The Wagner Compendium by Barry Millington

Author:Barry Millington
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-500-77098-6
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 1992-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Quadratic melody. In the 1871 essay Über die Bestimmung der Oper (On the Destiny of Opera) Wagner speaks of the ‘conventional quadratic structure of the musical phrase’ (‘Quadratur einer konventionellen Tonsatzkonstruktion’), which Beethoven’s melody ‘overgrew’ in amazingly vital profusion yet without quite obscuring its own roots there. The state of ‘sublime irregularity’ exemplified by the Shakespearian drama – a goal towards which Beethoven’s melody seemed to aspire – is only possible, we are told, when music is freed from its foundations in the symmetrical periodicity of song and dance forms by means of the drama (GS IX, 149). This critique of melodic Quadratur – the foundation of Classic-Romantic phrase structure on metrical units of 2, 4, 8 or 16 bars – recurs throughout Wagner’s writings and is fundamental to his belief in the aesthetic imperative of drama as the means of emancipating music’s fullest expressive potential.

Related formulations crop up at the end of Über das Opern-Dichten und Komponieren im Besonderen (On Opera Libretti and Composition in Particular, 1871), where Wagner speaks of the ‘rhythmic and harmonic Quadratur’ (‘der Quadratur des Rhythmus und der Modulation’) that forms the musical analogue of stereotyped, conventional operatic figures, theatrical ‘masks’ or ‘figurines’, invoking the heritage of Rossini (GS X, 174).

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