The Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner by Michael Tanner

Author:Michael Tanner [Tanner, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258482
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-05-06T03:00:00+00:00

COMMENTARY

When Wagner finally got down to composing Das Rheingold, after five years of stalling that produced nothing more than a few tiny abortive musical sketches for The Ring, he wrote something wholly unlike any music that he or anyone else had previously composed. He insisted, incidentally, that The Ring would be a trilogy, like the sets of Greek tragedies that he loved so much, so that Das Rheingold is, as it were, a satyr play that precedes instead of follows the main body of work. Whether consciously or not, the start of the Prelude sounds pre-musical: a seemingly unpitched note comes from the orchestra’s depths, depicting not just the depths of the Rhine but the beginning of all things. It is truly the music to begin a ‘cycle’, conveying how the world begins and may begin again, if – as The Ring powerfully suggests – its ending contains within it the possibility of starting all over again. Only when the frivolous Rhinemaidens start to sing – in the beginning was utter lack of seriousness, Wagner seems to suggest – do we hear a melody, and only when Alberich appears do we hear anything other than an eternal rhythm. This is the primal scene – though much later on we learn that a great deal has happened before this. Wagner regarded the traditional forms of opera, in which dry, almost spoken recitative alternates with more or less florid arias – and worse still, with ensembles in which several characters sing simultaneously, so that it is impossible to tell what they are saying – as inherently decadent, though of course he didn’t deny that Gluck and Mozart, for instance, had achieved great things. For his new form, music drama, Wagner required something less artificial – and he had already been moving towards that in his earlier operas, even though they do have arias and ensembles. He now wanted continuous melody from the singers, who were never to sing together unless their words were the same; and an orchestral tissue that incessantly casts light on what is happening, what the characters are feeling, and so on, and which is as continuous as the vocal lines.

Evidently a new principle of organisation would be needed if the music wasn’t to be merely formless. Wagner introduced the idea – which is to be found often, but not systematically, in earlier operas, including his own – of what came to be called (though not by him) Leitmotiven or leading motives. The (very) rough idea is that they adumbrate or recall an action, a state of mind, a character, an object, even a general notion such as Law, and that they are short, plastic, adaptable and able to be combined contrapuntally or otherwise linked. At first Wagner was very strict in his idea of how they should be employed; later he relaxed his views.

Das Rheingold is, in fact, the only complete work in which Wagner strictly abides by his own stated precepts; Act I of Die Walküre, the one complete act to follow the principle, is also one of his most perfect.

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