The Case of Wagner, Part 2

Now that we have established the context in the previous post, we can look at Wagner himself. I am hampered a bit by not being a Wagner fan: I rarely listen to his music. But this provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate the objectivity of aesthetic judgment. What I mean is, that the tools of professional music criticism should allow me to set aside my personal bias against Wagner and give a more or less fair account of his music.

Let's start by listening to the first opera, Das Rheingold, of the four that make up his masterwork: Der Ring des Nibelungen. The opening is really spectacular, consisting of 140 measures of an E flat major chord! Philip Glass, eat your heart out:

It is doubtful that there has ever been a more ambitious musical work than Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner not only composed the longest, at around fifteen hours, piece in the repertoire, but he also wrote the libretto and had to have a special theater designed and built to perform it in. It also required some new instruments (Wagner tubas) and a new approach to harmony and orchestration. Not to say that there were not precedents. As David Goldman points out in this article, Why We Can't Hear Wagner's Music, Wagner was, ironically, particularly indebted to Jewish writers and musicians:

Wagner’s first anti-Jewish screed, the 1850 essay “Jewishness in Music,” claimed that Jews could imitate but never create. Given Wagner’s debt to Jewish musicians and writers, this was particularly twisted. In his first opera, Rienzi, Wagner emulated the work of the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, who in 1841 helped Wagner stage the premiere in Dresden. Wagner reserved especially venomous words for Heinrich Heine, from whose novella From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski Wagner copied the scenario for The Flying Dutchman, the first entry in the “Wagnerian” canon. Wagner also drew on a Heine ballad for his next opera, Tannhäuser. When Jewish musicians suited his requirements, moreover, Wagner happily employed them, entrusting the first performance of Parsifal in 1882 to the conductor Hermann Levi.

But Goldman, while delving into Wagner's techniques, does not give him enough credit for his musical achievements. The article is fairly long, but certainly worth reading. Here is an interesting passage:

That the old regime of throne and altar had fallen, Wagner’s generation could have had no doubt. Wagner told them to celebrate rather than mourn its demise, for in the Twilight of the Gods their impulses would be freed from the fetters of the law. As Nietzsche explained:

 Whence arises all evil in the world, Wagner asked himself? From “old contracts,” he replied, as all revolutionary ideologists have done. In plain English: from customs, laws, morals, institutions, from all those things on which the ancient world and ancient society rests. “How can one get rid of the evil in this world? How can one get rid of ancient society?” Only by declaring war against contracts (traditions, morality). This Siegfried does.

Goldman goes on to mention the connection between the music of Wagner and the Third Reich, but that shouldn't distract us from observing the kind of impact he had on his 19th century listeners. The first performance of the Ring was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876. By this time the effects and consequences of the French Revolution had truly spread throughout all European society. Yes, the old regime of throne and alter had fallen. And what was to replace them? The new complete artwork of Wagner gives the clue: the old rules, customs, laws, morals and so on are all to be replaced by a vision of a post-Christian progressive paradise. To return to a theme of our previous post, this is a middle-class paradise, one with emotional, sensual appeal. Wagner cloaks this in a kind of pseudo-medieval mythology.

Musically, Wagner is, with the exception of passages in Die Meistersinger, writing against the clear boundaries of the classical forms. His music is all about sensuality, fluidity, long-delayed resolution and sumptuous orchestration. As Goldman points out, we are so far removed from the classical forms that Wagner's music has much less impact than it would have had in the late 19th century. Goldman writes:

Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon the depths of darkness, riven by dreams, it seems like the vertiginous imaginings of opium.” (Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil, meant this as a compliment.) The twenty-three-year-old Gustav Mahler, after hearing Parsifal, wrote, “I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled for the rest of my life.” For the first time in history, a composer lent his name to a cultural movement with ramifications far beyond music.

This kind of over-heated prose is typical of much writing about music in the 19th century--we see it applied to Beethoven as well. But I think the sociology of this is clear: looking at it from the musician's point of view, how are you supposed to attract an audience if you don't amp up the exotic impact of your music? Again, emotional, psychological and sensual elements are emphasized over the detached wit and charm of the Classical Era.

This discussion of Wagner is going to have to go to a third post and that will be delayed a bit. I am in the middle of moving and all my reference books are packed up and inaccessible. In the meantime, I am going to do some listening and you can as well.

David Goldman has another interesting article comparing Wagner with J. R. R. Tolkien.

Let's end with another piece by Wagner. This is almost his only non-operatic work, the Siegfried Idyll, a tone-poem for chamber orchestra. The performers are the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan:

The Case of Richard Wagner

I haven't done one for a while, but I used to toss off brief posts on various composers, particularly ones that I thought might be just a tad over-rated. But there is one composer whom I have hardly written about at all, but who deserves a closer look. This is Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) whose masterwork, Der Ring des Nibelungen, has been called "the most influential art work of the past two hundreds years [sic]" but who remains a controversial figure to this day.

Richard Wagner is in the first generation of the great Romantic composers, all of whom were born right around 1810. These include Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869), Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856) and Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886). For a really brilliant and lengthy discussion of these last three, I recommend the book The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen. But you might also read the individual biographies at Wikipedia that I linked to above. Yes, this is the only music blog on the Internet with actual homework! I just want to save a bit of time by not rehearsing all the basic information about these composers.

What is so special about this generation at this particular time? The 19th century is a very complex era, historically, and there are enormous amounts of writing about it, but the crucial fact might be that the generation born, more or less, around 1810 was the first to be born into a post-Revolutionary world. Wikipedia says about the French Revolution that it was:

a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France that lasted from 1789 until 1799, and was partially carried forward by Napoleon during the later expansion of the French Empire. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy, established a republic, experienced violent periods of political turmoil, and finally culminated in a dictatorship under Napoleon that rapidly brought many of its principles to Western Europe and beyond. Inspired by liberal and radical ideas, the Revolution profoundly altered the course of modern history, triggering the global decline of absolute monarchies while replacing them with republics and liberal democracies. Through the Revolutionary Wars, it unleashed a wave of global conflicts that extended from the Caribbean to the Middle East. Historians widely regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history.

Prior to the Revolution, composers and musicians were typically employed by the Church and the aristocracy. If successful, they were guaranteed the patronage of princes, dukes and emperors and this gave a security and stability to their careers. Haydn managed to write one hundred and six symphonies not only because of his manifest talents, but also because of the wealth and patronage of the Esterházy family. He had, at his disposal, an orchestra, large and small concert halls and even an opera house, all at the Esterházy estate. The French Revolution was quite successful in erasing, or at the least diminishing, both the aristocratic class and the influence of the church. One of the intellectual leaders of the Revolution was Denis Diderot who has this quote attributed to him (though it is actually a paraphrase of something said by Jean Meslier).

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”

That's clear enough! The consequences of the French Revolution were profound and widespread and not least upon the arts, music especially. The Revolutionaries were supported by composers who grew up under the ancien régime and their music, while glorifying the Revolution in a suitably brilliant way, was not fundamentally different musically from that which came before. Composers to note include Luigi Cherubini and Étienne Méhul. But as we move into the 19th century, the composers born between 1803 (Berlioz) and 1813 (Wagner) came into the post-Revolutionary world.

One obvious problem was, who would offer them patronage? Mozart and, towards the end of his life, Haydn, had shown that there was a market for public concerts and Beethoven took advantage of this as well. But all three relied mostly on aristocratic patronage. Even Beethoven, who is often called a "revolutionary" composer himself, was supported by a special fund set up by a group of aristocrats in Vienna. The big economic change in the 19th century was the growth of the middle-class music consumer. I say "consumer" instead of "patron" because that better describes the nature of the relationship. The nobility who had a keen interest in music, also tended to be highly educated in music and often, like Prince Nikolas of Esterházy or Frederick the Great of Prussia, were accomplished musicians in their own right. Some of this was true of the middle-class music lovers as well, which is attested to by the enormous numbers of pianos that began to adorn middle-class parlors. But they were more consumers than patrons and musicians and composers found that they needed to write and play music a bit differently to catch their attention. The emotive and sensational began to supplant the witty and charming.

Let's take a couple of examples. The first is a symphony by Joseph Haydn, that well-exemplifies the aesthetic values of 18th century music. This is the Symphony No. 96 in D major and the performers are The Orchestra of the 18th Century, conducted by Frans Brüggen.

This symphony is one of the "London" symphonies written for Haydn's tour. It was premiered in the Hannover Square Rooms, the large concert hall of which seated only 500 people. This was the main concert hall in London for a century. Mozart's piano concertos were premiered in the Lenten concerts in Vienna where the typical audience was around 120 people. In both these cases the majority of attendees were nobility.

Now, by way of contrast, let's listen to Berlioz's hugely influential Symphonie fantastique which was premiered in 1830. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

The symphony is a piece of program music that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless, unrequited love.

Let's listen. This is the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France & Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel:

This piece is always discussed in terms of its innovation and exotic program, but why don't we ask ourselves why Haydn didn't write something like this for Prince Nikolas? Actually, I can see the prince now saying, "my dear Joseph, why would you ever think I had any interest in your romantic adventures, with or without the addition of opium?" I think that crystallizes what was so successful in the Berlioz work: it was perfectly designed to appeal to the new middle-class music consumer. It was scandalous and seductive all at once. Instead of making an intellectual appeal, it makes an emotional, psychological and sensual appeal. The orchestration, harmonies and rhythms are haunting and alluring.

I suspect Haydn could have written something quite like this, if he had seen the point. Just listen to the introduction to his oratorio The Creation for example. This is Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt:

And now I find I have written a fairly long post, and hardly mentioned Richard Wagner! This will have to serve as the introduction and I will continue with Herr Wagner in the next post.