The Labyrinth of the Soul:: Wagner’s Musical Lament (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cambridge Opera Journal, 2006
By any measure, recent decades have shed an enormous amount of new light on Richard Wagner in all his guises-writer, composer, reigning bogeyman of German cultural politics. From Schott's complete edition of the operas to Cosima's diaries, and from Winifred Wagner's revealing on-camera interviews to the annual fracas over new Bayreuth productions, it would be hard to deny that Wagner's works, his family and his theatre continue to provoke a level of public and academic discussion hardly imaginable for almost any other composer. Certainly significant gaps remain; despite frequent complaints, we still have no complete critical edition of Wagner's writings, much less a readable translation of them into English 1. But Egon Voss's 1996 pronouncement that 'Wagner research has just begun' seems wilful at best. Diehard Wagnerians may cherish such a prospect, but are we really faced with a 'Wagner without end'? 2 In a sense, yes. As Voss argues, the continuing emergence of new documents renders 'bibliographic control' an ever-receding vision rather than a realisable goal. And although Voss is mainly concerned with philological research, his diagnosis applies more generally to the larger world of Wagnerian exegesis. The issue is not just one of gathering biographical or institutional information, analysing the operas' music or examining their engagement with culture and philosophy. Looking back on the current generation of Wagner scholarship, it is striking to note how little of it has attempted the Herculean task of bringing together these multiple lines of enquiry, or even attempting a comprehensive account of all of his operas. 3 Indeed, the most insightful studies in recent years have tended to focus on particular issues: Wagner's narrative aesthetics, the location and extent of his anti-Semitism, the idea of the leitmotif, individual sketch studies, harmonic procedures in the later works, biographies of neglected family members, and of course studies of individual operas. 4 To be sure, a 1 On the problem of Wagner's prose and its rendition into idiomatic English, see Treadwell's amusing 'Note on citations and translations', xvi-xix. 2 Egon Voss, 'Wagner und kein Ende'. Betrachtungen und Studien (Zurich, 1996), 10. 3 The most obvious exception is Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1979). But this short work is more a prolegomena to a new golden age of post-Lorenzian Wagnerian studies than it is its culmination. It is also almost three decades old. Hans-Joachim Bauer, Richard Wagner (Stuttgart, 1992) is conceived more as a summary and introduction to the works. Michael Tanner's Wagner (London, 1996) attempts a comprehensive view beyond a general introduction, but it reflects only a limited amount of recent work by Wagner scholars.
The Fade Out: Metaphysics and Dialectics in Wagner
The Fade Out: Metaphysics and Dialectics in Wagner, 2020
This article is a critique of the failure of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It considers this as a metaphysical problem rather than an aesthetic or formal one. The article, considering Wagner's inheritance from Haydn, claims him as the first composer of the culture industry. This will lead the author to conclusions regarding a gendered Das Unheimlich, the distinction between technology and technique, and the philosophy of aesthetics.
Le Vin herbé (1941), by the Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890–1974) is an ‘Oratorio profano’ for 12 voices and chamber ensemble, which contrasts markedly with Wagner’s iconic musical treatment of the Tristan legend, Tristan und Isolde (1859). Whereas Wagner wrote his own libretto, drawing largely on the version by Gottfried von Strassburg (died c.1210), and infused by his enthusiastic reading of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Martin’s work sets selected passages from the Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900) by the French medievalist Joseph Bédier (1864–1938), drawing on earlier sources. An examination of relevant literature deepens understanding of the intricate relationships between these two texts and their historical forerunners, and serves to digest the philosophical and psychological models that have proved especially illuminating for appreciation of Wagner’s work. This is complemented by a narratological examination of Le Vin herbé, highlighting ways in which Martin’s libretto invites an alternative understanding of Tristan’s psyche. In particular, the relevance of Jungian concepts, such as the collective unconscious, archetypes and individuation, are explored.
Between Intangible and Corporeal: Word, Body, and Music in German Romanticism
DEDALUS 22-23 ( Word – Body – Music), 2019
Some of the first German Romantic writers refer to the intangibility and incorporeality of music as qualities that distinguish it from other arts, arguing that it allows the spirit to access “the pure form of the movement of the heavenly bodies, freed from any object or material” (Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, 1802/3). This paper explores how Novalis, W. H. Wackenroder, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, and E.T.A. Hoffmann reinterpret this assertion: either by saying that music allows human beings to separate themselves from their bodies and thus reach an ethereal and harmonious state; or, on the contrary, by considering music a physical phenomenon that flows within the human body, visibly affecting it and leading to altered states of (self)awareness. Keywords: Music, body, illness, Novalis, W. H. Wackenroder, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Johann Wilhelm Ritter
2018
Tchaikovsky completed his tone poem Francesca da Rimini in 1876, during the period he was attending the premiere of Wagner's Ring Cycle at Bayreuth. Critics of the work drew comparisons with the Tetralogy and faulted what seemed to be Tchaikovsky's derivative inspiration. Indeed, the composer himself acknowledged Wagner's influence. In this paper, I set aside influence to consider intertextual dialogues between Tchaikovsky's work and others by Liszt, Zandonai, Rachmaninov, and not Wagner's Ring, but Tristan und Isolde. Drawing upon theories by Klein and Peirce, I examine parallelisms of topic, melodic contour, tonal motion, and timbral signifiers to establish a "conversation" between Francesca's tale and King Marke's speech at the conclusion of Act 2 of Tristan. The results reveal an interactive field of narration and symbolization that projects both stories' themes of desire, betrayal, guilt, and love.
While metaphysical, Schopenhauerian-based treatises abound on composer Richard Wagner’s music dramas Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, little evidence has surfaced of an equivalent study of his last work, Parsifal. Most circulating discussions on Parsifal, though they may acknowledge Schopenhauerian influence, do not go into significant metaphysical depth; nor have pieces surfaced that consider Parsifal from a purely Schopenhauerian approach. Thus, in this paper I argue that Parsifal is best viewed as a Schopenhauerian opera, my conclusion being based on the study of Schopenhauer’s primary writings on the Will and the metaphysics of compassion, and also on the study of the characterization, text, and music of Parsifal. The resulting argument offers Parsifal a place alongside Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as the third and final of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian music dramas.