.
Richard Wagner grew up under the shadow of Ludwig van Beethoven, that immortal musician who influenced almost everyone in the world of classical music of his time.
Beethoven taught his fellow-musicians to fearlessly think big: not necessarily big in the literal sense, but to think of music that was great, emotionally bold and unrestrained, powerful enough to last long after the composer was dead, music that would leave the audience forever changed. Gone were the days when people lived as pale shadows under sufferance from their feudal lords; each person theird his god-given right to exist and to glory in their existence. A person's artistic conscience was answerable to no one. The watchword was freedom: from bondage, from oppression, from artificial strictures, and from tradition.
In Wagner, this spirit took the form of an imperative to seek an artistic medium that encompassed everything: graphic art, sculpture, music, song, poetry, dance, and of course, theater. This universal Art he named
Gesamkunstwerk, which means something like "Universal Art Work" (or effectively in modern parlance,
multi-media art concept). And it was built on the foundation of Opera.
Wagner began writing operas from the time he was a youth, until in the middle of his life he decided to take on the subject of the Ring of the Nibelung, (the Nibelungs being a mythical race of dwarves, who mined gold), which he felt gave him the opportunity to address many major issues of good and evil, and expediency and responsibility, and inflexibility and compassion.
The first opera in the tetralogy (actually written last) was
Rhinegold. This brilliantly written opera serves as a prologue to the action of the remaining three operas: A Dwarf, Alberich, steals the magic Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens. Meanwhile, the Giants have built Valhalla for the gods, and need repayment. The trickster god Loge (Loki) steals the magic Ring forged by the Dwarves of the Rhinegold, and gives it to the Giants. For the moment, everyone is happy, except the Dwarves and the Rhinemaidens.
(Back then the Dwarves had their own eminent domain principle, except for when people stole things from them!) [The painting at right is a depiction of Alberich and a Rhinemaiden by Arthur Rackham.]
Wagner's peculiar invention was the concept of the
Leitmotif: a tiny musical fragment that is highly recognizable, which would serve not merely as the basis for mood music, but very specific aural allusions to persons, feelings, incidents, objects, principles and events. So when in Star Wars the score recalls Darth Vader, or The Empire, or The Rebellion, or
The Force, we must remember that Wagner, decades earlier, invented the means to do this in a way perhaps a little too subtle to succeed in modern Cinema. Modern Cinema has embraced the idea of broad musical
themes that refer to persons, places or events, but not at the miniscule, atomic level of Wagner's
Leitmotifs. (The score for
Gone With the Wind, by Max Steiner, for example embodied this modified
Leitmotif principle.)
Now Wagner's ideal was to present the entire saga of the Rhinegold using all these media of music, art, dance, poetry and drama. He started with his own script (libretto), written all in verse of an appropriate epic meter, and set about creating a score that had the highly imaginative principle of the
Leitmotif at its heart.
The opening scene of the entire four-opera tetralogy (some 13 hours of music-drama) opens under the surface of the river Rhine. Before the curtain goes up, the
Overture to Das Rheingold begins simply with a huge B Flat chord.
Deryck Cooke, a well-known British musicologist who has spent a large proportion of his life in studying the
Leitmotifs of
Der Ring des Nibelungen, suggests that this theme is the basic theme of
Nature. (Note: Wagner himself has written at length about his own
Leitmotifs for the Ring; I simply use Deryck Cooke's description because I'm more familiar with it.)
Gradually the Nature theme transforms into a more 'churning' theme, that of the
River Rhine. Here you get the first, simplest example how Wagner developed musical ideas via transformation of these atoms of meaning, to represent related ideas by related atoms of musical melody and harmony. (He adds that the pentatonic theme of the
Rhinemaidens, from whom the Dwarves stole the gold in the first place, as characteristic of nature elementals in the story, such as the
Wood bird, who appears in the third opera,
Siegfried.)
Later, in subsequent operas, Wagner introduces variants of the opening
Nature motif to represent the
World Ash Tree, from which Wotan cuts himself a staff, or spear. A
similar, but minor-key theme represents
Erda, the earth-goddess. Here is her first appearance, her minor-key theme a counterpart to the major theme of the River Rhine. (After warning Wotan of sad consequences of his actions, she foretells the downfall of the gods, and under her words is an ominous
descending, major version of her rising, minor theme.)
Here is
a sequence of scene fragments from Rheingold, staged by the San Francisco Opera. In this clip we have (1) the Rhinemaidens frolicking, shortly before being robbed of their gold, (2) Wotan, the King of the gods, (3) Wotan being talked at by his consort, (4) the two giants, Fasolt and Fafnir talking about not getting paid for their construction work, (5) The Dwarf Alberich, (6), (7), (8) scenes I don't recognize, and (9) Wotan leading the way over the Rainbow Bridge into the (finally paid-for) Valhalla.
The giants, who are given the Ring, fight among themselves, and one kills the other. The survivor, Fafnir, turns himself into a dragon, the better to guard the Ring. (The fight among the Giants is echoed in Smeagol killing his brother Deagol in Tolkien's Ring Saga.) The gold is cursed, and has an appropriate theme, which one hears in the orchestra at critical moments when the Ring influences events around it, usually ending in death, war or destruction.
The second opera (the first of the real operas after the prologue, Rhinegold) is
Die Walküre. In it, Wotan puts into motion his devious plan to retrieve the Ring from the Giants, and, maybe, return it to the Rhinemaidens. Wotan arranges for a man and a woman to be born, who would be the parents of a great hero. But the plans go wrong, and the woman (Sieglinde) ends up married to the wrong man. But Wotan arranges for the man he intends should be Sieglinde's lover to stumble into her home during a storm. They fall in love, and run away together while the husband lies sleeping. The betrayed husband follows, and there is a mighty battle where both men die, but luckily Sieglinde already bears the child who is to be the hero.
During the duel, the valkyrie Brunhilde aids the lover, in defiance of Wotan's explicit instructions, because she has pity on the pregnant woman and her lover. (This is a poignant moment, because Wotan, in his heart of hearts, supports Brunhilde's action, while his instructions to Brunhilde were in obedience to his wife Fricka's command. Wotan's wife Fricka is the deity who guards the sanctity of marriage, and is naturally appalled at Wotan's plot to have this lover come between a man and his wife.) Now Brunhilde faces Wotan, and after a lengthy accusation of treachery, he condemns her to a magical sleep, after which she has to marry the mortal who wakes her, which takes away her immortality, of course. Losing immortality is a major deal, as we have learned from Tolkien's Ballad of Luthien Tinuviel. The opera ends with
the magic fire music, representing the magical ring of fire Wotan arranges to be placed around the sleeping Brunhilde, to ensure that only the exceptional hero can wake her.
Sieglinde has already been smuggled away from the scene of the battle by Brunhilde, and hidden away in a cave in a forest, near which it happens that the Dragon Fafnir has his lair. She is given shelter by the brother of Alberich the dwarf, and gives birth to the hero Siegfried.
Siegfried, the third opera, recounts how the young hero, brought up by the dwarf in the forest out of sight of humans, forges his father's broken sword, kills the dwarf, kills the dragon Fafnir, get
s the Ring, and proceeds to discover the sleeping valkyrie Brunhilde, who wakes and falls in love with him. Siegfried gazes at her in amazement; he has finally found a human woman, the first one he has ever seen.
But the Ring causes trouble, and
Götterdämmerung, the last episode, recounts how when the couple arrive at a nearby court, Siegfried is offered another bride, and amid the cross-currents of jealousy, suspicion and avarice, Siegfried is murdered, Brunhilde in grief rides her horse into the flames of the funeral pyre, Valhalla catches aflame from the burning pyre (!!), and the Ring falls into the Rhine, where it belongs.
[The painting at right is a depiction by Arthur Rackham of Brunhilde riding her horse Grane into Siegfried's funeral pyre. Equine actors in operas have famously been reluctant to do this bit.]
Wagner appears to have looked for a story in which the true hero is presented with a series of dilemmas, in which the choices were invariably inevitable but regrettable. To that extent, Wagner's choice of this tortured storyline is understandable, though the inevitability of the choices are occasionally questionable. Wagner's hero is, of course, not Siegfried, but Wotan. While, on the surface he appears to manipulate everything, he is simply the puppet of blind fate, the way Wagner seems to have seen life.
To conclude, the entire cycle of four operas (three operas and one opera-length prologue) is driven by the lyrics sung by the actor-singers, the fantastic scenery (nowadays too often substituted with modern interpretations, such as the California Gold Rush, etc), and the amazing score, played by Wagner's enormous orchestra, featuring special instruments for the purpose, such as special tubas to represent the the dragon Fafnir.
The story of the Ring of the Nibelungen is a variant of a German-Norse epic, the
Nibelungenlied, written by an author whose identity remains a mystery. Wagner conflated this story with that of another legend, the Vollsung Saga, to portray a net of deception and disappointment intense enough to motivate his dramatic requirements. The sequence of betrayals is painful enough on which for Wagner to build the ultimate destruction of Valhalla, and the return of the Ring to the Rhinemaidens at the end of the whole drama. Today, to modern eyes, the melodrama seems too unreal and too long-drawn to be taken seriously. But granted that it was going to be realized in some medium, it is hard to think of a better one than Wagner used, or a more effective execution, if one takes into account the amazing musical creativity and planning that Wagner undertook, and achieved.
With the medium of Cinema available today, such projects can be implemented with much greater success, as we see in the
Lord of the Rings project with J.R.R. Tolkien's book and Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. Since these were created by an author rather than a composer, the literary characterization is certainly more successful. Understandably so, since Tolkien had not only all German mythology and epic poetry for his sources, but Wagner's work as well. The musical score of the movie, however, takes a secondary place. While it is entirely possible that the score could have been written with the fine attention to detail of Wagner's Ring Cycle score, the needs of modern cinematic production procedures and the level of sophistication of movie-going audiences (compared to opera audiences) all dictate a simpler approach to movie scores.
The music community is divided over Wagner's music, especially his Ring cycle. Many musicians and aficionados regard Wagner's music overblown, heavy and self-indulgent, and one can see why. (Many composers after Wagner absorbed a lot of his ideas --Verdi, Mahler, Humperdinck-- but managed to keep their music more agile and their orchestras more compact, thus avoiding the worst of the criticisms that followed Wagner everywhere.) Still, we in the 20th and 21st centuries are accustomed to being indulgent with artists whose egos and ideas would probably dwarf those of Wagner. Perhaps Wagner's greatest mistake was that of being born too early!
In later posts, I plan to look at other operas by Wagner that are greater successes, artistically, and which reflect a more mature personality in the composer:
Parsifal, and
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Archimedes
The first opera in the tetralogy (actually written last) was Rhinegold. This brilliantly written opera serves as a prologue to the action of the remaining three operas: A Dwarf, Alberich, steals the magic Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens. Meanwhile, the Giants have built Valhalla for the gods, and need repayment. The trickster god Loge (Loki) steals the magic Ring forged by the Dwarves of the Rhinegold, and gives it to the Giants. For the moment, everyone is happy, except the Dwarves and the Rhinemaidens. (Back then the Dwarves had their own eminent domain principle, except for when people stole things from them!) [The painting at right is a depiction of Alberich and a Rhinemaiden by Arthur Rackham.]
Wagner's peculiar invention was the concept of the Leitmotif: a tiny musical fragment that is highly recognizable, which would serve not merely as the basis for mood music, but very specific aural allusions to persons, feelings, incidents, objects, principles and events. So when in Star Wars the score recalls Darth Vader, or The Empire, or The Rebellion, or The Force, we must remember that Wagner, decades earlier, invented the means to do this in a way perhaps a little too subtle to succeed in modern Cinema. Modern Cinema has embraced the idea of broad musical themes that refer to persons, places or events, but not at the miniscule, atomic level of Wagner's Leitmotifs. (The score for Gone With the Wind, by Max Steiner, for example embodied this modified Leitmotif principle.)
Now Wagner's ideal was to present the entire saga of the Rhinegold using all these media of music, art, dance, poetry and drama. He started with his own script (libretto), written all in verse of an appropriate epic meter, and set about creating a score that had the highly imaginative principle of the Leitmotif at its heart.
The opening scene of the entire four-opera tetralogy (some 13 hours of music-drama) opens under the surface of the river Rhine. Before the curtain goes up, the Overture to Das Rheingold begins simply with a huge B Flat chord.
Deryck Cooke, a well-known British musicologist who has spent a large proportion of his life in studying the Leitmotifs of Der Ring des Nibelungen, suggests that this theme is the basic theme of Nature. (Note: Wagner himself has written at length about his own Leitmotifs for the Ring; I simply use Deryck Cooke's description because I'm more familiar with it.)
Gradually the Nature theme transforms into a more 'churning' theme, that of the River Rhine. Here you get the first, simplest example how Wagner developed musical ideas via transformation of these atoms of meaning, to represent related ideas by related atoms of musical melody and harmony. (He adds that the pentatonic theme of the Rhinemaidens, from whom the Dwarves stole the gold in the first place, as characteristic of nature elementals in the story, such as the Wood bird, who appears in the third opera, Siegfried.)
Later, in subsequent operas, Wagner introduces variants of the opening Nature motif to represent the World Ash Tree, from which Wotan cuts himself a staff, or spear. A similar, but minor-key theme represents Erda, the earth-goddess. Here is her first appearance, her minor-key theme a counterpart to the major theme of the River Rhine. (After warning Wotan of sad consequences of his actions, she foretells the downfall of the gods, and under her words is an ominous descending, major version of her rising, minor theme.)
Here is a sequence of scene fragments from Rheingold, staged by the San Francisco Opera. In this clip we have (1) the Rhinemaidens frolicking, shortly before being robbed of their gold, (2) Wotan, the King of the gods, (3) Wotan being talked at by his consort, (4) the two giants, Fasolt and Fafnir talking about not getting paid for their construction work, (5) The Dwarf Alberich, (6), (7), (8) scenes I don't recognize, and (9) Wotan leading the way over the Rainbow Bridge into the (finally paid-for) Valhalla.
The giants, who are given the Ring, fight among themselves, and one kills the other. The survivor, Fafnir, turns himself into a dragon, the better to guard the Ring. (The fight among the Giants is echoed in Smeagol killing his brother Deagol in Tolkien's Ring Saga.) The gold is cursed, and has an appropriate theme, which one hears in the orchestra at critical moments when the Ring influences events around it, usually ending in death, war or destruction.
The second opera (the first of the real operas after the prologue, Rhinegold) is Die Walküre. In it, Wotan puts into motion his devious plan to retrieve the Ring from the Giants, and, maybe, return it to the Rhinemaidens. Wotan arranges for a man and a woman to be born, who would be the parents of a great hero. But the plans go wrong, and the woman (Sieglinde) ends up married to the wrong man. But Wotan arranges for the man he intends should be Sieglinde's lover to stumble into her home during a storm. They fall in love, and run away together while the husband lies sleeping. The betrayed husband follows, and there is a mighty battle where both men die, but luckily Sieglinde already bears the child who is to be the hero.
During the duel, the valkyrie Brunhilde aids the lover, in defiance of Wotan's explicit instructions, because she has pity on the pregnant woman and her lover. (This is a poignant moment, because Wotan, in his heart of hearts, supports Brunhilde's action, while his instructions to Brunhilde were in obedience to his wife Fricka's command. Wotan's wife Fricka is the deity who guards the sanctity of marriage, and is naturally appalled at Wotan's plot to have this lover come between a man and his wife.) Now Brunhilde faces Wotan, and after a lengthy accusation of treachery, he condemns her to a magical sleep, after which she has to marry the mortal who wakes her, which takes away her immortality, of course. Losing immortality is a major deal, as we have learned from Tolkien's Ballad of Luthien Tinuviel. The opera ends with the magic fire music, representing the magical ring of fire Wotan arranges to be placed around the sleeping Brunhilde, to ensure that only the exceptional hero can wake her.
Sieglinde has already been smuggled away from the scene of the battle by Brunhilde, and hidden away in a cave in a forest, near which it happens that the Dragon Fafnir has his lair. She is given shelter by the brother of Alberich the dwarf, and gives birth to the hero Siegfried.
Siegfried, the third opera, recounts how the young hero, brought up by the dwarf in the forest out of sight of humans, forges his father's broken sword, kills the dwarf, kills the dragon Fafnir, get
s the Ring, and proceeds to discover the sleeping valkyrie Brunhilde, who wakes and falls in love with him. Siegfried gazes at her in amazement; he has finally found a human woman, the first one he has ever seen.
But the Ring causes trouble, and Götterdämmerung, the last episode, recounts how when the couple arrive at a nearby court, Siegfried is offered another bride, and amid the cross-currents of jealousy, suspicion and avarice, Siegfried is murdered, Brunhilde in grief rides her horse into the flames of the funeral pyre, Valhalla catches aflame from the burning pyre (!!), and the Ring falls into the Rhine, where it belongs. [The painting at right is a depiction by Arthur Rackham of Brunhilde riding her horse Grane into Siegfried's funeral pyre. Equine actors in operas have famously been reluctant to do this bit.]
Wagner appears to have looked for a story in which the true hero is presented with a series of dilemmas, in which the choices were invariably inevitable but regrettable. To that extent, Wagner's choice of this tortured storyline is understandable, though the inevitability of the choices are occasionally questionable. Wagner's hero is, of course, not Siegfried, but Wotan. While, on the surface he appears to manipulate everything, he is simply the puppet of blind fate, the way Wagner seems to have seen life.
To conclude, the entire cycle of four operas (three operas and one opera-length prologue) is driven by the lyrics sung by the actor-singers, the fantastic scenery (nowadays too often substituted with modern interpretations, such as the California Gold Rush, etc), and the amazing score, played by Wagner's enormous orchestra, featuring special instruments for the purpose, such as special tubas to represent the the dragon Fafnir.
The story of the Ring of the Nibelungen is a variant of a German-Norse epic, the Nibelungenlied, written by an author whose identity remains a mystery. Wagner conflated this story with that of another legend, the Vollsung Saga, to portray a net of deception and disappointment intense enough to motivate his dramatic requirements. The sequence of betrayals is painful enough on which for Wagner to build the ultimate destruction of Valhalla, and the return of the Ring to the Rhinemaidens at the end of the whole drama. Today, to modern eyes, the melodrama seems too unreal and too long-drawn to be taken seriously. But granted that it was going to be realized in some medium, it is hard to think of a better one than Wagner used, or a more effective execution, if one takes into account the amazing musical creativity and planning that Wagner undertook, and achieved.
With the medium of Cinema available today, such projects can be implemented with much greater success, as we see in the Lord of the Rings project with J.R.R. Tolkien's book and Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. Since these were created by an author rather than a composer, the literary characterization is certainly more successful. Understandably so, since Tolkien had not only all German mythology and epic poetry for his sources, but Wagner's work as well. The musical score of the movie, however, takes a secondary place. While it is entirely possible that the score could have been written with the fine attention to detail of Wagner's Ring Cycle score, the needs of modern cinematic production procedures and the level of sophistication of movie-going audiences (compared to opera audiences) all dictate a simpler approach to movie scores.
The music community is divided over Wagner's music, especially his Ring cycle. Many musicians and aficionados regard Wagner's music overblown, heavy and self-indulgent, and one can see why. (Many composers after Wagner absorbed a lot of his ideas --Verdi, Mahler, Humperdinck-- but managed to keep their music more agile and their orchestras more compact, thus avoiding the worst of the criticisms that followed Wagner everywhere.) Still, we in the 20th and 21st centuries are accustomed to being indulgent with artists whose egos and ideas would probably dwarf those of Wagner. Perhaps Wagner's greatest mistake was that of being born too early!
In later posts, I plan to look at other operas by Wagner that are greater successes, artistically, and which reflect a more mature personality in the composer: Parsifal, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Archimedes
1 comment:
Just to clarify: the idea of themes is big in modern cinema. Themes are entire tunes, which can be played as complete excerpts. The Leitmotif, in contrast, is just a tune fragment, or even just two chords, something that can be even woven into an accompaniment to an aria, but still noticed in the background.
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