Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

Author:Bryan Magee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141929378
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

(iv)

At this period of his life Wagner confronted a problem that was as much personal and psychological as artistic. For more than two years he had been going through a transformation of outlook not only as an artist but altogether as a human being, across the whole battlefield of his inner life, the deepest and most extensive personal change he was ever to experience. Some of his most firmly held beliefs and attitudes had gone through a turn of 180 degrees and were now the opposite of what they had been. As a creative artist he had abandoned certain theories and assumptions that had been central to his practice until recently. Yet here he was, still continuing to work on a project that he had set himself before any of this had happened, and still devoting his best attention and energies to it for most of his waking hours.

It was not as if this unfinished task were something he could get out of the way quickly, just polish off, and then make a fresh start. What remained to be done was not even the composition of the music for a whole opera, it was the composition of the music for two whole operas, and what is more they were two of the most gigantic operatic scores that have ever been composed – by any reckoning a task for several years. And he was not beginning even this process of musical composition unencumbered. His use of the leitmotif system meant that he was inheriting dozens upon dozens of highly distinctive musical themes out of which to continue into the future, weaving his musical fabric. There was nothing to prevent him from introducing new themes, of course, and he did, but the whole nature of the work required that those already used should be perpetually reused to comment, allude, recall, contrast, foretell, expose, controvert, reminisce. It was an extraordinarily confining situation for a creative person. His real choice was only to carry on within its limitations or abandon the work.

For him at this point, as the sole creator of The Ring, the weight of the past must have been almost overwhelming. The entire project had been laid out in prospect from beginning to end, and all the libretti not just written but published. The first two of the four operas had been completed in every respect, and, for those that remained, everything was now set in stone except for the composition of the musical score. As regards that, the only room left for manoeuvre was in how he would construct a score that he had no choice but to saturate with already-composed motifs. He did indeed use this freedom to give a weight to the orchestration that no orchestration had ever had before, and partly thereby to give a preponderance to the music that it had not yet had in The Ring. But by his standards, and especially the new standards implicit in his new situation, this was not a great deal in the way of innovation.

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