14

Old Wagner

The bare bones of Wagner’s progress after finishing Lohengrin in 1848 have already been sketched. He wrote a libretto based on Norse mythology, called Siegfried’s Tod (Siegfried’s Death), but put it aside during his involvement with the Dresden uprising and flight into exile. In 1850, he decided that this libretto needed a predecessor, and produced one called Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried). He then felt he needed to go still earlier in the tale, and wrote a libretto that might have been called Siegfried’s Parents since it tells their story: it ended up as Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, 1851), named after its most important character, who is the immortal half-sister of those parents and called Brünnhilde. Finally he decided that this trilogy needed a prologue, Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold, 1852), which would deal with the pre-history of the family drama: how magic gold was fashioned into an accursed ring; how the Gods won and lost it; and how Wotan, their ruler, must scheme to get it back. The four libretti were bundled together and published in 1853 as Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

The music for the first three parts of the story – up to and including Der junge Siegfried, Act 2 – was finished between 1853 and 1857, at which point Wagner broke off. He had (as so often) severe money problems, and his attention was captured by a new project: an opera called Tristan und Isolde, which he told his publishers Breitkopf & Härtel – with insane, probably debt-driven optimism – presented ‘almost no difficulties in terms of the scenery and the chorus. Practically the only demanding task will be to find a good pair of singers for the main parts.’¹ He wrote this libretto in the summer of 1857, and by 1859 the music was also complete; Tristan was not performed, though, until 1865. In 1860 he was again in Paris, to oversee and compose some new music for a revival of Tannhäuser at the Opéra (which occurred in March 1861). And then, having at last been granted an amnesty and allowed to return to Germany, he shifted his base to Munich, where, supported by subventions from the Bavarian king, Ludwig II, who was a passionate devotee, he wrote Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Master Singers of Nuremberg, 1865–7; first performed 1868), his only mature comedy and an anomaly in his oeuvre. After Die Meistersinger he returned to Siegfried (by now, the title had been shortened) and finished Act 3 in 1869.

Along the way Wagner was widowed: his first wife, Minna, died in 1866, the couple having lived separately for years. Well before Minna’s death, he had acquired a new partner, Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of Franz Liszt and, when they met, the wife of Wagner’s (until then) good friend Hans von Bülow. Children were born. Siegfried’s Tod was renamed Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods) and its music completed by 1874. In these last years, Wagner was constantly distracted by the labour of conducting, which he did to raise funds for building a new theatre he planned in Bayreuth (a small town in northern Bavaria) and then for productions of his works to be mounted there. The complete Ring des Nibelungen was premiered in Bayreuth in 1876, inaugurating a Wagner summer festival that continues to this day, currently under the direction of Wagner’s great-granddaughters Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner. For his final work, Parsifal, Wagner returned to a project first conceived in the 1840s. He called it a Bühnenweihfestspiel (A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage). Its libretto was written in the late 1870s, the music completed in 1882; the premiere was in Bayreuth that same year. In February 1883 Wagner died in Venice.

Thus briefly told, the tale only emphasizes the accomplishments. The most striking part has always been the interruption of the Ring. Wagner broke off a project of epic proportions, one whose size was unprecedented in the history of opera. He then resumed after more than a decade (a decade in which he had written two quite different but equally revolutionary new works, Tristan and Die Meistersinger), and did so without apparent anguish or lack of fluency. Indeed, he seemed to make the differences between his musical voice in 1857 and in 1869 part of the dramatic effect. Another startling achievement was the composition of Tristan und Isolde, the most influential opera – probably the most influential piece of music – in the second half of the nineteenth century. This magnum opus took a mere two years of effort, from writing the libretto to scoring the final B-major triad.

These tremendous creative feats would not have been possible without a circle of self-sacrificing women, open-minded male friends, generous benefactors and devoted musicians. That Wagner tended to betray the women and the friends, exploit the benefactors and crush the musicians was his particular pathology. That he relied on such a support structure, though, is unremarkable: composers in the nineteenth century seldom got much done without a similar collective of publishers and acolytes. Verdi, as so often, offers a convenient comparison: the way in which his career ran in mutually sustaining parallel with that of his publisher, Ricordi, was a sign of the times (the nineteenth century saw an inexorable rise in the power and prestige of music publishers, just as the twentieth century saw their decline); and Verdi’s long-term partner, Giuseppina Strepponi, offers in many ways a classic exemplar of the trials and tribulations that could attend those who elected to serve at the altar of nineteenth-century genius.

In Wagner’s case, though, the women seem to have been an even more powerful force than usual. This aspect of his biography may well have influenced his higher intellectual detractors – Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno are the most famous – in their views about his unpleasantly feminine side, his uncontrolled outbursts of anger, his racial panics and his penchant for silk. The silk issue, by the way, was serious, as one sees in Wagner’s correspondence with Judith Gautier, the Paris friend (and perhaps lover) charged with exporting fabrics for him. He wrote to her in December 1877:

Cancel the pink satin entirely: there would be too much of it and it would be good for nothing. Can I expect the two remnants which I mentioned in my last letter? The brocade can be reserved. I’m inclined to order 30 metres, but perhaps the colours can be changed to flatter my taste even better; in other words, the fawn-striped material would be silver-grey, and blue, my pink, very pale and delicate.²

Yes, that was thirty metres, no misprint. But to argue that emotional outbursts and strong opinions about furnishings are universally and eternally the proper domain of the female, ergo repugnant in males – or indeed that they are ills to be combated – is hardly philosophical wisdom. Wagner was indeed fascinated by the feminine as an abstraction, pronouncing frequently on its meaning; one of his favourite ideas was of ‘feminine’ music submitting to the dictates of ‘masculine’ poetry, a metaphor whose potential for twentieth- and twenty-first-century irritation he could not have anticipated in 1850. This notion of creative duality became the centrepiece of an argument about musical form in his treatise Oper und Drama in 1851. Taking matters even further, the last prose essay he worked on, a fragment called ‘On the Feminine Element in the Human’ (1883), makes the case for reconciliation of masculine and feminine, and even suggests that nirvana would be the erasure of their differences.³

Wagner, whose literary writings are famous for their changes of mind and even frank contradictions, wavers in this last essay between, on the one hand, putting men and women on a similar footing and, on the other, arguing that masculinity and femininity might be eliminated as distinct conditions. These alternatives nevertheless converge in Tristan und Isolde, which was based on Gottfried von Strassburg’s medieval epic, a classic of the Middle High German canon. Gottfried’s poem centres on the life of Tristan, beginning with the tragic death of his mother and father, his adoption by his uncle King Marke of Cornwall and Tristan’s various heroic deeds, in particular his slaying of an Irish usurper called Morold. Tristan sustains a wound in the battle with Morold and goes back to Ireland (in disguise) to be cured. There he encounters Princess Isolde, Morold’s fiancée, who heals him but in the process discovers his identity. Trouble ensues, but after some shuttle diplomacy between Cornwall and Ireland, Tristan escorts Isolde to Cornwall to wed his uncle. While on board the ship, however, Tristan makes the mistake of sharing with Isolde a love potion, which has the usual results. Duty prevails on disembarkation; Isolde marries King Marke. The poem then becomes an account of the undying erotic passion between Tristan and Isolde. He is eventually separated from her, wounded a second time and dies waiting for her to return to him over the sea. For his three-act opera, Wagner radically simplified the action. In Act 1, Tristan (tenor) and Isolde (soprano) are sailing from Ireland to Cornwall and drink what they believe to be deadly poison, but in fact is the love potion. Act 2 is set in Cornwall: the lovers meet at night and sing about love, only to be discovered in flagrante at dawn by King Marke (bass) and his entourage, one of whom wounds Tristan. In Act 3, having returned to Brittany, Tristan languishes in sickness and hallucinations; he dies at the very moment Isolde arrives over the sea to heal him, whereupon she too expires.

We will consider the opera in more detail later, but for the moment we can concentrate on one aspect of the libretto. It is strikingly modern in placing the two lovers on an equal plane rather than assigning them female and male behaviour along the nineteenth century’s usual social or indeed operatic lines (imagine for a moment Otello e Desdemona, or Carmen et Don José, or Lohengrin und Elsa). Isolde is Tristan’s rival both as verbal sparring partner and as musician. In Gottfried’s account she is portrayed as musically superior, and Wagner was happy to write music that reflected this superiority. We can see this at the end of Act 2, when Tristan sings a formal verse in a relatively stable minor key, inviting his beloved to follow him on a journey:

Dem Land, das Tristan meint,

der Sonne Licht nicht scheint:

es ist das dunkel

nächt’ge Land

daraus die Mutter

mich entsandt.

[To the land that Tristan imagines, / where no sun ever shines: / it is the dark, / nocturnal land / from which my mother / sent me forth.]

Isolde replies with a parallel verse:

Nun führst du in dein Eigen,

dein Erbe mir zu zeigen;

wie flöh’ ich wohl das Land

das alle Welt umspannt?

[Now you are leading the way to your domain, / to show me your heritage; / how could I escape a place / that spans the entire world?]

Musically she starts by re-voicing his first two lines, but then she detours into stranger harmonic and melodic terrain. And rather than following the music of his last three lines, she takes another tack entirely, redoing what she has just sung in yet another way, the orchestration twice as rich. Her version is, in other words, meant to sound independent and more inventive. Such examples of gender equipoise and rebalancing are repeated many times elsewhere. For instance, Tristan throughout the opera is an unusually and wonderfully un-masculine male, constantly suffering from what were regarded in the nineteenth century as feminine maladies such as nervous melancholy; and in this sense he is a match for Isolde, who has her own surfeit of wildness and despair. In Act 3, just before Isolde arrives, he is given music in 5/4, the most off-balance metre Wagner could have chosen, to express his descent into self-annihilation: ‘with blood flowing from my wounds, once I fought Morold. With blood flowing from my wounds, let me now hunt Isolde’ – this is one of the craziest lines in all opera, and the hunting image recalls, from the medieval source, that Tristan was an expert at dismembering stags.

Quintuple metre is extraordinarily rare in European classical music before the twentieth century (at least outside Eastern European music, where it tends to reference national song types), and it suggests here that time is out of joint. The passage distorts music from Act 2, where the same theme appears as a sleepy interlude in the love duet, setting the lines ‘lausch’ Geliebter! / Lass’ mich sterben!’ (Listen, beloved! / Let me die!). In Act 2, this is a berceuse or lullaby in 3/4 and the single most peaceful stretch in the act. Hearing this same music distorted into 5/4 in Act 3, in the chaos and roar of the moment, it is extremely hard to tell exactly why music that seems like it should be in 3/4, and was in 3/4, and seems just on the border of being metrically stable, now sounds so profoundly wrong. The confused souls in the audience – made so by a strange metre – momentarily share an experience of instability with the man onstage.

The relative equality of Wagner’s couple is also exemplified in the most famous subsection of the long Act 2 love duet, music that returns at the end of Act 3 and is known there, colloquially, as the ‘Liebestod’ (death-from-love):

So starben wir,

um ungetrennt,

ewig einig,

ohne End’,

ohn’ Erwachen,

ohn’ Erbangen,

namenlos

in Lieb’ umfangen,

ganz uns selbst gegeben,

der Liebe nur zu leben!

[So we would die, / and thus inseparable, / for ever, as one, / without end, / without awakening, / without fear, / nameless / encircled by love, / be given only to ourselves, / living only love!]

Tristan leads with these lines and Isolde echoes them, following suit by repeating more or less verbatim, as is appropriate both to immemorial operatic gender roles and to the order in which they will die – first him, then her. But even to early audiences, the personae in this duet were nonetheless interchangeable. Wagner travelled to London in 1877 to conduct excerpts from his later works as part of a ‘Wagner Festival’, and most of the Act 2 Tristan duet was featured on the final day, 26 May. James William Davison, the critic of The Times and generally no lover of Wagner, wrote that ‘the lovers echo one another, phrase after phrase, as if what one said was precisely what the other would have said if their positions had been reversed’.⁴

Then in Act 3, as Isolde is kneeling over Tristan’s corpse, this same music is played quietly in the orchestra, representing an acoustic hallucination that she will give a name to, a few moments later, in her final monologue: ‘How gently and quietly he smiles. How delicately his eyes are opening. Do you see it, my friends? Don’t you see? … Don’t you see how his lips are parting, and his breath drifts out? Am I the only one who hears this melody … that resounds from him, and resonates in me?’ All this is sung to the music of ‘So starben wir, um ungetrennt’ from Act 2, but Isolde, now a soloist, takes it far afield. It is as if she remembers Tristan’s musical leads and then improvises a spectacular variation around them. She says that she hears music emanating from his corpse, but the music we can hear, its immense sonic plenitude, is coming from the singer who is impersonating her. Such feats of musical daring were hard, very hard, to emulate. Fifty years later, Richard Strauss set his sights on a libretto in which the dying heroine, Elektra, says to her sister, Chrysothemis, ‘How could I not hear the music? The music comes from me’ – and that was as close as he was ever willing to get to Tristan.

There are famously prim responses to Tristan, including several from Nietzsche in the years after he had turned away from his initial Wagner passion: ‘Who dares say the word, the actual word for the ardours of the Tristan music – I put on gloves when I read the score of Tristan’.⁵ And armoured matrons like Clara Schumann were predictably offended: in an oft-quoted remark she pronounced the opera ‘the most disgusting thing I have heard or seen in my entire life’.⁶ But we may be too quick to attribute the vitriol to dislike of onstage adultery, or the idea of sex, or strange music. The fact that male and female weigh evenly on the scales, that a female character is sometimes even allowed mastery, may have been more disturbing to Nietzsche or Clara Schumann than kissing or infidelity or unresolved harmonic dissonances.

Later in life, when Wagner came around to arguing not merely for the erasure of sexual inequalities but of sexuality entirely, an essential misogyny would re-emerge, perhaps one not much different from that found in his earlier operas. In his last writings, women are distinct from The Feminine: they figure as aliens, as temptresses luring the upright masculine figures into a slide towards barbarism. One wonders whether this sort of thing was qualitatively much different from the thinking that produced the more ordinary clichés of the works pre-1850. There, woman’s proper role was to sacrifice herself to redeem men, as do Senta in Der fliegende Holländer and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser. And if such a role is not played with complete conviction, with never a doubting moment, then you become Elsa in Lohengrin: a failure, and a dead one at that.

It is unlikely that Wagner’s intellectual convictions and fictions about ideal women had no effect on his real-life interactions with them, and some of his encounters with women were indeed strange beyond fiction. One instance was his long, intense relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck. She was the wife of the Swiss banker Otto Wesendonck, who was one of Wagner’s greatest supporters and patrons. Wagner first met the Wesendoncks in Zurich in 1854; they provided him and his wife Minna with a cottage on their estate (called ‘Asyl’, sanctuary) from 1856 to 1858, the place where the larger part of Tristan und Isolde was written. Mathilde was Wagner’s muse in these Zurich years and, inevitably in the circumstances, became enmeshed in a great deal of domestic tension. The nature of the relationship between her and Wagner is not known, but her devotion to him was at one point extreme. For example, she traced Wagner’s pencil copy of the Tristan libretto in ink, so that he might have a slightly clearer manuscript to work from. This willingness to undertake tasks of crushing tedium and near pointlessness makes the rather sphinx-like Mathilde – her portraits show a Botticelli bourgeoise in Victorian silks – even more inscrutable. The letters Wagner wrote to her fill an entire printed volume, revealing significant details about his working habits and musical thinking during the composition of the Ring and Tristan. At the same time, they offer a generous sampling menu of Wagnerian flirtatiousness, as in this letter from 21 May 1857, written right as the composer was about to abandon Siegfried and start on Tristan:

The Muse is beginning to visit me: does this betoken the certainty of your visit? The first thing I found was a melody that I didn’t at all know what to do with, until of a sudden the words from the last scene of Siegfried came into my head. A good omen. Yesterday I also hit on the commencement of Act 2 – as Fafner’s Rest, which has an element of humour in it. But you shall hear all about it, if the little swallow comes to inspect her edifice to-morrow.⁷

However, it matters not whether Wagner is writing to Mathilde about the secret of musical form in Tristan or about plans for a picnic outing; what he says in both cases utterly fails to illuminate her.

Given Wagner’s close alliances with the women in his life, and his concern for the feminine and the masculine in theory, it might seem odd that, with the exception of Tristan und Isolde, he became increasingly clumsy at depicting romantic passion in opera. But this is probably where his essential misogyny left its mark. The classic illustration of the problem is Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (1882), with its questing stranger (Parsifal, tenor), chaste knights, Grail ritual, self-castrated evil sorcerer (Klingsor, baritone) and single female character, the self-annihilating Kundry (soprano). Kundry serves the Grail knights wearing muddy sackcloth in Acts 1 and 3. They refer to her as a ‘wild animal’ and are accustomed to scorn her. But in Act 2 she shape-shifts under the control of Klingsor and appears (cleaned up nicely, indeed at the head of a whole bevy of Flower Maidens) as a temptress in Klingsor’s magic garden. The ensuing scene – Kundry attempts to lead Parsifal astray, and at a turning point in the drama bestows on him a languishing kiss – is terribly contrived, even deliberately so. She is putting on an act, and the music is obviously artificial and cloying. But one gets the sense that Wagner did not mean it to be quite so unconvincing, just that he couldn’t by that stage imagine what real seductiveness sounded like. For a near-contemporaneous musical representation of the latter, all too human sensation, listen to ‘Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix’, Delila’s hymn to wilting Samson in Act 2 of Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila (1877).

IN PRAISE OF THE PERIPHERY

This is not a small matter. Romantic passion, whether ingénue or mature, had been for much of operatic history the single necessary ingredient of serious opera, and of much comic opera as well. True, operatic couples were often paper-doll figures, and libretto love might well be expressed in formulaic ways. But romantic love had been such an operatic mainstay; it comes as a shock to realize that many central nineteenth-century repertory pieces effectively pass it by. Yet again Verdi offers a case in point. One might imagine that passionate love duets are of course the crowning glory of Verdi’s greatest works, but in the second half of his career they are actually rather meagre. They do exist: in La traviata Act 1, Un ballo in maschera Act 2 and Otello Act 1, to name three famous examples: but even among these it’s only in Un ballo (often thought of as Verdi’s Tristan moment, and premiered in 1859, the very year Wagner finished his grand love-opera) that the soprano–tenor effusions are placed firmly at the centre of the drama. In most other cases, Verdi preferred his high-voiced principals to be pitted in grand confrontations against an Older Man, usually one singing in a baritone register. A possible reason is that, as Verdi himself grew older, heroic young tenors became less attractive to him, and were banished to the operatic sidelines.

This was also the case with Wagner, and above all with Wagner after the divide around 1850. Tristan aside – and that is of course a big aside – his ability to put a soprano together with a tenor and make it seem like love was largely over after Die Walküre in 1856. His interests both as librettist and composer veered perpetually towards other realms: sometimes, as with Verdi, to clashes between passionate young men and mature, world-weary antagonists; but more often to larger, less domestic issues, a path that partially explains why his works became so intriguing to ensuing generations of philosophers and academics.

In Die Meistersinger, for example, the philosophical point involves a debate about traditionalism and innovation in art. The opera is set in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Three men vie for the love of a goldsmith’s daughter, Eva (soprano), in a picture-postcard late-medieval city complete with guilds, professions and bourgeois order. Eva is an allegorical figure, a golden ‘prize’ to be won by the greatest citizen-composer, the man who can triumph in a song contest sponsored by the city guild. The opera’s three male stars – the tenor Walther and the bass-baritones Sixtus Beckmesser and Hans Sachs – schematically represent untutored creative innovation (Walther), stolid, unthinking conservatism (Beckmesser) and self-effacing mediation (Sachs). Wagner tries hard to give them corresponding music: fiery and innovative for Walther; studious and ungainly for Beckmesser; reassuringly stable, although occasionally tinged with melancholy and transcendence, for Sachs. But there is one terrible misfire: Walther’s Prize Song, the composition that will win him Eva in the teeth of opposition from Beckmesser after Sachs yields the battle to the younger man. Walther conceives his song in an inspired dream, Sachs helps him work out a satisfactory structure and Walther then sings it in the Act 3 contest. It should be the crowning glory of the opera, a demonstration that all is well creatively in this enclosed society and that innovation can enrich age-old traditions. Unfortunately it can’t remotely fulfil these obligations, turning out to be one of Wagner’s dullest and most predictable inspirations.

Instead, the most moving, beautiful and sensuous music in the opera is sung by a minor character, David (tenor), Hans Sachs’s young apprentice. In Act 1, David explains the rules of the Master Singers’ guild to Walther, who aspires to be admitted to their society. At some length, David describes the modes and melodies, the formal dictates for constructing verses and the elaborate customs surrounding creativity. As a demonstration of vocal virtuosity, and of the range and command of a great musician and performer, there is nothing else like it in the opera. The singer must master every style, every mode and melodic type contained within David’s catalogue of the art. It’s as if an actor were required to deliver dozens of lines, one after another, each in a different language and demanding exquisite variations in expression, as a native speaker for each one, and make it all seem easy. Although the plot presents David as a beginner, and although his is a secondary role, such singing can only be done by a top-quality tenor.

His penultimate verse in the disquisition about Master Singers involves a very beautiful melodic turn:

Der Dichter, der aus eignem Fleiße,

zu Wort und Reimen, die er erfand,

aus Tönen auch fügt eine neue Weise:

der wird als ‘Meistersinger’ erkannt.

[The poet, who through his own endeavour, / for the words and rhymes he has invented, / also creates, from sounds, a new melody / – he will be recognized as a ‘Master Singer’.]

The line ‘creates … a new melody’ has the expressive marking äusserst zart, which means ‘with extraordinary sweetness and softness’. In Italian it would be dolcissimo, and it is an expressive direction rarely found in Wagner. David’s melody starts in the major but then drifts down in a delicate sequence on minor-key steps. There is a pause, an intake of breath before the triumphant punch line (with brass fanfare): ‘he will be recognized as a Master Singer’. This dolcissimo music for David turns out to have an ancestry and development in the opera that is far from trivial. In the next scene, when Walther appears before the singers’ guild and is asked about his teacher, he names a legendary Middle High German poet, Walther von der Vogelweide (the name literally means Walther of the Meadow of Birds), someone clearly meant to symbolize natural inspiration and compositional grace. But if you listen closely, you hear that when Walther sings the name, the music echoes David’s dolcissimo inspiration, now marred by Walther’s louder, brasher way with it. The same motif will later turn up as part of Walther’s Prize Song, similarly mistreated.

Wagner’s failure with the Prize Song points once again to a fundamental operatic truth: when operas must, for plot reasons, invest any particular song with overwhelming power and transfigured loveliness, the actual music is invariably insufficient to deliver on the debt. This is why the composers of all those early Orpheus operas were sensible enough not to attempt the actual miraculous song (the performance in front of Pluto himself) and stuck with preliminary pleas to gatekeepers such as Charon or the Furies. In the case of Die Meistersinger, Walther’s song puts in peril much dramatically important music in the final act, since motifs from the song are endlessly repeated, quoted, recalled and anticipated. With one exception – the beginning of Act 3, which features a moving orchestral prologue, another solo for David (‘Am Jordan Sankt Johannes stand’) and a world-weary monologue for Hans Sachs (‘Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!’) – it is the incidental music in Meistersinger, the music for minor characters, or for activities unburdened by central themes, that attains the glory Walther strives for in vain. In the festive music for Act 3, scene 2, set in an open field where Nuremberg’s trade guilds – cobblers, bakers and tailors – march in to the sound of drums, flutes and trumpet calls, and ordinary people spontaneously dance, the ear is drawn to the margins, where the absence of allegorical gravitas and compositional over-attentiveness lets a less encumbered musical voice emerge. Looking back to the youthful Wagner’s cosmopolitan musical influences, one might hazard that this peripheral voice recalls his early fascination with opéra comique, while the central tread of the Prize Song marks the fact that his affection for Mediterranean lightness had mostly faded.

MOTIFS IN THE DARK

Matters both schematic and philosophical dominate much of Wagner’s longest work, Der Ring des Nibelungen, whose action over the four operas is so complex as to defy easy synopsis. However, so strong are the links between musical development and epic detail that it’s impossible to understand singing, sound, motif or harmony in the Ring without knowing the plot. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, the dwarf Alberich (bass) steals gold from under the Rhine, snatching it from its guardians, the Rhine Maidens (two sopranos and a mezzo). He returns underground and forges from it a magic ring that gives him great power. A phalanx of Nordic Gods hear about this: their leader, Wotan (bass), is urged by his scheming henchman Loge (tenor) to steal Alberich’s wealth in order to meet the construction costs of their new fortress, Valhalla, built by two giants, Fafner and Fasolt (basses). These busy workers were originally promised the goddess Freia (soprano) as payment, but have reluctantly agreed to take gold in lieu. Wotan and Loge visit Alberich and his cringing brother Mime (tenor), kidnap Alberich and force him to deliver up his wealth. Wotan also seizes the ring, and Alberich lays a curse on it. Above ground, the giants demand the entire hoard, including the ring. Wotan hesitates, but the earth goddess, Erda (contralto), rises from the depths to warn him of the ring’s dangers. Wotan hands the ring to Fasolt, who is immediately murdered by Fafner, a first example of the ring’s curse in action. The Gods (except for Loge) cross a rainbow bridge to Valhalla, but the Rhine Maidens, singing unseen from below, accuse them of falseness and cowardice.

This takes us only to the end of the first opera, but the remainder can be compressed into genealogical high points. For Die Walküre we move forward untold eons. Wotan has sired two half-human twins, Siegmund (tenor) and Sieglinde (soprano), as well as some all-magical daughters, the Valkyries, whose number includes Brünnhilde (soprano), Erda’s daughter. His aim is to breed a great hero who can extract the ring from Fafner. Siegmund and Sieglinde, separated in childhood, meet as adults and fall in love. A single, highly illicit night engenders their son, the future hero Siegfried. But Siegmund is killed battling Sieglinde’s husband, and Brünnhilde, who has incurred Wotan’s anger by trying to defend Siegmund, is punished by being put into a magic sleep on a mountaintop.

Forward one generation for Siegfried. Sieglinde died giving birth and her child, Siegfried (tenor), has been raised in a forest by Mime. Siegfried is uneducated and brutal and knows no fear. From Mime, he learns about his ancestry and about Fafner (who has turned himself into a dragon and guards the ring and his hoard of gold). Siegfried finds the dragon, kills him, gets the ring, hears about sleeping Brünnhilde, finds her, wakes her up and weds her with a kiss.

Forward one night for Götterdämmerung. The next morning, Siegfried gives the ring to Brünnhilde and leaves the mountaintop seeking adventure. At a nearby court he encounters Gunther (baritone), his sister Gutrune (soprano) and their half-brother Hagen (bass), who is Alberich’s son, although no one but Hagen and Alberich are privy to that information. Hagen is also after the ring. At this point complications escalate alarmingly. Siegfried is given a forgetfulness potion, and loses all memory of Brünnhilde. He promptly falls in love with Gutrune. To demonstrate his worthiness and loyalty to Gunther, he goes back to Brünnhilde magically disguised as Gunther, and claims her as (the latter’s) wife. He seizes the ring as symbol of a union that he will not, being a proxy, actually consummate, although he does demand to sleep next to her for the night, with a sword between them. Next morning, he brings Brünnhilde to the court for a double wedding. But seeing the ring on Siegfried’s finger rather than Gunther’s (Siegfried has taken off the Gunther disguise but has kept the ring) she cries betrayal. Hagen convinces Brünnhilde and Gunther that Siegfried is false and must be killed. The next day, the men go off to hunt. Siegfried stumbles on the Rhine Maidens and they ask him for the ring, warning him of the curse, but he laughs at them. Rejoining the others, he is slipped a remembering potion by Hagen, which leads him to blurt out intimate details about awakening Brünnhilde with a kiss and what ensued. Since no one is keeping track of exactly which night(s) are at issue here, this revelation suggests gross insult and treason against Gunther. Hagen skewers Siegfried with his spear and Siegfried dies. His corpse is brought back to the court, but as Gunther and Hagen squabble over the ring, Siegfried’s dead hand rises to ward off its theft. At that moment Brünnhilde appears. She has consulted the Rhine Maidens and they have explained all. She pockets the ring, orders a funeral pyre for Siegfried and, announcing that she will return the ring to the Rhine, immolates herself. The Rhine overflows. Hagen jumps in to snatch the ring and is drowned by the Rhine Maidens. The flames reach Valhalla and the Gods. The world ends.

A mythic farrago, especially when thus briefly narrated, the Ring’s plot is also serious, at times disturbing, at times engrossing in the way that myth can be, and provides endless material for interpretation and reinterpretation. Most of all, though, it is the narrative scaffold for an enormous acoustic tapestry, one which can be mistaken for no other, and which represents a singular and ambivalent fictional world. The Ring involves more than sixteen hours of continuous music performed over four nights, broken only by the ends of acts, and drawn together by scores of recurring musical motifs and sonorities. Wagner began it with one of the most famous creatio ex nihilo effects in all music history. The prelude to Das Rheingold starts from a single, subterranean Ea in the double basses – the players have to tune their lowest string down – which then becomes a chord, a rising call in the horns, with more instruments, gradually most of the orchestra added in, building to cascades and waves of Ea major. This goes on for several minutes – Ea everywhere and nothing but Ea – before the curtain goes up. More than a century and a half later, this prelude is still astonishing.

In 1876, when the Ring was about to be performed for the first time at Bayreuth, one of Wagner’s disciples, Hans von Wolzogen, published a musical guide to the four operas. Wolzogen enumerated all the many recurring motifs. He called them Leitfaden or ‘guiding threads’, but they later became known as leitmotifs or ‘guiding motifs’. Each motif was equipped with a small music example and a name such as ‘Renunciation’, ‘Curse’ or ‘Ring’. In the later twentieth century it became fashionable to refine and correct Wolzogen’s guide and also to deplore the fact that Wagner’s music could thus be reduced to what Claude Debussy famously disparaged as ‘calling cards’. In 1882, a foreign correspondent for The Theater reviewing the Ring at Bayreuth mentions the guide, and makes an unusual observation, one that links Wagner’s penchant for music-with-labels to another special Bayreuth phenomenon, that of darkness in the auditorium:

Physically incapacitated from reading the libretto during the performance, and infrequently able to follow the words by ear, owing to the general predominance of orchestral sound over vocal utterance, the Bayreuth audience was mainly dependent upon the Leit-Motiven for its guidance through the bewildering maze of the Nibelungen story and psychological phenomena. It is Wagner’s wish that this should always be the case; and, should the auditorium of Her Majesty’s Theatre be veiled in Cimmerian darkness during a coming performance of the Trilogy, those who propose to attend a ‘Cyclus’ will do wisely to master beforehand Herr von Wolzogen’s notes on the Leit-Motiven, and to commit these latter to memory.⁸

Press this review a little harder and the implications are stunning. At an extreme, it could mean that when Wagner began composing the Ring in the 1850s, he invented a radically new operatic music not because he had interesting ideas about continuity, or about musico-poetic synthesis, or because he wanted to avoid conventional numbers, but rather because he was seeking an operatic music that would be perfect for the dark. Blind Cimmerian night would not actually occur in any operatic theatre until 1876 at Bayreuth – so it would have been an imagined darkness. But did its sensory deprivations inspire a musical revolution, circa 1854?

Whatever their original motivation, the numerous motivic recurrences – the symbolism of returning sonorities – are critical in the Ring and constitute a large measure of its effect. Being sceptical about the leitmotif phenomenon does not mean that it loses its fascination or its relevance. One way to understand Wagner’s technique in the Ring is to realize that these leitmotifs, whether melodies, orchestral sonorities, particular harmonies or other recurring musical ideas, usually appear first in simple forms and then in transformation, and that the transformations – the way the music is changed – have symbolic heft. This process of association and then change has been called the ‘semanticization’ of music, the motifs’ gradual saturation with meanings.⁹

A single example must stand for hundreds. The Rheingold prelude, as noted, grows from a rising Ea major arpeggio. The curtain goes up. We are under the Rhine and the Rhine Maidens are swimming joyously; but they are about to be visited by Alberich. The musical wave appears over and over again in many keys other than Ea, but always in the major, always going up, cascades of sound washing up again and again on to the shore. Once Alberich disturbs the scene, however, the wave retreats: it represented unspoiled nature, music in its most basic form; Alberich’s presence sullies the scene, causing the motif’s immediate departure. Much later, in the fourth and final scene of Das Rheingold, Erda, the prophetic earth goddess, rises slowly out of the ground surrounded by an eerie bluish light, a mysterious and utterly unexpected visitation. As she appears, that musical wave from the prelude and scene 1 returns, but in a minor key and much slower, as if the water has turned glacial. Like the Rhine Maidens, Erda represents the primordial; but she does so in a more pessimistic form. The sapphire sibyl warns Wotan of impending doom: ‘Alles was ist, endet. Ein düst’rer Tag dämmert den Göttern’ (Everything that exists will end. A dark day will dawn for the Gods). Her first two lines are set to iterations of the rising wave, first in the minor, then (‘endet’) in the major. But when that major-key arpeggio reaches its crest (‘ein düst’rer Tag’) Wagner turns it around. For the first time in the opera, the wave goes downward, inverted, back to its origins. The symbolism is clear: the world’s upward arc will collapse into ruin. But because of the orchestration, the voicing and the particular harmonies involved, this passage sounds deeply uncanny and disquieting. The music prefigured here returns, sparingly, over the entire Ring, always in predictions and visions of the world’s end.

EROS AND CARITAS

We suggested earlier that the older Wagner lost touch with romance, which may seem odd in the case of the Ring, where love affairs routinely muddy the mythic waters. But despite these episodes, hunger for power and the nature of greed are the predominant themes, so much so that the sexual couplings seem contrived largely for dynastic purposes. The low point here is a character who never appears, Hagen’s mother Grimhilde (we are told she spent a night with Alberich in exchange for payment). The love between Gutrune and Siegfried in Götterdämmerung represents what Wagner may have thought the perverse truth about Eros. Siegfried becomes enraptured shortly after catching sight of Gutrune in Act 1, and falls truly, deeply in love with her after imbibing the forgetfulness potion. But after Hagen delivers the antidote in Act 3, Siegfried recalls that he is truly, deeply in love with Brünnhilde. Is there any strong musical difference between the genuine and the drug-induced state? Certainly, the plot works hard to tell us that his real love is Brünnhilde, but love in the Ring – as in much of Wagner – can be portrayed as madly ardent in the instant while remaining artificial when viewed from any other perspective. Passion can, in other words, occur on demand, pharmaceutical in both its origins and its demise.

The crowning romantic liaison in the Ring, between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, turns out to be among the least convincing. It is, at least minus the music, one of the most patently prescribed and dramatically forced soprano–tenor pairings in all opera. When Siegfried awakens Brünnhilde from her enchanted sleep, in Act 3 of Siegfried, she seems her old self at first – the headstrong girl who defied her father in Die Walküre. But once the libretto calls for her to stop patronizing the juvenile enthusiast, and to fall in love with him instead, it is as if she too has been slipped a potion. The liaison is required by the source legend for the libretto, and its misfire in the opera has been attributed to the composer’s miscalculation of Siegfried as an operatic character. Wagner chose to make the hero jejune – young, brash, unchangeable, incorrigible – for schematic reasons, since Siegfried is conceived as Youth defeating Age (the rule breaker and World Hero). But as a character on stage Siegfried seldom fulfils the promise invested in this abstract idea. In the Prologue of Götterdämmerung, after a single night and a rousing duet with Brünnhilde, he takes off in pursuit of further adventures, leaving her on the top of her mountain with a ring for company – a classic operatic case in which only the music, which by this time in the Ring is invariably elaborate and disquieting, can possibly save the situation from comedy.

The programmed quality to Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s passion may also account for peculiarities in the music they sing, in particular their farewell love duet in the Prologue of Götterdämmerung. Towards the end, Wagner detours into a curiously antique musical mode: he uses harmonic sequences, procedures characteristic of eighteenth-century music, rolling them out in particular for the overlapping salutes that end the duet: ‘Heil dir, Brünnhilde, prangender Stern. / Heil dir, Siegfried, siegendes Licht’ (Hail, Brünnhilde, radiant star. Hail, Siegfried, victorious light). These old-fashioned sequential repetitions are not genuine antiques and their effect is hard to pin down. It is as if music – genuinely moving music – from a benign past has found its way into a present that is soon to end catastrophically. So the peroration of the love duet and the lovers’ simultaneous singing sounds jubilant; but it does so in the way that whistling in the dark can sound both jubilant and futile at the same time.

This particular passage in the Ring is laden with implications. One other reason the music sounds curiously old-fashioned – even though it was written relatively late in Wagner’s life, in 1872 – is that it sets one of the oldest passages in the Ring libretto. The idea for this duet was present in the original poetic draft for Siegfried’s Tod in 1848. Back then, Wagner could still imagine love duets involving separate solo statements: soprano first and then tenor, or vice versa, capped off by simultaneous singing, almost in the manner of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. By the time he wrote the Walküre libretto a few years later, he was more self-consciously radical as a poet. In the first act of Die Walküre, Siegmund and Sieglinde’s affectionate expressions never once involve their voices in parallel verses, let alone being placed over one another or heard together. For this reason, these two, unlike Siegfried and Brünnhilde, sound less allied to the operatic past. They are very new and very daring, quite apart from the fact that they commit incest without hesitation or qualm. And this is a musical phenomenon that meshes beautifully with their role in the plot as ‘bourgeois terrorists’. That last phrase belongs to Theodor Adorno, who used it to describe Rienzi, Wagner’s first operatic anti-hero. One of Adorno’s – many – anti-Wagnerian ideas was that ‘In Wagner the bourgeoisie dreams of its own destruction, conceiving it as the only road to salvation, even though all it ever sees of the salvation is the destruction’.¹⁰

Siegmund and Sieglinde jolted Wagner to a higher plane in his thinking about motifs in the dark, those intricate musical transformations that depict the twins’ increasing passion in Act 1 of Die Walküre. Some alterations engage with the very nature of recognition, since for most of the act Siegmund and Sieglinde do not realize they are brother and sister: their family connection dawns on them just before the curtain drops, seeming if anything to ignite them further. In the lead-up to this revelation, Sieglinde has drugged her loathed husband, Hunding (bass), and as the lovers prepare to flee, the wind blows the hut door open and moonlight streams in. This shock is the scenic prelude to a lyric effusion from Siegmund, who reacts with an allegorical poem about Love, a brother, who finds his sister, the Spring; it is a rare late-Wagner quasi-aria, one that tenors sometimes even perform in concert. Indeed, one of the most famous Wagnerian singers of the twentieth century, Lauritz Melchior, sings it on screen in the ocean-cruise film Luxury Liner of 1948. The allegory in the poem seems absolutely clear; but as so often in opera, a revelation staring the audience in the face remains obscure to the dramatis personae. The music, in other words, is much more prescient than the characters, with Wagner’s melodic writing and his inventiveness with musical symbolism achieving peak colour.

One detail must again stand for many. In this Spring Song, Siegmund sings his first line, ‘Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond’ (Winter storms yield to the rapturous moon), and ‘Wonnemond’ is set to a three-note descending scale, E♭-D-C. A few lines later, he enthuses about the spring’s power, ‘seinem warmen Blut entblühen wonnige Blumen’ (from his warm blood bloom rapturous flowers). On ‘wonnige Blumen’, his voice returns to the three-note scale of ‘Wonnemond’, but ornamented by two extra notes, F-E♭-B♮-D-C. Still later, in a contrasting verse, he gets to the brother-and-sister allegory: ‘Zu seiner Schwester schwang er sich her’ (He [the Spring] to his sister did rush). On ‘Schwester schwang’ the motif returns, but the kaleidoscope has been tapped again, and the five notes coalesce into four, F-E♮-B♭-D.

What Wagner has done here is to create a precise musical analogy for dawning consciousness, as something long forgotten becomes clear to the mind. The final, four-note form is actually something we have heard a great deal in Act 1. In the first scene, for example, where Siegmund stumbles into Sieglinde’s hut and is revived by her, it sounds in the orchestra to accompany much mute gazing and blushing. In guides to the Ring this collection of notes is therefore often called the Love Motif—a label whose invention required minimal imagination. When the motif re-emerges in the Spring Song, its melodic face is already familiar. The difference is that now we have been treated to its pre-history, its musical evolution: a featureless three-note bundle first gets ornamented, and then morphs into a symbolically charged and recognizable motif. It is a perfect way to express in music the distant impression that something or someone is familiar; then becomes a charge on memory; and then a revelation of identity.

The same thematic inventiveness takes flight in later parts of the Ring, as Wagner’s taste in harmonies and sonorities grew stranger and more complex in the 1860s and 1870s. So those old-fashioned operatic numbers hiding in the Götterdämmerung libretto preordain a peculiar past-in-the-future sound. The story’s younger generation, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, end up sounding older than their parents in one way (in their formal cut, the manner in which their music unfolds) and far more advanced in another (in harmony and orchestral combination). But the mix is perverse. Brünnhilde and Siegfried singing together inhabit a peculiar sound-world, where a past in which outcomes were not yet disasters becomes tangled up in an apocalyptic present whose nihilism they have yet to discover.

That effect reaches its peak in the music Siegfried sings just before he dies, ‘Brünnhilde, heilige Braut’ (Brünnhilde, exalted bride) – addressed not to Brünnhilde herself but to a hallucination of her. The passage opens with an alarming sound: a single, loud minor chord scored for high-register brass, preceded by a long silence, and followed by contrasting low-register arpeggios that start soft and stay soft, lofting up from the bass to end in the high stratosphere of the violins and upper woodwind. The arpeggios per se have a distinct pedigree. They are derived from the waves we hear at the opening of Das Rheingold, during the prologue and the first scene under the Rhine; and from those same arpeggios as they migrated into the minor mode when Erda appeared. However, this alarm-plus-arpeggio idea is heard on only three special occasions in the entire Ring. The first is when Brünnhilde awakens in Siegfried Act 3, singing ‘Heil dir, Sonne. Heil dir, Licht!’ (Hail, sun, Hail, light!). The second is at the very beginning of Götterdämmerung, where the low-lying arpeggios seem to turn into a terrestrial mist swirling around the feet of the three Norns (Fates), who will review past, present and future in scene 1 after the curtain rises.

The third and last time is for Siegfried’s ante-mortem hallucination. One way of understanding this last recurrence is via the poetic text. Siegfried imagines that he is seeing Brünnhilde asleep again, and wonders why she does not wake. Logical, then, that music from his first encounter with her sleeping figure (in the last scene of Siegfried) would come back. But press a little harder and the logic wavers. Why bring back music for her salute to the sun? Why music we last heard in the prologue to Act 1 of this opera, ushering in the shapeless Norns? The very questions define the limits of Wagnerian musical symbolism. Those labels that Wolzogen first broadcast certainly have their uses. But time and again in the Ring any expectation that leitmotifs should work with semantic consistency will bind the operas to rules they were never intended to obey. Wagner himself had something to say about this, though contemplating his statement may make things even less clear. In the late essay entitled ‘Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama’ (On the Application of Music to Drama, 1879), he complained that ‘one of my younger friends … has devoted some attention to the characteristics of “leitmotifs”, as he calls them, but has treated them more from the point of view of dramatic import and effect than as elements of the musical structure’.¹¹

It seems as though Wagner is issuing a warning: over-attention to the semantic side risks obscuring larger aesthetic or formal designs. To put this another way, musical recurrences in the Ring are, as one might expect in such a sprawling, symbol-rich plot, quite plentiful; but sometimes they happen primarily because the effect is good. What’s more, in Wagner’s other post-1850 operas – in Tristan, Die Meistersinger and Parsifal – the whole business is on another footing altogether. In these operas there are indeed themes, sonorities, melodic ideas and motivic particles that recur, but very seldom do they do so with the elaborate dramatic associations Wagner likes so much in the Ring. You can make your way quite satisfactorily through these three operas without knowing a single leitmotivic association.

For Wagner, ‘effect’ is a charged word. In his writings, he accuses other composers, or stage actors, or conductors or assorted lesser artists of being lured into ‘effects’ that he judges unmotivated (in German, Effekt means an empty effect, rather than Wirkung, an effect resulting from a cause and in turn causing something beyond mere astonishment). This is the gist of his objection to Meyerbeer’s music, already mentioned in Chapter 11:

In fact, Meyerbeerian music produces – on those who are able to edify themselves thereby – effects without causes. This miracle was only possible for the most exaggerated music, that is, music aspiring to a power that, in opera, had from the first sought to make itself more and more independent of anything worth expressing, and had finally proclaimed its complete independence by reducing to a moral and artistic nullity the object of expression.¹²

In an 1871 essay, ‘Über die Bestimmung der Oper’ (On the Destiny of Opera), he connected this error to both a style of performance, and – a common bête noire – to the ills of Italian opera:

As everything written for and acted in the theatre is nowadays inspired by nothing but this tendency to ‘effect’, so that whatever ignores it is promptly condemned to neglect, we need feel no surprise at seeing it systematically applied to the performance of pieces by Goethe and Schiller. … The need of poetic pathos made our poets deliberately adopt a rhetorical mode of diction, with the aim of working on the feelings; and, as it was impossible for our un-poetic actors either to understand or carry out the ideal aim, this diction led to that intrinsically senseless, but melodramatically telling style of declamation whose practical object was just the ‘effect’, i.e. a stunning of the spectator's senses, to be documented by the outburst of applause. This applause and its unfailing provoker, the ‘exit-tirade’, became the soul of every tendency in our modern theatre: the ‘brilliant exits’ in the roles of our classical plays have been counted up and numbered – exactly as with an Italian operatic part.¹³

Yet the alarm-plus-arpeggio music in the Ring is a ‘stunning’ effect,with enigmatic self-containment as the heart of its power. The music jolts the audience from their seats. Then, having sounded this warning, it veers off into waveforms recalling primordial life. Far too strange to be signalling an upcoming romance, it becomes the audible advance notice of something bleak, the intimation of far-off disaster even as the plot seems to have reached a fairy-tale high point where Sleeping Beauty awakes.

And disaster is not far off. Wagner turned out to be very good at musical apocalypse. Perhaps, as in so many other ways, he took his lead here from the final theatrical shocks of so many French grands opéras. The hallowed routine – collapsing scenery plus orchestral thunder – rounds out Götterdämmerung, grand as well in being Wagner’s longest single opera. Composing it took him several years, and this comes as no surprise when we consider the opera’s facts and figures: Act 1 alone lasts about two and a half hours, making it longer than Das Rheingold in its entirety. There are noisier operas and there are operas whose orchestras are as large (Richard Strauss’s Elektra figures in both respects), but for sheer, terrifying acoustic mayhem there is nothing that rivals Götterdämmerung Act 2, scene 2, in which Hagen blows a steer horn and summons a male chorus. It illustrates the brutal side of nineteenth-century German art, and is good for frightening children. Those who imagine dissonance to be merely unpleasant, or who think close harmony by male singers makes for sure-fire merriment, cannot have heard it.

Much of the male-chorus music returns for the revenge trio at the end of Götterdämmerung Act 2, in which Hagen, Gunther and Brünnhilde vow to sacrifice Siegfried. Wagner’s musical sketches for this trio survive, and show that he wrote some of the final section, which includes simultaneous singing, without words under the voice parts, also going so far as to use the old Italian-opera trick of repeating some of Hagen’s lines to fill out the evolving vocal line.¹⁴ This may seem like a small issue, until we recall that for decades Wagner had proclaimed this sort of thing as an ancient and execrable operatic flaw. The trio also draws on another old-style ‘number’, Siegfried’s and Gunther’s oath of blood brotherhood in Act 1, scene 2, a passage involving a tenor–baritone singing competition and momentous onstage drinking. But old operatic conventions are colliding with the eerie acoustic flavour of Wagnerian harmony circa 1870, and the benign forms of leitmotifs heard in the earlier operas have been subjected to progressive distortion. Thus were the old, grand opera ways changed out of all recognition.

TRISTAN’S OTHER WORLD

Around the time Wagner was completing the Ring, Friedrich Nietzsche was finishing his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, which is among other things about Wagner. Nietzsche is famous for having begun with a passion for Wagner but ending up loathing him. In 1886, when he republished The Birth of Tragedy, he wrote a new preface calling the book ‘embarrassing’ and ‘effeminate’ because of its Wagnerian enthusiasms.¹⁵ Yet in both the initial enthusiasm and later disillusionment Nietzsche’s insights about Wagner’s music were very often to the point, even though they had been preformed by philosophical dogma. This, for example, is a passage about Tristan und Isolde:

I must appeal only to those who, immediately related to music, have in it, as it were, their motherly womb, and are related to things almost exclusively through unconscious musical relations. To these genuine musicians I direct the question whether they can imagine a human being who would be able to perceive the third act of Tristan und Isolde, without any aid of word and image, purely as a tremendous symphonic movement, without expiring in a spasmodic un-harnessing of all the wings of the soul? … How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the ‘wide space of the world night’, enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual, without inexorably fleeing towards his primordial home, as he hears this shepherd’s dance of metaphysics?¹⁶

When it comes to expiring, the exertions of Tristan have in fact claimed several. Famously, the tenor who created the role in 1865, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1836–65), only managed three performances before he caught a chill, which turned to rheumatic problems, which turned to apoplexy, which turned to an early grave. And at least two famous conductors have died while leading the opera: Felix Mottl (Munich, heart attack, 1911) and Joseph Keilberth (Munich, heart attack, 1968). All this is talked about as if it is hardly surprising. Nietzsche was by no means the only critic to write in such hyperbolic terms about the opera – his comments exemplify a common tone among devotees. Even a more measured observer, writing from Bayreuth in 1891, was struck by the opera’s effect on the audience:

Yesterday the opera was Tristan and Isolde. I have seen all sorts of audiences – at theatres, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals – but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. … This opera of Tristan and Isolde last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.¹⁷

That was Mark Twain. Whether people actually did cry the night away (Twain’s ‘I know of some who have heard of many’ doesn’t strike a rigorous documentary tone) is irrelevant: what’s important is that people talked about the opera in these terms – terms that were granted to no other.

Tristan is also the only mature Wagner opera to escape the stigmas that were attached in the twentieth century to his other works: stigmas concerning their German hyper-nationalism, racist fantasizing, distasteful political allegory, xenophobia and misogyny. That Tristan eluded taint is in part a consequence of the fact that it was seldom in the repertory of Nazi-era Germany, being too neurotic and somehow French for the Reichskulturkammer.¹⁸ Another thermometer gives a similar reading. Like Die Meistersinger and Der Ring, the music of Tristan has had a resonant afterlife in film soundtracks, but unlike them, never as propaganda. The Liebestod – the orchestral excerpt based on Isolde’s final monologue – has served inevitable duty as an accompaniment to doomed love, as in Humoresque (1946), where Joan Crawford, devastated by rejection, drowns herself to a piano-concerto version; or Escape (1943), where Conrad Veidt, personifying decadence and neurasthenic passion, plays the Liebestod from memory, again on the piano. But in what is probably the most complex case – a film noir, The Blue Gardenia (1953, directed by Fritz Lang) – the Tristan Prelude escapes all typecasting, even though there is doomed love aplenty in the plot. The director and his sound designer, through direct quotations from the Prelude, elaborate instead an idea that is easy to spot in Tristan once you are not focused on intimations of adultery and midnight trysts. It is the idea of caritas, of humane love and pity. This is what Kurwenal gives voice to when he comforts the dying Tristan in Act 3, ‘The ship, yes, it will arrive today. It can’t be delayed much longer.’ It is also expressed in a melody played by unison cellos as Isolde in Act 1 recounts how she spared Tristan’s life, even after discovering his identity as the knight who killed her betrothed: ‘his suffering moved me. I let the sword fall’. Almost sixty years after The Blue Gardenia, in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), that cello melody from the Prelude serves the same purpose it had in the earlier film. We hear it on the soundtrack when a mother, her sister and her young son – theirs being the only love left at the end of the world – clasp hands.

It is indeed hard to draw much political edge from the Tristan plot, which is relentless in its focus on love in all its forms. As outlined earlier, Wagner followed the broad lines of Gottfried’s medieval tale, but radically simplified the action. Little happens; much is said. The music is orchestrated in such a way as to trick the ear about the instruments being heard, sometimes within a complicated, plush sound and sometimes – although this might seem impossible – when only a few instruments are playing. The libretto is a mélange. Gottfried’s plot is cut down, but additional poetic images and metaphors are supplied by Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800) by the German Romantic poet Novalis. Wagner also threaded in some unsettling nihilism, ideas about death and transcendence that he had absorbed from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1818), which he read in 1854. There was, finally, a minor contribution from Wagner’s own dabbling in Buddhism in the mid-1850s.

There is also that oddly modern quality in the human interactions, despite the contrived poetry through which the characters express themselves, the faux medievalism of their milieu and the extensive philosophizing that Tristan and Isolde manage to pack into their protestations of undying love. For instance, in Act 1 Isolde is furious with Tristan for having tricked her when they were in Ireland and then running away, returning only to fetch her as a bride for his uncle. Tristan, on the other hand, seems indifferent: he ignores Isolde and remains distant. During their great confrontation in Act 1, scene 5, her hurled accusations and his cool responses are played out in flawless style, Isolde using the familiar form of address (‘du’), perhaps as an insult yet also to suggest emotional proximity, while Tristan keeps to the antique, aristocratic form (‘Ihr’), which is unfriendly, albeit in a polite way. But Tristan becomes tired and morose, and finally says: ‘if Morold meant so much to you, then take the sword again, and strike sure and true this time, so it doesn’t slip from your grasp’; and at that moment he switches to the familiar form (‘war Morold dir so wert, / nun wieder nimm’ das Schwert’) for the first time. Suddenly, through the alchemy of grammar, there is an entire unexplained past in the room, an intimacy that happened long ago and instantly rekindles. It is well to remember that at this point the starring beverage, the love potion, is nowhere in sight.

We know that the later two acts of Tristan were written without Wagner having access to what he had written earlier, at least in full score. In part to pay off his ever-spiralling debts, he sent off the manuscript act by act to his publisher in Leipzig. Just as a feat of memory, this is astonishing. Wagner did of course have his preliminary drafts for consultation, but the circumstances of the opera’s creation dictated that to a great extent each act is musically independent, in particular inhabiting a different orchestral sound-world. Prominent aspects of these sound-worlds are then anticipated in the preludes to each act. Of these, the Act 1 Prelude is by far the longest and most famous, and is often played as an orchestral excerpt in concert. It starts with a four-note melody played by the cellos. On the last note the cello is joined by other instruments, forming perhaps the most famous chord ever: starting from the bottom, F, B, D♯ and G♯, scored for oboes, clarinets, cor anglais, cellos and bassoons. Ever since 1865 this collection of notes in this particular order and spacing has become instantly recognizable, peculiar and inimitable, notorious in its instability. It is dissonant and unstable, demanding resolution; but it resolves to yet another unstable chord – a more conventional dominant seventh – as if a question has been answered by another question. The so-called Tristan Chord is, though, merely the first instance of an unsettled harmony that stretches over the entire Prelude: melodies end by beginning other melodies, harmonic resolutions are constantly delayed or obfuscated or never arrive or are there only for an instant. Conductors today have the habit of performing the Prelude at a snail’s pace, which it hardly needs since the music, by never seeming satisfied, produces languor at any speed. In Richard Strauss’s recording, the piece is played lightly enough for the waltz rhythm hidden within Wagner’s notes to break through now and then.

The music of this Prelude turns up now and then in the opera, most spectacularly near the end of Act 1. After drinking the love potion (they think it is a death potion, but Isolde’s panicky maid Brangäne has substituted an alternative), Tristan and Isolde fall silent for several long moments, waiting to die. As they wait, the orchestra rewinds almost literally to bar 1 of the prelude, and a recapitulation of the opening accompanies their pantomime as it dawns on them what has happened. Since it has been made abundantly clear that they fell in love when in Ireland, it is uncertain what the potion has to contribute here, except perhaps a pretext.

Even the most rigid, scientific approaches to musical analysis – which may barely mention text or drama, treating the opera as if it were some kind of elephantine string quartet – can be read as over-compensation for the devastating impression the music of Tristan leaves. Because it is wondrously complicated, full of sheer musical verve and tricks of construction, Tristan has held perpetual fascinations for musical theorists (analyses of the Tristan Chord, showing precisely how it might be explained in terms of conventional harmonic syntax, go back well into the nineteenth century). One of Wagner’s technical tricks runs as follows: the Act 1 Prelude begins with the cellos playing the opening melody, which leaps from A to F, then goes down via E to D♯ (D♯ then forming one pitch in the Tristan Chord). The same melody is then repeated twice more, moved up to jump from B to G♯, and then from D to B. The first statement is thus very slightly different from the other two in that its opening leap is a half-step shorter, in technical terms a minor sixth rather than a major sixth. Is the very first note, then, the A♮, in some sense a wrong note substituting for an absent Aa that would lengthen the jump to a major sixth? And could a there-yet-not-there Aa represent some Schopenhauerian salute to mystery and transcendence, a beyond that cannot precipitate into the material world and yet haunts it?

This may seem a dispute over minutiae, but the tension or ambiguity about A♮ versus Aa turns up again and again, in big ways and small, throughout the opera. An important recurring theme is built around it when in Act 1 Isolde (catching sight of Tristan through the rigging) mutters an imprecation:

Mir erkoren,

mir verloren,

hehr und heil,

kühn und feig!

Todgeweihtes Haupt!

Todgeweihtes Herz!

[Chosen for me, / lost to me, / sublime and unhurt, / courageous and cowardly! / Head consecrated to Death! / Heart consecrated to Death!]

At ‘Todgeweihtes Haupt!’ the orchestra plays two chords: A♭ major (loud, woodwind), then A major (soft, trumpets and trombones). And there is more. When the ship is about to reach land, Tristan and Isolde are interrupted by the voices of unseen sailors, ‘Auf das Tau! Anker los!’ (Haul up! Anchor away!), set to rolling waves and fast runs in the strings. The chords alternating here are G♯ major (which is A♭ major re-spelt) and A major. And there is more still. This enigma of two competing notes and the chords formed on them stretches far into the opera. Recall the parallel verses for Tristan and Isolde in Act 2, discussed in the opening of this chapter: he invites her to follow him into night (‘To the land that Tristan names’) in A♭ minor; she takes up his music and makes it more interesting in her reply. One way she does so is that, while he sticks to A♭ minor, she makes a strange modulation to A minor for her last two lines.

We use the word ‘enigma’ to indicate the degree of assimilation between the music and poetry in the opera. The technical devices can be described. But to do so without saying that the music is so strange and otherworldly, in the final case so moving, would be to allow attempts at rationalization to falsify the description. As a libretto, Tristan und Isolde tries to evoke the transcendent – what is beyond life, the material world, sex and intellectual thought, past explanation, eluding representation. The music has so many transfixing moments, passages like the song the invisible Brangäne sings from her watchtower in Act 2, twice warning Tristan and Isolde that dawn is near, a real song – a song demanded by the fiction – amid the lovers’ philosophical-operatic wanderings. Brangäne’s song (‘Einsam wachend in der Nacht’) performs magic in many ways, not least because her melody begins and ends on the same note (D♭/C♯), but the music departs from and returns to this note in a way precisely calculated to create the illusion that beginning and end are very far away from one another, not the same note at all. These moments are, in the larger sense, often themselves enigmas or questions. To turn Wagner’s disparaging term back on to him one last time, they are effects without causes. This does not mean they are separate from the drama, in fact quite the opposite: a mystery, as proposed by the drama, is given expression without being answered or contained.

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

No matter how hard he tried, slogging around Europe to raise funds to build his theatre-cum-shrine at Bayreuth, Wagner could not dictate his own afterlife. At Bayreuth, the dictum that all must remain true to the composer’s intentions, indeed to his every whim, continued in some shape or form until the Second World War. After the war, Wagner’s grandchildren and then great-grandchildren realized that the Festival needed to establish some distance from the past, particularly the immediate past, in which Bayreuth’s links to Hitler had been very strong and very visible. Production values had to be shaken up, and that shaking up had to involve scenic and directorial freedoms. In 1994, on the occasion of a new Ring production in Bayreuth, the twelfth since 1876, a conference was held at which Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s grandson, presided. ‘Mythos oder Gesellschaftskritik?’ (Myth or Social Critique?) was the conference title, which attempted to put names to the principles by which staging should be judged. The title’s opposition is a very blunt instrument, and raises a good question: can we stage opera in a way that eludes easy qualification as one or another? Might there be an opera staging that is neither Myth (fairy tale prettiness, fashion runway, archetypes, historical kitsch), nor Social Critique (expose political subtext, reveal ideology, disenchant), nor some amalgam of the two?

In the case of Wagner, the question of how to interpret and understand and therefore stage his operas must engage with an afterlife that is more fraught, more repugnant and richer, than that of any other opera composer. As we shall see in later chapters, at the end of the nineteenth century, French symbolist writers – not to mention Claude Debussy, French symbolist composer – fought the attraction even while pulled into the undertow. Debussy made jokes about Wagner – he ruminated about ‘the ghost of old Klingsor’ appearing in his musical sketches, he even parodied the opening of the Tristan Prelude in his piano piece ‘The Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ (marking the passage to be played avec une grande émotion) to prove his irreverence. The ambivalence represented by these gestures turns up in many other guises. There are critics who profess to loathe Wagner and his works yet devote numerous books to explaining him. There are directors who are deeply suspicious of Wagner yet relish the opportunity to stage his work.

We end with a paradox: Wagner’s operas were largely conceived as forms of complete artistic control over an audience. They are routinely imagined to be the first theatre pieces in the modern era to enforce absorption, to attempt to erase both the social function of opera-going and the impulse to interpret opera in concrete social or cultural terms. In media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s formulation, their mythic libretti and narcotic music are the ‘amplifiers [that] put philosophy out of commission’.¹⁹ And yet the history of their performances and staging through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has proven this to be nonsense. Wagner’s works were among the first in the repertory to be subject to irony, challenge and socio-political probing through critical staging. In other words, they have engendered immense interpretative freedom. How is one to account for this phenomenon? Perhaps by the fact that, in such a monumental oeuvre, inherent unruliness is to be expected.

Thus Wagner’s operatic music can be outdone. This happens, for example, at one moment in the Metropolitan Opera’s Ring staging of 2010, directed by Robert Lepage, a production generally faithful to the old French grand opera precept that visual effects should astonish. The usual argument about the scenic wonders required by the Ring is that staging can only suggest them, since theatre scenery and lighting are bound by material rules and physical limitations. Music will create the awe when, say, the set at the end of Götterdämmerung collapses, or Brünnhilde is surrounded by fire at the end of Die Walküre. And we must never forget that music will also cover the noise made by the technology when these things happen, as every French grand opera composer knew full well. The end of Das Rheingold asks for a Rainbow Bridge, over which the Gods ascend to Valhalla (see Figure 50). For this moment at the end of the opera, Wagner’s music is indeed wonderful. Yet when, as at the Met, you see Gods walking vertically up the face of a cliff, easily and effortlessly, surrounded by three-dimensional prismatic colour, the primary frisson of wonderment has actually come from something not under Wagner’s command. His music was merely an inspiration.