Ring, but true to his aim of offering his audiences a modern mythology, he presents us with images and ideas that we have carried around inside us from time immemorial.

  The reproach that Wagner uses his leitmotifs in blatantly overobvious ways is popular with anti-Wagnerians but is ultimately untenable, while the claim that these motifs merely duplicate the action is vitiated by the nuances of which they are capable. In any case, the transformation of the Ring motif into the Valhalla motif takes place in the orchestra, without any words of explanation, necessitating an independent transfer action on the part of the audience: only then is it possible to appreciate the structural affinity between the two leitmotifs and see the structural similarities with the potential of the ring and Valhalla as instruments of power.27 That this transfer succeeds, even though it is undertaken not by the intellect but primarily by feeling, represents a triumph that few would begrudge Wagner.

  Even within the context of the drama, Wagner’s music is sufficiently autonomous to throw listeners back on their own devices. But not only is the listener “active” in this sense, so too is the music, which on this point has no need to fear comparisons with the visual arts. For centuries writers on the visual arts have argued that it is not only the individual who looks at the image but the image that looks at the observer. Philosophers such as Leibniz and Nicholas of Cusa have ascribed an “autonomous activity” to the image inasmuch as it looks “simultaneously at everyone, independently of the position and movements of its observers and, from the standpoint of the individual, at that individual alone.”28 This reflects the way in which Wagner’s leitmotifs work and, indeed, the way in which music in general functions: on the one hand motifs send out signals that all listeners can understand in the same or similar ways, while on the other hand they are mostly sufficiently autonomous to affect every listener differently. This ambivalence is already found in the motifs that make up Das Rheingold, which are more reminiscent of al fresco painting than the motifs that occur in the later parts of the cycle.

  And even these motifs are already remarkable for the variety of ways in which they can be transformed and combined. Let us consider a further detail from Loge’s great narration, this time from the standpoint of the music theorist. “Ein Tand ist’s / in des Wassers Tiefe, / lachenden Kindern zur Lust” (A toy it is in the watery deep, delighting laughing children), Loge describes the Rhinegold, before going on:

  doch, ward es zum runden

  Reife geschmiedet,

  hilft es zur höchsten Macht,

  gewinnt dem Manne die Welt.

  [But once it is forged to a rounded hoop, it confers unending power and wins the world for its master.]

  Wotan replies, “reflectively”:

  Von des Rheines Gold

  hört’ ich raunen:

  Beute-Runen

  berge sein rother Glanz.

  [Of the gold in the Rhine I’ve heard it whispered that booty-runes lie hid in its fiery glow.]

  It goes almost without saying that the Rhinedaughters’ cantilena and the Ring motif are heard at this point in the orchestra. What is particularly interesting is the way in which this is done. On a purely superficial level, there is nothing unduly striking: the Ring motif appears with importunate frequency, but it remains tonally unaltered, its bass line the same as on its first appearance. On that occasion Wellgunde and Floßhilde had revealed the Rhinegold’s secret to Alberich:

  WELLGUNDE

  Der Welt Erbe

  gewänne zu eigen,

  wer aus dem Rheingold

  schüfe den Ring,

  der maaßlose Macht ihm verlieh’.

  FLOSSHILDE

  Der Vater sagt’ es,

  und uns befahl er

  klug zu hüten

  den klaren Hort.

  [WELLGUNDE: The world’s wealth would be won by him who forged from the Rhinegold the ring that would grant him limitless power.

  FLOSSHILDE: Father told us and bound us over to guard the bright hoard wisely.]

  The opening scene of Das Rheingold in Patrice Chéreau’s centennial production of the Ring in Bayreuth in 1976. The dam on top of which the Rhinedaughters are positioned was intended to illustrate Chéreau’s view that the cycle is a nineteenth-century construct, but avoids the sort of explicit political interpretation placed on the work by Joachim Herz in his Leipzig production that was first staged in its entirety that same year. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: D 1597.)

  What is remarkable is that in his exchange with Loge, Wotan claims to have “heard” about the warning concerning the “gold in the Rhine,” a warning once issued to his daughters by Father Rhine. But is Wotan really so imperfectly informed about his own world? In offering this information, he merely pretends to be expressing
himself “reflectively,” his expression corresponding with the reciting note F-sharp, which is clearly contradicted by the harmonization of the “orchestral melody” at this point in the score. Moreover, his F-sharp contradicts the reciting note F to which Floßhilde had articulated the words “Der Vater sagt’ es.” Of course, no listener can possibly recall the harmonic environment of Floßhilde’s F when Wotan sings his F-sharp 854 bars later.29 At the same time, however, the “allusive magic” of Wagner’s musical dramas rests on details such as this, details that are so effective precisely because they appear en masse and serve to reinforce each other.