Wagner - is it music or drama?

In the music there is a shimmering and swelling, which finally blazes forth in a proud, even harsh, assertion of triumphal power. At the end of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the Gods are finally, after a great deal of travail, crossing the rainbow bridge into their citadel Valhalla.

Anyone sitting in a concert hall listening to this as an orchestral extract could be forgiven for thinking this is music of unalloyed ‘rubbing-the-loser’s-nose-in-it’ victory. They may even hate themselves for feeling excited, associating Wagner’s music with sheer unconscionable arrogance!

But the thing is, the ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’ can only have this meaning when you’ve paid no attention to the storyline; when you’ve ignored the dramatic context. Because when you finally hear this passage in the theatre, or at least as part of the opera (or ‘music drama’, as Wagner called these works), you realise that the gods are entering a kingdom that has been doomed; that Wotan and Fricka and Donner et al are blind, as Loge says, ‘to the end towards which they are heading’. It is the most spectacular example of irony in the history of… well, what - Music or Drama?

In the theoretical text Opera and Drama (1851), Wagner established and codified techniques for rendering music suitable for underscoring the drama - his famous theory of the leitmotif, for example, a musical theme associated with a particular person, thing or concept, which is musically transformed as that person, thing or concept proceeds through the plot, musically assisting audience members through the various developments in the progress of the drama. In Opera and Drama Wagner also explains how modulation (the changing of keys) could be used to express the changing shades of meaning and emotion in a sung line.

There’s a fantastic example in Act II of Die Walkure (The Valkyrie), the second opera in the Ring cycle.

Brunnhilde has come to tell Siegmund that he is to die in the duel with Hunding the next day. It’s a grim prospect, but Siegmund is not too dispirited as long as there’s a chance of finding his beloved in eternity. ‘Will Siegmund find Sieglinde there?’ he asks, as his music modulates expectantly up a fourth, expressing his rising anticipation. ‘Erdenluft muss sie noch athmen; Sieglinde sieht Siegmund dort nicht,’ replies Brunnhilde. In other words... ‘no’, as the music cadences on a chord a semitone lower than our ears expect, underscoring the disappointing message. 

‘But Wagner moved away from the ideal balance he achieved between words and music in The Valkyrie!’ cry those who argue that Wagner’s career proves the ultimate futility of marrying music with drama.

Their argument goes: Under the influence of the philosophers, first Ludwig Feuerbach and then Arthur Schopenhauer, (who believed that music was the highest of all arts), Wagner quietly dropped the theories of Opera and Drama. By the time of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (the third and fourth instalments of the Ring), and the non-Ring opera Tristan and Isolde, he’d reverted to more standard operatic procedures, to work that was primarily of musical interest. In Tristan and Isolde (1865), as one commentator remarks, the words are little more than ‘sonant carriers’ of the music.

What this point of view fails to take into account, however, is the continuing development of Wagner’s musical-dramatic ideas through the 1860s and 70s in such essays as Beethoven (1870) and The Destiny of Opera (1871). In these, as Jack M. Stein argues in Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts, Wagner gradually expounded a musical-dramatic theory in which music and visual action were the two complementary elements, as you can see in the long sequences of pantomime in The Mastersingers. This doesn’t disprove the validity of Wagner’s ambitions: it proves that Wagner was too good a man of the theatre to persist in thinking that words alone are what an audience takes in, in performance. (Even in spoken drama the word is not the basic unit - the basic unit is the psychological beat.)

In fact, in Götterdämmerung, the last of the Ring operas, Wagner’s score actually reflects bigger dramatic turns. Think how the last moments of the music convey the whole sweep of the closing stage pictures:

With a single bound she urges her horse into the blazing pyre. The fire flares up and seems to engulf the entire building. The glow eventually subsides leaving a pall which settles on the horizon like a cloud. The Rhine rises up in flood bearing the three Rhinemaidens. Hagen throws aside his spear and rushes forward: ‘Get back from the ring,’ but the Rinemaidens twine their arms around him and drag him into the depths of the waters, emerging jubilantly with the ring. A red glow pierces the horizon’s cloudbank. From the ruins of the fallen hall, the men and women see the gods sitting in Valhalla, consumed by flame.

True, you can deduce almost all this from the music; the music is painting a picture, suggesting a choreography. But, even this late in his career, Wagner was still arguing for the importance of the words.

On 18 August 1877, there was a production of Lohengrin in Melbourne, Australia. A local resident wrote to Wagner in Germany telling him it had just been on. After perhaps looking up 'Melbourne' in his atlas, Wagner thanked the writer for news of the production and for the views he had sent of Melbourne 'which have greatly interested myself and family': Geliebter Herr...

But then he added, significantly: 'Would that you had brought out my works in English, only then can they be understood by an English-speaking people. I hope to have this done in London.' Okay, he was writing in response to news of an earlier opera (Lohengrin had been premiered in 1850 just prior to Oper und Drama with its word-matching theories). But he was writing this letter in 1877. The Ring had just been done in Bayreuth; it was12 years after Tristan.

He still believed opera was a form of drama, and presumably one where you still need to understand the words.

If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme,29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], ideas for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012