WAGNER

RICHARD WAGNER

(1813–1883)

London Philharmonic Orchestra – Overture: ‘Tannhäuser’

Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1996

Those who have sat through the interminable longueurs of the second act of Wagner’s Die Walküre, fervently wishing for the sumptuous orchestral splendours, not to say sheer tunefulness, of the third act, may often have wondered about a very apparent paradox in his work. Those boring exchanges between Wotan and Brünnhilde are in fact a clear demonstration of the artistic theories he had outlined in the books The Art-Work of the Future and Opera and Drama, written in 1849 in Switzerland, four years after the first performance of Tannhäuser. Those theories resulted from Wagner’s very laudable condemnation of the meretricious trends he saw developing in the opera of his day. He felt that all sense of dramatic continuity was being lost in a desire to provide an extravagant spectacle of theatrical absurdities, and the music itself was becoming a mere vehicle for the egotism of the singers, allowing them to show off their technical expertise.

He wished for a new type of Gesamtwerk (complete artwork) in which music should not only serve the drama, but in which every element – words, music, stage design – should be united to express the central theme. In Tannhäuser itself we can hear sections where a recitative-like melody grows out of the orchestral harmony, which is itself a musical interpretation of the text. The fioriture, trills and melismas of grand opera here give way to a more declamatory style which vibrates to every inflection of the words.

Even if Wagner had been more of a poet and philosopher, and less of the very great musician he undoubtedly was, it would have been a difficult ideal to live up to. It served to give a greater dramatic seriousness to his works than many of the operatic absurdities of the day, but, as suggested above, it was also responsible for some of the most boring passages in his music-dramas.

For the truth of it is, he did not live up to it. From Die Walküre onwards, there is a continual emergence of music as the supreme protagonist in his works. The first scene of Siegfried, where he is true to his early theories, seemed forged more through an iron artistic will than true inspiration; but by the final scene Wagner’s previously confined musical sorcery bursts through to claim supremacy.

The process of artistic equivocation continued through Tristan und Isolde, which has been described as “a mighty tone-poem with voice parts”, and culminates with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Götterdämmerung. Not only is music clearly the pre-eminent factor in the latter two works but, irony of ironies, they are also structures very much in the manner of grand opera, complete with duets, ensembles and choruses.

Tannhäuser and the Song Contest on the Wartburg, Wagner’s fifth music-drama, was composed between 1842 and 1845. For the theme of the drama, Wagner drew together two different narrative strands. Both of these were well established in German literary tradition, and Wagner appears to have used both ancient and modern versions of the story in preparing his libretto. Firstly, there is Tannhäuser’s dilemma in having to choose between his carnal pleasures with Venus, the goddess of love, and his pure earthly love, Elizabeth. Then there is a sub-plot involving the story of the song contest (a theme which Wagner was to return to in Die Meistersinger).

Tannhäuser was an actual historical figure, a 13th-century Minnesinger, a representative of that group of courtly minstrels who toured the German-speaking states in the early Middle Ages, whose theme was principally a quasi-religious idealisation of aristocratic ladies. Tannhäuser, by contrast, as he tells us in a surviving poem, had a strong leaning towards the more sensual pleasures of life.

The overture exists in two versions. In 1860–61 Wagner revised his score so that the overture would lead straight into the first act of the music-drama. But it is the earlier version which will be heard in tonight’s concert, since it forms a self-contained symphonic movement.

PS

I owe my interest in grand opera – at least as far as it goes – to a friend at university who spent several nights plying me with coffee and playing me the best bits from the likes of the Ring cycle, Verdi, and Richard Strauss (no relation, as I found out). So transformative was this experience that I recast it in fictional form in a novel I wrote shortly afterwards to keep me company during a year off in Germany.

But even with such a helpful grounding I learnt little more than what I was told. Not that you’d know it from reading these pieces. Look at me here sounding like I know what I’m talking about: ‘the music itself was becoming a mere vehicle for the egotism of the singers’. Oh it was, was it? Go on then, clever dick, name the first soprano to sing the part of Lucia di Lammermoor. Who created the role of Rossini’s Wilhelm Tell? Who was Verdi’s favourite baritone? I certainly couldn’t tell you. Is ‘melismas’ even a legitimate plural? I’d need to look it up.

On the other hand, I take genuine and weird (for me) pleasure in the apparently chaotic and cacophonous shenanigans that comprise Strauss’s Elektra, and I found my own way to the glories of Puccini and ‘O mio babbino caro’ and ‘Doretta’s Dream’. (All right, A Room With a View helped with the latter, but the moment that music started in that scene in that corn field I knew I’d be in tears by the time Julian Sands started kissing Helena Bonham Carter… and not only because it was Julian Sands doing the kissing rather than me, the lucky bastard.)