Music drama

Music drama

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is a complex figure. He wrote essays, poems, and music at a prodigious rate. His music has remained in the modern repertory, despite controversy and scandal (he was an ardent anti-Semite): his influence is too great to sidestep or ignore. In particular, he transformed the way that music and drama worked together, inventing a new form of opera called music drama, which has influenced modern film score composition in a major way. He also popularized bold chromatic harmonies, and pioneered the use of the orchestra pit in theaters.

Wagner’s career is a curious mixture of contradictions. His failure to launch himself in Paris led him to reject the commercial mainstream of opera, which at the time was dominated by the music of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Meyerbeer was Jewish, and his continued success fed Wagner’s anti-Semitic paranoia). Wagner achieved local successes in Germany, but ran afoul of local governments by actively participating in the 1848 democratic revolutions. He spent much of his life in exile as a political dissident, before eventually securing the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (who built the prototype for the Disney castle), who supported Wagner financially. Eventually, Wagner was able to build the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany, a theater which still performs his works to this day. So despite his revolutionary ideals, Wagner was in the end supported by royalty, like many a musician of the seventeenth century.

Wagner’s magnum opus was a set of linked music dramas called the Ring Cycle (begun c. 1850, finished 1874), consisting of four works: Das Rheingold, Die Walkuere, Siegfried, and Goetterdaemmerung (the Twilight of the Gods). He wrote the music and the poetry and designed the staging for these pieces himself: they are examples of what he called a gesammtkunstwerk (unified artwork). Derived from Germanic and Norse mythology, these works drastically revise operatic norms. There are no isolated songs, no breaks for applause, no coloratura to entice star singers, little ensemble singing. The scores are not divided into separate songs, but rather consist of a continuous flow of music that lasts for a whole act at a time (usually each act is an hour long). The entire cycle takes about sixteen hours to perform, and is traditionally given on four successive nights.

The structure of each drama is created by a web of recurring motives played by the orchestra—some as short as two measures. Each of these is associated with a character in the story, a concept (such as love, anger, etc.), a place, or a physical item (such as the god Wotan’s spear). Recurring themes had appeared in opera before; the difference is that Wagner’s themes were modified and developed as the story progressed. Wagner himself hoped that listeners would understand the music at a subconscious level, but his supporters began printing guides to the recurring themes with explanations of their significance. It was also his supporters who came up with the name leitmotiv for these recurring themes. Today, leitmotivs in the Wagnerian style remain a common tool for film composers.

At the same time, Wagner’s singers had to compete with a powerful orchestra which had most of the interesting musical material. The singing style involved requires tremendous physical strength, as the singers need to project over an orchestra of about a hundred players—and they need to sing intelligibly so the audience can follow the dialogue. The light, agile voices needed for Italian opera are generally out of place in a Wagner score.

Wagner was skilled at self-promotion, and he explained his working procedures by invoking the legacy of Beethoven, that icon of the Romantic Movement. Wagner had effectively shifted the chief interest in dramatic music to the orchestra and relied on thematic development to create structure in opera. He claimed that he was following the path opened by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which combined a full orchestra, soloists, and chorus. This claim was a way for Wagner to justify his radical work by reference to a revered ancestral figure; it also legitimized him as a leading musical Romantic.

Another element of Wagner’s cultural significance derives from his commitment to German nationalism. Germany only became a unified country during Wagner’s lifetime, and the Ring Cycle was in some part an attempt to provide national unity for a nation that did not yet exist in political terms. Wagner’s hatred of Jews and distrust of French and Italian opera also relates to his nationalist agenda. After his death, the emerging Nazi party used his music for political purposes, and it is still controversial to perform Wagner’s music in Israel.

Finally, Wagner’s harmony is still studied today. A famous example is the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde (1859), a music drama about star-crossed lovers which ends in both their deaths. The opening few minutes (seen in a reduction below) are tonally ambiguous: they consist of a short phrase which is stated in A minor, C minor (note the enharmonic spelling of G-sharp/A-flat), and E minor without reaching a clear resolution in any key (each phrase ends of the V chord of the given key).

Notice that these keys are a third apart—Wagner was very fond of mediant relationships. This harmonic sequencing allowed Wagner to suggest keys without fully cadencing in them. This type of chromatic harmony points the way toward the rise of atonal music in the following generation.