Wagner on Welte: Tristan und Isolde around 1905 (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.
Wagner in Context, 2024
criticism in a broad philosophical sense, conceived as a systematic assessment of music and art epitomized by Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), probably originates in ancient Greece (cf. Plato's Politeia). Criticism as an appraisal of specific pieces, creators, soloists, and performances in newspapers, periodicals, and journals, however, emerges from complex interconnected developments in the 1700s and 1800s, encompassing the democratization and professionalization of concert culture as well as the emancipation of autonomous instrumental music, which proved in need of explanation. While early music journals chiefly reviewed scholarly literature, their focus shifts to reports on musical pieces and performances by 1750-a process generating periodicals such as Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend (1766-70) by J. A. Hiller and Magazin der Musik (1783-87) by C. F. Cramer. The full-time critic, however, did not exist until ca. 1800, when J. F. Rochlitz, founder of Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (AmZ, 1798-1818), and J. C. F. Rellstab, contributor to Vossische Zeitung in Berlin until his death in 1813, answered the growing demand for public musical debate. 1 The increasing relevance of the middle class (Bürgertum) also meant that critics no longer mainly addressed fellow musicians, theorists, and historians as part of (say) aesthetic treatises or manuals 1 For a general outline, see Stephen Rose, 'German-Language Music Criticism before 1800', in The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. by Christopher Dingle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 104-24. 16:3). While even at that time Wagner would couple music with issues of culture and wrote about French elegance, German naivety, and Italian fervour, he did not yet deem these qualities divisive but rather strove for their combination as manifest in Meyerbeer's works, which he views as 'deeds of music' that bridge national qualities (SSD 12:27). Although critical verdicts of this kind may not be illustrative of 'mature' Wagner, they show that his views are more complex than generally assumed. 8 When assessing Wagner's critical writings, however, it is important to keep in mind that compared to composers such as Berlioz, Debussy, Schumann, Weber, or Wolff, he rarely wrote proper reviews, usually linking music with broader cultural issues. Wagner's most penetrating engagement with criticism is to be found in aesthetic writings of the 1850s, pondering the purpose and prospect of criticism. Generally speaking, he came to consider criticism a despicable profession early on, while recognizing the merits of good press. He did not shy away from lobbying on his own behalf, for instance, in messages to Schumann, prompting him to publish a review of Rienzi, or August Schmidt, editor of the Allgemeine Wiener Musikzeitung, asking him to retract a negative review (SB 2:169-71 and 322-24). 9 While in 'The Artist and the Public' ('Der Künstler und die Öffentlichkeit', 1841), Wagner had already probed the dialectical relations between the genius and his public of 'pleasure-seekers', 'ignorant wiseacres', and 'jealous, corrupt reviewers' (SSD 1:182), he soon came down hard on criticism in general. 8 His respect for Bellini, for example, did not wane over time; CT 2:54, 508, 835. For Wagner's attitude towards his colleagues, see Friedrich Geiger, 'Wagner und die Komponisten seiner Zeit', in Lütteken, Wagner Handbuch, 459-67. 9 On Wagner's ingenuity in marketing his works, which grew even stronger in later years, see Nicholas Vazsonyi, Richard Wager: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 'Berlioz und Wagner in den Schriften von Richard Pohl', in Berlioz, Wagner und die Deutschen, ed. by Sieghart Döhring,
Context: journal of music research, 2014
Staging is all-important for opera. An opera is not a score (though scholars often write as if the score is the opera). Indeed, not even a sound recording represents an opera fully; it only exists when produced on stage. It is therefore essential to analyse the work of directors and singing actors, not at the relatively general level of newspaper and magazine reviews, but rather more deeply. 1 Wagner took production very seriously. Although he was a highly experienced conductor, he entrusted the pit for the first season of the Ring at Bayreuth to Hans Richter, and he himself took on the then new role of stage director to develop what was clearly, from Heinrich Porges' record of the rehearsals, for some of his cast an entirely novel attention to the details of posture and gesture. 2 But he was dissatisfied with the costume and set designs for the premiere of the Ring in 1876. 3 It is clear that Wagner, having created a wholly new kind of opera, felt that his reforms had not extended to the mise-en-scène. Indeed, after seeing the designs that he had commissioned for his own production of Parsifal, Wagner jested that having invented the invisible orchestra, he now wished he had invented the invisible stage! 4 1 This is a shortened version of a paper that I delivered as a plenary keynote address to the conference Richard Wagner's Impact on his World and Ours in Leeds in May-June 2013, and again at the Wagner and Us conference in Melbourne in December 2013. I am grateful to delegates to both conferences for their comments. 2 Many details of his interpretation are recorded in Heinrich Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the 'Ring':
The Labyrinth of the Soul:: Wagner’s Musical Lament
2016
EnglishIn spite of the witty saying that more books have been written about Richard Wagner than anyone else except Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte, I will venture to sail into the high seas. This essay is the first installment of a trilogy devoted to Wagner’s Tristan—a musical lament, indeed the cornerstone of modern(ist) art. Taking my cue from Eduardo Lourenco’s self-questioning remark on such powerful music, ‘By what mysterious means?’, I shall examine it anew, trying different tacks. The complete text— literary, theoretical and analytical—weaves through music and language. ‘Music in language’ is a preliminary attempt to explore sensual, artistic sound qualities in the word. ‘The language of music’, then, puts forward a grammar for tonal music as it may be sensed in a wider panorama of the evolving Western consciousness. ‘Music as language’, eventually, offers a novel approach to Wagner’s musicopoetic process: I thus seek to unravel that distinctive longing (Sehnen) of the so...