|
The
greatest composer of German opera, Richard Wagner, b. Leipzig,
May 22, 1813, was the youngest of nine children of Friedrich
and Johanna Wagner. His father, a police registrar, died 6
months after Wagner was born, and his mother was remarried
the following year to Ludwig Geyer, an actor and portrait
painter, who moved the family to Dresden.
Geyer
died in 1821, and in 1827 the family returned to Leipzig.
Wagner was attracted to the theatre at an early age.
His
formal music training was brief - about 6 months in 1831-32 with
the Leipzig cantor C.T. Weinlig. During the 1830s, Wagner held
a series of conducting posts with small theatrical companies, and
he wrote two operas, Die Feen (The Fairies, 1834) and Das
Liebesverbot (Forbidden Love; after Shakespeare's Measure for
Measure); His third opera, Rienzi, was conceived on a larger
scale, and Wagner travelled to Paris in 1839 with the futile hope
of having it performed there. Rienzi was finally accepted for performance
in Dresden in 1842. Its success, coupled with that of Der fliegende
Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) the following year, led
to Wagner's appointment to an official conducting post in Dresden.
There
he completed Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin
(1848). This period of success ended in 1849, however, when his
participation in revolutionary political activities forced him to
flee to Switzerland. Wagner's exile from Germany, which lasted until
1860, marks the start of a new period in his career.
Wagner
began composing the non-conventional opera-cycle Der Ring des
Nibelungen (THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG) in 1848 and did not finish
until 1874.
The
last great turning point in Wagner's fortunes occurred in
1864 when he was called to Munich by the eccentric young king
of Bavaria, Ludwig II, an ardent admirer of his works and
theories. Ludwig's patronage continued for the last 20 years
of Wagner's life, making possible the performance of all his
mature works and eventually the construction in Bayreuth of
a theatre of Wagner's own design. It was opened in 1876 with
the first complete production of the Ring. Bayreuth soon became
the centre for the promotion of Wagner's works and ideology.
His last opera, Parsifal, was performed in 1882, with
the ceremony normally accorded only to a religious event.
Following
Wagner's death on Feb. 13, 1883, control of the Bayreuth festival
passed to his second wife, Cosima (a daughter of Franz Liszt), and
later to their children and grandchildren, a succession that has
continued to the present.
The
use of legendary sources and the gradual reduction in contrast between
aria and recitative in these operas anticipate the new music drama
that Wagner was to propose in the treatises written about 1850.
The guiding principles of his theory were naturalism and dramatic
truth, which he felt had been compromised by the musical conventions
of contemporary opera.
He advocated a new synthesis of music, verse, and staging
- what he called a Gesamtkunstwerk. The verse, which
Wagner always wrote himself, was to be compressed, metrically
free, and alliterative, dispensing with the end-rhyme that
led to closed musical structures. The open-ended melody of
the vocal line was to be supported by a symphonic accompaniment,
continuously fluctuating with the sense of the text and unified
by a web of motifs associated more or less directly with characters,
things, ideas, or events.
Wagner
called these motifs Grundthemen, but they have become better
known as leitmotifs ("leading motifs").
This
theoretical music drama was exemplified in its purest form in "Der
Ring des Nibelungen".
The Perfect Wagnerite:
A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
by Bernard Shaw
THE OLD AND THE NEW MUSIC
In the old-fashioned opera every separate number involved the
composition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to
suppose that this creative-effort extended continuously
throughout the number from the first to the last bar. When a
musician composes according to a set metrical pattern, the
selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave
(a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally
completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less
mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is
usually a perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the
third and fourth an exact or very slightly varied repetition of
the first and second. For example, given the first line of Pop
Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could
supply the remaining three. There is very little tune turning of
this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that where it does
occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon, "Ein
zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous
compared with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.
The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free
melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it
were a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy,
sometimes exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take
several themes of this kind, and weave them together into a rich
musical fabric passing panoramically before the ear with a
continually varying flow of sentiment, is the highest feat of the
musician: it is in this way that we get the fugue of Bach and the
symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly inferior musician is the
one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to mention our purveyors
of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited quantity of
symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.
When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact
that there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not
distinguish it from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference
is that in them the repetition was used for the mechanical
completion of conventional metric patterns, whereas in The Ring
the recurrence of the theme is an intelligent and interesting
consequence of the recurrence of the dramatic phenomenon which it
denotes. It should be remembered also that the substitution of
symphonically treated themes for tunes with symmetrical eight-bar
staves and the like, has always been the rule in the highest
forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as an
abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus
conversant only with dance tunes and ballads.
The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he
hampers himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike
what might have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example)
had been compelled by convention to write his historical stories
in rhymed stanzas. That is to say, it limits his fertility to an
occasional phrase, and three quarters of the time exercises only
his barren ingenuity in fitting rhymes and measures to it. In
literature the great masters of the art have long emancipated
themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims that the hierarchy
of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan to Ruskin,
should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from Herrick
to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving
factitious prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing
the dramatic style of the genuine poet of its full natural
endowment of variety, force and simplicity.
This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in
musical art, since music can be written in prose themes or in
versified tunes; only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater
difficulty of the prose forms, and the comparative triviality of
versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature,
the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious
results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made
like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things
the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in art.
Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic
element in both literature and music is maintained by the example
of great masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression
can be combined with decorative symmetry of versification when
the artist happens to possess both the decorative and dramatic
gifts, and to have cultivated both hand in hand. Shakespeare and
Shelley, for instance, far from being hampered by the
conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse, found it
much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in
prose, all his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the
first scene of As You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine
as "What a piece of work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal
of blank verse in which the thought is commonplace, and the
expression, though catchingly turned, absurdly pompous. The Cent
might either have been a serious drama or might never have been
written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to carry off its
unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both poets have
achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one
another to a pitch otherwise unattainable.
Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a
prodigiously gifted and arduously trained musician who is also,
by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Mohere, the
obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does
not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought. No
matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in
exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of ordinary
singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
too, like Shakespeare and Shelley,leaves versified airs, like
Dalla sua pace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's
Leise, leise, which are as dramatic from the first note to the
last as the untrammelled themes of The Ring. In consequence, it
used to be professorially demanded that all dramatic music should
present the same double aspect. The demand was unreasonable,
since symmetrical versification is no merit in dramatic music:
one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork should be
constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an
ignorant demand too, because it is not true that the composers
of these exceptional examples were always, or even often, able to
combine dramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side
by side with Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir,
in which exquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to
decorative passages which are as grotesque from the dramatic
point of view as the music which Alberic sings when he is
slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from the decorative
point of view. Further, there is to be considered the mass of
shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical
numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable
dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a
continuous musical fabric by thematic treatment. Finally,
Mozart's most dramatic finales and concerted numbers are more or
less in sonata form, like symphonic movements, and must therefore
be classed as musical prose. And sonata form dictates repetitions
and recapitulations from which the perfectly unconventional form
adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is more scope for
both repetition and convention in the old form than in the new;
and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to
resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his
invention.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most
astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the
world. Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe
conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra and of the
perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the
dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems
which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional
command of words, can be written down in music as symphonies. Not
that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications of their
art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that the
dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough
to stand by themselves quite apart from the decorative musical
structures of which they had hitherto been a mere feature. After
the finales in Figaro and Don Giovanni, the possibility of
the modern music drama lay bare. After the symphonies of
Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for
words does not lie too deep for music, and that the vicissitudes
of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest aspiration,
can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful
webs of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite
beyond all ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft
was thoroughly popular and practicable: not to save his soul
could he have drawn one long Gothic line in sound as Bach could,
much less have woven several of them together with so apt a
harmony that even when the composer is unmoved its progressions
saturate themselves with the emotion which (as modern critics are
a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our delicately
touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes makes us
give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does not
entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and
noble wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic
dialogue to music exactly as he set the recitatives of the
Passion, there being for him, apparently, only one recitative
possible, and that the musically best. He reserved the expression
of his merry mood for the regular set numbers in which he could
make one of his wonderful contrapuntal traceries of pure ornament
with the requisite gaiety of line and movement. Beethoven bowed
to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the expression for his
feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded funny in
music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all music
by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked
by his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly
questioned his sanity. But to those who were not looking for
pretty new sound patterns, but were longing for the expression of
their moods in music, he achieved revelation, because, being
single in his aim to express his own moods, he anticipated with
revolutionary courage and frankness all the moods of the rising
generations of the nineteenth century.
The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no
longer necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a
composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely
susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A
race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and
Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression.
The frankly delirious description of his Robert the Devil in
Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's astonishingly
mistaken notion that he could have composed music for Faust, show
how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music upset
the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor
of Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a
profounder genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner
himself raved about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots
as wildly as anyone.
Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by
a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting
certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and
devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its
decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the
Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven
organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was
no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic system to his
striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns
in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he
hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by
certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their
singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a
thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and
worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even
passion; and sometimes rose to the occasion in a manner which,
whilst the imagination of his contemporaries remained on fire
with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to overrate him
with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a long
critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a
disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how
anyone could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously.
Those who remember how his reputation stood half a century ago,
and who realize what a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved
to be, even to himself, know how inevitable and how impersonal
Wagner's attack was.
Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not,
like Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures
independently of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because,
that craft being no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not
cultivate it. As Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to
have an exclusively dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner
compared with Mendelssohn. On the other hand, he had not to go to
third rate literary hacks for "librettos" to set to music: he
produced his own dramatic poems, thus giving dramatic integrity
to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony
(except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble
feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner
added thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest
opera, his Ring, so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto
which, though none the worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold,
the merest Christmas tomfoolery to shallow spectators, is the
product of a talent immeasurably inferior to Mozart's own.
The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial: its
transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody
will venture to contend that such transfigurations, however
seductive, can be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in
which the musician and the poet are at the same level. Here,
then, we have the simple secret of Wagner's preemminence as a
dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well as composed the
music of his "stage festival plays," as he called them.
Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of
undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a
musician at his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had
served an arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other.
Wagner was very far from having attained equal mastery at
thirty-five: indeed he himself has told us that not until he had
passed the age at which Mozart died did he compose with that
complete spontaneity of musical expression which can only be
attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with
the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came,
he was not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a
dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical essayist,
exercising a considerable influence on his century. The sign of
this consummation was his ability at last to play with his art,
and thus to add to his already famous achievements in sentimental
drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest
masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the
tragedians and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the
first two acts of Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a
professedly comedic work, and a quite Mozartian garden of melody,
hardly credible as the work of the straining artifices of
Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do one thing by doing
something else, however closely allied the two things may be,
Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it
is all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece
without any such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint
by the standard of Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can
realize how atrocious it used to sound to musicians of the old
school. When I first heard it, with the clear march of the
polyphony in Bach's B mmor Mass fresh in my memory, I confess I
thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that some of the
band were half a bar behind the others. Perhaps they were; but
now that I am familiar with the work, and with Wagner's harmony,
I can still quite understand certain passages producing that
effect organ admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect
accuracy.
|
contact 
Download full version of Ring movie