Today we're celebrating the 209th birthday of German composer Richard Wagner, and in honour of that occasion I wanted to share some thoughts about the composer's life and works, since he's been one of my great inspirations ever since I started turning to the art world. The question of Wagner is a very difficult one for musicologists and music historians, because when you deal with the Wagner problem you're dealing not only with music as an exclusive art form, the way you are when you talk of Mozart, or Beethoven, or the Beatles; you're dealing with an intricate, tremendously vast web of art forms and other pieces of the puzzle that can't even be confined to the arts, but built itself around all the topics that were of key importance in the artistic decadence and the industrial revolution of the end of the 19th century. But the most amazing thing about all this, is that that web, woven as early as the mid-19th century, still persists to this day, and now in the 21st century the subject of Wagner still inflames the musical world as ardently as before, and perhaps even more; the reason for this being, that Wagner was an artist with such an extraordinary perception of the important questions concerning mankind since the beginning of times, that the questions he asked himself, and tried to resolve in his colossal amount of essays and writings - which add up impressively to his already massive musical output - and the problems he tackled, are at the root of our evolution as a society, and concern the human mind, heart & soul more closely than anything else.
There is something in Wagner which instantly and irresistibly, perhaps also inexplicably, elicits an instinctive and powerful feeling of devotion, perhaps more than with any other composer or artist. Why Wagner? He was certainly a prodigiously gifted musician, with genial musicality and a talent for conducting an orchestra that made him respected and even revered in the successive positions he occupied during his career. But the musical field alone is not enough to explain the aura of Wagner. To understand why the name of Wagner is synonymous with that weird name of Gesamtkunstwerk which got recycled over & over again since ever it was created, before Wagner's birth, and why there are societies of Wagnerians forming all over the world, even in countries in which the composer's very name is despised, we have to delve in deeper. The abundant literature on the composer, more abundant than on any other musician as well - there we go again... - gives one of the best insights into the reason for this singular Wagner-worship that has formed in the musical world not only during the composer's lifetime, but even more strongly after his death. The other best insight, of course, is given by the composer's own works. Both of these sources make us tumble upon an awe-inspiring realization: Wagner is revered not only as a musician, but as a writer, poet, philosopher, playwright, and above all a man of the stage, who believed that no art in itself was sufficient to express the Ideal, but that they all needed to be unified in a common effort, a Total Artwork that gave them all their worth and uplifted each specifically to their highest level of expressivity and power on the human mind & heart. He sought to create an artwork that not only delighted people's ears and eyes, but also that should act as a cleansing force for good and betterment, so that each time the audience sat in the theatre seats they were prepared for a spiritual experience, to be carried on as a ceremony, as something sacred and not just for entertainment. This idea of Wagner as the thinker, instead of only the composer & conductor, is probably the main element which endows Wagner with that aura of power he first acquired through his evident genius among his peers, and then posthumously when it grew to become what it is today.
Ironically, Wagner's hitherto unmatched power to attract and fascinate people's minds was at once his salvation and his death-knell. At the time of the Third Reich in Germany, when Adolf Hitler came to power, he was looking for a carrier, a vehicle that would be a symbol of the greatness as much of the German nation and people, as of the antisemitism which was to become rule in Nazi Germany, and a return to the purity and cleanliness of mythology, which had ever so powerfully imbued Germany. And there it was, all ready for him: the colossal, controversial, mythology-imbued, virulently Germanic work of Richard Wagner, who had died but a few decades earlier. For his woe as much as his music's, Wagner's work and his ideology became the flag of the Nazi party, and it has not entirely been able to shake it off to this day, almost a century later, as prove the ban of his works in Israel, or the renaming of streets previously bearing his name.
In spite of all the stigmata brought on by Hitler's tragic championship of the Wagner myth, that titanic legacy keeps living on and inspiring the art world with its uniqueness, which made it legendary. Music historians are as intrigued by that singular historical phenomenon, and eager to discuss it, as they were decades ago, even more. Alex Ross with his excellent new publication Wagnerism, is only one of many music authors who look more closely at that fascination, to give it a meaning, and a measure. So on this day of his 209th birthday, it seems appropriate to ask ourselves the question: how did Wagner reach that half-mythical, almost superhuman destiny of mythification and that aura of prophet of the art world and of the future age? Although his legacy seems immense, it's his depth as a thinker, his integrity as an artist, his desire to make of his works more than a simple entertainment, but a force for change, the result of a deep, spiritual reflection on the world and how it could become, as well as on the problems of the society of his time, on a level that transcends the artistic and even the political, it's all these things at once which fascinate us in Wagner, almost more than the music itself. Finally, it's Wagner the man, more than the artist, who elicits our admiration and sometimes our fear. His abundant energy, his extraordinary intellectual abilities as a writer, a reader, a critic, a polemicist, his habit of opinionating on anything that happened around him, and of writing essays for each subject upon which he pondered, gives his personality, with the distance of time, something intimidating, frightening, and sometimes, unpleasant. But the study of his life provides an endless source of understanding towards the exceptional human being that Wagner was.
Wagner in Tribschen around 1868
To understand the development of Wagner's development as an artist and thinker, we must travel back in time to the society in which he lived. He was born in Leipzig, Saxony in 1813, the ninth son of a police clerk and a baker's daughter. His first play, Leubald, which he wrote when he was fourteen, was the first product of his deep fascination for the theatre and especially for Shakespeare and Goethe, and his initial ambitions to become a playwright. But he had also heard Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz, conducted by the composer, before even writing the play, and the effect produced upon him by the gothic elements in the opera was instrumental in changing his ambition into becoming a musician. Wagner was a dreadful music theory student, who struggled to play a proper scale at the piano, and outrageously refused to study any discipline that didn't stimulate his imagination - which necessarily must have come with frightful shortcomings in many fields, just like Conan Doyle's great detective Sherlock Holmes. But soon his extraordinary inspiration and imagination and prodigious gift for musicality uncovered the raging fire that had been dormant within for so long - which perhaps inspired Wagner towards the creation of his dragon Fafner in the Ring Cycle - and he became determined to make a name for himself in the strait-laced musical world of his day. He had been eager from the start to become someone, and he was so determined to succeed that he started writing in the style he despised: although he had begun his endeavours in the German tradition of Weber and Marschner, his two failed attempts at recognition, Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot, made it clear to him that he must turn his efforts elsewhere. At that time on the German stage the French-style grand opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer, and opera in the Italian style of Rossini & Bellini, held absolute sway over audiences, and Wagner, the eternal, systematic opportunist, immersed himself in the trend he despised to produce his third opera, the 1842 Rienzi, a grand opera in five acts in the Meyerbeer style, which in its length is second only to the Ring among all of Wagner's works. It was a staggering success. Then came the ventures into his true style, the style he would keep developing and improving throughout his life: the 1843 Der Fliegende Holländer, based on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, his first real artistic breakthrough, Tannhäuser, in 1845, and Lohengrin in 1850. Freed from the hindering trends of the grand opera style he despised, Wagner started doing away with some of the most irrelevant traditions of the Meyerbeer style, indeed he started doing away with aria and recitative altogether, to create the framework of his own vision: a web of intricate themes woven into a continuous orchestral line, developed from the leading themes - which Wagner specifically called Hauptmotivs, but which are commonly referred to as Leitmotivs, more traditionally - while the singers, who have become actors instead of simple music boxes uttering vocal feats for the delight of entertainment-loving audiences, accompany that line with a vocal flow destined to bring prominence to the text and the words. Because the orchestra states the themes linked with people, elements, events and even notions, Wagner's orchestra seems in his works to take the place of Destiny, while the singers enact the story.
Composers (above) Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) and (below) Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
By the time of the writing of Lohengrin Wagner had already started work on the poem which would later become the colossal Ring Cycle, a four-part stage work on the Norse/Germanic saga of the Niebelungen, adapted by Wagner to his own views - Wagner never seemed to be able to stick to what was already created without his intervention, but seemingly felt that he had to make it his own if he wanted to be acknowledged as the creator of the work; in an interesting digression we can mention a letter Brahms had written to a friend, in which the more conservative composer expressed the extent of Wagner's aura as a creative titan: "I woke up this morning" he wrote "and heard the delightful song of a nightingale out the window; it reminded me that not everything in this world is by Wagner." To return to the evolution of Wagner's four-part work, by far his most impressive, it was not before the entire poem had been completed in reverse order, that he wrote the music this time in order, beginning the draft of Das Rheingold, the first of the four, in 1853, and completing Götterdämmerung, the last, in 1869.
The Ring of the Niebelung - in German Der Ring Des Niebelungen - has been intriguing art lovers and opera-goers all over the world ever since it was premiered in 1876 in Bayreuth. It has probably brought Wagner more posthumous fame and controversy than any artist living. In its form, it is the most gigantic opera cycle ever conceived, with each of its parts lasting three to six hours, so that sitting through the whole work would be about 15 hours of uninterrupted music. In its substance it is one of the greatest mythological, philosophical, political and psychological tour de force ever imagined by an artist, a patchwork of Norse-Germanic mythology, of old European lore, of Schopenhauerian philosophy, and, of course, of Wagnerian world view, with a lot of the composer's special, sometimes contradictory ideologies thrown in. The tremendous length of the work, the difficulties to perform it, its association with Nazism and the sheer intimidating aspects of the whole, have frightened many out of continuing to stage the work after the world wars: but it needed only the revivals of the 1950s, at the Festspielhaus, under the composer's descendants, for the curse of the Ring to resume its sway over the musical world. And to be sure, the productions resumed all over the world, translated in French, English, Swedish, Italian, Flemish, and the fascination of Wagner's seminal work persists to this day, in spite of all the accusations repeatedly made against it by the whole world. The question we may ask ourselves is: did Wagner himself realize the scope of his own work, or was he driven by that dreadful Schopenhauerian Will throughout the frantic creation of the work? Since an answer to that question would be as futile as it would be totally inadequate, however, we may safely ignore it, and retain, instead, the very real fact that the Ring is not only an artistic piece of tremendous worth, but also a phenomenon of historical proportions: for in the end we must consider artistic phenomena as historical ones, if we deem Art to be a fashioning force in History.
Siegfried's Death from Götterdämmerung
The Ring exploited all of Wagner's discovered techniques to the utmost. It has, like everything Wagner, a touch of the magical; just like the composer's own life. In 1863, Wagner was still in exile after his involvement in the Dresden revolutions of 1849, and had not only spent in Paris the worst years of his existence in poverty, but he was now at the end of his resources, a state of mind in which he wrote the preface to the Ring Cycle, and, curiously, prophetically appealed to a German prince who would save him and his works. What happened next is an intriguing replica of the plot of one of Wagner's operas - yes, you might have hint already that it's Lohengrin. Only a year later in 1864 the young King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. One of his first actions as he started his reign, was to be life-changing for Wagner; and thus that same year the composer received the visit of a certain Pfitzermeister, who brought him to Munich to no other purpose than to introduce him to a private audience with the newly crowned king. Ludwig had heard Lohengrin at the tender impressionable age of sixteen, and he was determined to become his revered composer's knight in shining armour. It was almost a love affair on his side: but on Wagner's, it was the most spectacular intervention of his lifelong lucky star. The King paid off all his debts, installed him in a villa, and financed the construction of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus which hosted the Ring's triumphant premiere in 1876. Oh! and, he also built Wagner a tiny present, the Neuschwanstein Castle, which the composer never visited, but which in his honour features the not insignificant tribute of having its interior walls covered with paintings representing the plot of Wagner's operas.
The Festspielhaus in Bayreuth (above) and the Neuschwanstein Castle
Nor was Wagner uttering his last word with the massive Tetralogy. A few weeks before his death premiered his last stage work, Parsifal, a story of Redemption through Compassion & Sacrifice. But quite aside from his musical and stage works we also have the massive collection of his writings to cherish as heritage.
More literature has been written on Wagner than on any other composer in the history of music. From the panegyric praises to the deprecating scorn, all aspects of Wagner the man and the artist have been discussed over and over again, and one of the common opinions which come out of these, is that had Wagner confined himself to the creation of grand operas in the style of Meyerbeer & Rossini, he would have been celebrated as the greatest of them all: but that he ruined his output, as it were, with his weird ideas on music philosophy and pushing too far his ambitions of fusing the text with the music, which, according to some, was a failure.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria
But the true Wagnerian sees beyond that. For Wagner was a thinker before being an artist; a mere glimpse at his life makes that doubtless. His revolutionary mind and grandiose vision on life and the destiny of mankind were the cause as much of his involvement in the Dresden revolutions of 1849, as of his revolutionizing of opera & the stage in general. Much more than just innovating music, he created a new philosophy of art, imbued with the exterior influences of his time of course, but modified and synthesized by his powerful mind and inquisitive nature, which still influences musicians, composers, conductors and even movie producers all over the world to this day. He transformed all he touched: during his lifetime the course of music changed more dramatically than it had probably ever done before or ever did after him. He suppressed the traditional operatic aria/recitative form, and perfected the system of the leitmotiv, which he brought to a level of complexity that made up volumes of explanatory literature by musicologists all by itself; he changed the way we view the audience and a stage work forever; he heralded, through his music dramas and his emphasis on the action (Handlung) rather than on the technical difficulties of the singing parts, a new era for Art, which is gradually being accomplished in our times in the cinema and even in the theatre; and, neither last nor least, he revolutionized music with his daring new harmonies and the concept of harmonic development pushed further & further, which carried it to heights of intensity and expressivity never dreamt before him; oh, and he half-unwillingly created a movement called Wagnerism which is upheld by a few millions of lunatics all over the world who wage war against all non-wagnerians, and who go around lauding him as the greatest artist who ever lived: one such was Paderewski, the Polish pianist & composer, who hailed Die Meistersinger as "the greatest work of genius ever produced by any artist in any field of human activity"; but most of all he was a world-changing artist with an unfailing Ideal, because, as Ted Libbey so rightly said in his Wagner section of my excellent NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music, "he was not just interested in entertaining people, but in getting inside their thoughts and changing them."
Final scene from Parsifal, Wilhelm Hauschild
Comments