W is for Wagner

Richard Wagner

My view of Richard Wagner has changed in the past year. What happened? Well, I actually watched the Ring Cycle. That'll do something for your views one way or the other.

Before this past year, Wagner was right there alongside Tolstoy or Einstein, maybe even Ingmar Bergman. People that I've heard about and might understand the basics and the theory of what they are doing, but people I've always been intimidated to approach. I just stand back appreciating that the work was done and that it seems amazing, but feeling somehow unworthy to approach it. I need to get away from that attitude.

What I found did not really surprise me. I knew Wagner was good, after all, everyone said so and everybody is only wrong none of time... That's probably misquoted, but it's good enough for now. There's a reason non-musicians have heard of Wagner. There's a reason that the moment opera is mentioned outside of musical circles the image of a large-ish Brunhilde belting out Ride of the Valkyrie's, spear in hand, and bedecked in one standard armored brassiere and horned helmet (be sure to give that horned 2 syllables) is what comes to mind. Wagner left a stamp and if you ask me, he is very deserving of his prominent place in history. The annoying thing is, he thought so too.

The way he conceived operas is as an all consuming work of art. Not just the music and the words. Even beyond the acting and stage. His concept was so high that he had an opera house built in Bayreuth that was dedicated to performances of his operas. Once the audience comes in and watches the opera the way he wanted it done, that whole artful experience, that is gesamtkunstwerk. Yeah, his ideas were SOOO lofty, he had to make up a word to encompass them. Sheesh.

So then I sit down and watch these operas and am amazed as they live up to this crazy hype. The orchestration is not compromised and you have a huge symphony playing wonderfully German symphonic music that is always driving the opera, the stories are epic in the truest sense of the word, the emotion (while a bit romantically exaggerated of course) draws you right in and what could seem like an eternal 3 hours watching opera becomes, well, a big 3 hour chunk of goodness. This is also just on my own home DVD system watching it on my own. To watch them live in Bayreuth? I guess there's a reason there's about a 10 year waiting list.

Now back to the nuts and bolts. Wagner wrote things besides opera, but not much at all and even less when he got fully into opera mode. Wagner was fully aware of his place as the latest in the great German symphonic heritage. Beethoven was an inescapable influence, but most people consider CM Weber a larger influence. Weber's operas or music shows (I think they have some sort of name I learned/forgot in music history class) were most likely more important than the symphonists as Wagner began his attempt to make true German opera instead of French or Italian distilate.

Things to listen for in Wagner's music is the continuous music, both in that it doesn't stop, and in that the harmonic drive is never still. Tension and resolution abound, but not necessarily in a Beethoven or Haydn kind of way. One tension is resolved, but leads to an even greater tension which relaxes into a tension in another direction. His soaring lines give my ear a strong sense of being tossed on rough waves. It's hard to say where you'll end up, but it will assuredly be on the sea.

It's hard to pick a piece to stand for the whole because as described before the whole is a lot more than the pieces. But anyway, out of all the Ring, my favorite opera is the 2nd, Die Walkure. The scene I wanted was the finale to Act 2 where an emotionally tortured Wotan (the leader of the valhalla gods) is forced to kill his created human son, Sigmund. He is forced to do this because of some shady deal he unintentionally made. While he is tempted to just use his power to negate that deal, he can't because Wotan's rise to power was based on shady dealings he made in his past and because of that he has to uphold shady deals in the present or his power is negated. Brunhilde, one of his Valkyrie's, stands against him and defends Sigmund to no avail. All that does is put her on Wotan's bad side. Act 3 is Wotan finding Brunhilde and the two of them singing at each other for a while (happens a lot in these operas) but the finale has Wotan putting a Sleeping Beauty sort of curse on Brunhilde and calling up Loge to surround her rock in flames that only one fit to kill gods can penetrate (or some such thing). As he's making that proviso/prediction we get the first inclusion of Siegfried's theme in the brass. Aww man, look out Wotan, Siegfried's coming for you, but you'll have to wait til tomorrow's opera. Same Met time, Same Met channel. Here's the finale for Die Walkure.



Apologies for the dreadful description above and the lack of subtitles on the clip, but it really is good. This is the 1976 Bayreuth, Pierre Boulez version. It might get some criticism, but I like it well enough.