12

Young Wagner

In 1849, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was accused of treason for his participation in the Dresden Revolution of 1848–9, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Notices reporting Wagner as a wanted man appeared in several newspapers. One was issued as late as 11 July 1853 (Wagner being still at large), in a publication called Eberhardt’s Allgemeiner Polizei-Anzeiger (Eberhardt’s General Police Gazette). It includes an unflattering lithograph portrait of the composer – his lower jaw appears to have grown to vast size – captioned ‘ehemal. Capellmeister und politischer Flüchtling aus Dresden’ (former court conductor and political fugitive from Dresden). The notice reports that Wagner ‘allegedly intends to travel to Germany from Zurich, where he currently resides. In order to aid in his capture, a portrait is included here; if discovered and caught he is to be arrested and turned over to the Royal Municipal Court in Dresden.’¹ An original notice from 16 May 1849 was more laconic: ‘All police departments are to be on the lookout, and are requested to arrest Wagner if he is discovered and caught. … Wagner is 37–38 years old, of medium height, has brown hair and wears glasses.’² Like celebrities ever since, Wagner always removed the glasses when being photographed or sitting for his portrait. Only a few candid shots – amateur sketches drawn by those observing him in rehearsals – have ever revealed that his eyesight was less than perfect.

We begin here, with Wagner on the run, because it can sometimes seem as if he has been wanted ever since. As the most controversial, most politically dubious musician in the history of Western music. As ‘Hitler’s favourite composer’. As an unrepentant anti-Semite whose tendency to publish any and every thought that came into his head has left us with ample traces of his most unpalatable ideas. As a habitual debtor, who was unfaithful to his wife (admittedly, he had many composer rivals where that sin was concerned) and who bamboozled King Ludwig II of Bavaria out of immense sums, which he spent not only on grandiose operatic ventures but also to nurse an abiding passion for silk dressing gowns. As a sinister magician whose purpose was to rob audiences of their capacity for rational thought, imprisoning them in a dark theatre filled with sounds and sights that seemed to flow directly from his imagination, with little homage to artistic achievements of the past. Wagner is wanted for so many reasons. Although it was not clear until the later 1850s, he rewrote the opera rulebook. Before Wagner, operas (no matter what language they were written in) were united in their use of certain musical forms, and in a shared sense for the proper relationship between the voice and the orchestra. After Wagner, those forms and that relationship could never again communicate in quite the same way.

What’s more, Wagner’s revolution in musical thinking, in notions of operatic time and musical rhetoric, and his radical ideas about theatrical production and architecture, engendered works whose impact was far from merely operatic. We can easily compile a list of composers who, although they never thought to write an opera or were never principally opera composers, nonetheless absorbed basic precepts from Wagner’s musical language: Anton Bruckner, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Arnold Schoenberg, Hugo Wolf. Wagner was, in other words, a prime mover of musical modernism, an imposing, often stifling father figure who loomed impossibly large over the later nineteenth century and beyond. His music and theories also caught the imagination of artists outside the sphere of professional composition, and in a way unprecedented among mere opera composers. In France, he was the poet Charles Baudelaire’s principal inspiration, as Baudelaire himself acknowledged in a famous letter of 1860, written to Wagner, never sent, but then published as a piece of journalism. Baudelaire’s idolatry was self-consciously exclusive: ‘I want to be distinguished from all those jackasses’. But it was also close to self-annihilating: ‘At first it seemed to me that I knew your music already, and later, in thinking it over, I understood what had caused this illusion. It seemed to me that this music was my own’.³ Confronted with Wagner, such a heady combination of pride and abasement was not unusual. The most famous acolyte of all was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose encounter with Wagner’s 1859 opera Tristan und Isolde was so devastating and violent that it resulted in Nietzsche’s first great philosophical essay, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music), in 1872. His later repudiation of the composer (he defiantly announced a preference for Bizet, of all composers), articulated at length in Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888), was no less traumatic.

It is always naïve to imagine that the history of opera can be outlined simply by rewinding to the time when this or that work was written, by pretending to discuss the work’s historical context as if it only included the period immediately surrounding its composition. The intervening past, the time between this or that opera and ourselves, can never be so easily willed away. Wagner is the trump card when this matter is debated, the unassailable test case. The impossibility of forgetting Wagner, of rewinding and capturing a time before Wagner’s music and writings burned a path through the nineteenth century, is clear to us all. This is even the case, albeit on a more modest scale, when trying to deal with his earlier operas – those written before 1849 – in comparison with the later, more revolutionary works. One cannot hear the young Wagner’s operas without reflecting on how they prefigure his innovations after 1849. And it is typical of the way Wagner’s works were generally received that this inability – this sense of the unassailable prestige of the later works, the way that all music preceding them seems inevitably filtered through their lens – was fostered by the composer himself, if not actually engendered by him. Wagner was hyper-loquacious, both in the print media and viva voce. Catulle Mendès reported after a visit to Wagner in Lucerne in 1869 that he ‘talked, talked, talked, it was an unending flood’.⁴ He was also, when not creating opera, prone to writing long letters and even longer essays about himself, and about culture and politics generally. His collected writings in the most complete edition run to sixteen volumes. One has the impression of someone who produced sound – whether verbal or musical – perpetually and fluently. As if to demonstrate this, many of Wagner’s best and worst writings come from a fallow period in his life as a composer, the five years that followed his abortive involvement in the Dresden Revolution. This period saw his exile from German lands and his literary preparation for the gradual explosion of the later works.

He was born, the youngest of nine children, into a family of theatrical hangers-on and art-smitten amateurs. One relative (the adopted daughter of his brother Albert), Johanna Wagner, became a celebrated opera singer who was for years the more famous musician in the family. Wagner had no formal training as a composer. In his teens he wrote a number of derivative works in the standard instrumental genres (sonatas, string quartets, overtures) and toyed with various theatrical and operatic projects, using as models the German cultural high-ground of Goethe and Schiller. He eased into the world of opera as a largely self-taught conductor who drifted through minor positions at small provincial theatres: Würzburg, Magdeburg and then a longer stint in Riga, where from 1837 to 1839 he conducted many operatic repertory works. In 1839 he fled his wretched credit history by moving to Paris, hoping – brashly, it would seem – to be commissioned by the Opéra. All that time he continued writing operas and other occasional works, minor and trivial pieces. But the way in which he placed the early works in later life is significant. One still-repeated cliché, again deriving from his own writings, tells us that his first three operas, Die Feen (The Fairies, 1833), Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, 1835) and Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (1842), represent an early, naïve and soon-to-be-overcome fascination with, in neat succession, German (Die Feen), Italian (Das Liebesverbot) and then French (Rienzi) operatic traditions. There is some truth in this formulation. Die Feen’s supernatural subject matter can certainly be related to previous trends in German opera (it has substantially the same plot as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Undine of 1814) and its musical forms owe much to Weber. Obvious too is the fact that Rienzi was planned as an assault on the grand opéra tradition and specifically in emulation of the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer: a five-act grand opera in the most inflated French tradition, based on the novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, intended to storm the Opéra but failing to find a performance there. However, Das Liebesverbot has very little that can be laid at the door of contemporary Italian opera, again relying on a rude mixture of French and German models. As we shall see, the Italian model of bel canto, much as he liked to denigrate it in later life, would not so easily be laid aside.

The likely reason behind Wagner’s dissemination of this idea of a brisk, youthful tour through the main European operatic styles was to encourage people to hear the post-Rienzi works as a kind of synthesis of these national idioms. The intended rivalry with Meyerbeer, whose early career had indeed involved prolonged exposure to German, Italian and then French opera, was obvious. In an obsequious letter to Meyerbeer, written before he reached Paris, Wagner stated as much: ‘in you I behold the perfect embodiment of the task that confronts the German artist, a task you have solved by dint of having mastered the merits of the Italian and French schools in order to give universal validity to the products of that genius. This, then, is what more or less set me on my present course’.⁵ He returned to these sentiments in a long and equally laudatory essay about Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, probably written in Paris: ‘Meyerbeer wrote world history, a history of hearts and feelings: he destroyed the shackles of national prejudice and the constraining boundaries of linguistic idioms: he wrote deeds of music.’⁶

While in Paris, Wagner finished another opera that he hoped might be performed in the capital, although this time in an entirely different genre: it was a short German Romantic opera, initially drafted in a single act, called Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1843). He also wrote literary essays and journalistic criticism, learned French badly and put bread on the table by making piano reductions of operas for vocal scores, or arrangements of numbers for various instrumental ensembles. Two of these opera arrangements, vocal scores of grands opéras by Donizetti (La Favorite, 1840) and Halévy (La Reine de Chypre, 1841), have recently been published, with elaborate scholarly apparatus, in a state-funded new critical edition of Wagner’s collected works – just one indication of how far his reputation has continued to expand from these desperate beginnings. At the time, though, the lack of recognition was galling, and accounts for some (not all) of his later, jaundiced views of the capital. Success eventually came from elsewhere. In 1843, Wagner gained an important post, and did so on the strength of the thinnest of résumés. He had sent the score of Rienzi to the Royal Saxon Opera in Dresden; bolstered by a recommendation from Meyerbeer to the director of the theatre, it was performed there and proved a wild success; on the basis of this, and despite the fact that Der fliegende Holländer, also premiered in Dresden, made a lesser impact, Wagner was invited to become the court conductor.

THE ORIGIN OF A SPECIES

Wagner left us dramatic, artfully embellished accounts of most of these events in his autobiography, Mein Leben (My Life), which he published in four volumes between 1870 and 1880. Much earlier, though, in 1851 while in exile in Switzerland, he wrote an important essay on his artistic development during these early years, a self-analysis of his first four big operas, Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer, having by then been joined by Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). This essay, which is called ‘A Communication to My Friends’, is a cornerstone for conventional histories of Wagner as composer. We can go straight to the critical part, a description of what Wagner saw as a small but radical element in Der fliegende Holländer. The opera’s story, of a ghostly voyager condemned to sail the seas perpetually until the love of a woman can redeem him, clearly anticipates one of the main themes of Wagner's post-1850 works. What’s more, the work (particularly in its original, single-act version) strives for an unusual consistency of tone and atmosphere, occasionally even a blurring of the distinction between recitative and aria – something that had previously been rare in German opera. These points notwithstanding, Der fliegende Holländer is – in both its one-act and three-act versions – at base still a conventional number opera, with arias, duets, choruses and the like. However, and ignoring these formal matters, Wagner picked on a particular moment in the opera, a passage that – he said – presaged the earthquake he was to unleash on the operatic world in 1851:

I remember, before I set about the actual working-out of Der fliegende Holländer, drafting first the ballad of Senta in the second act, and completed both its verse and melody. In this piece, I unconsciously laid the thematic germ of the whole music of the opera: it was the picture in petto of the whole drama. … In the eventual composition of the music, the thematic picture, thus evoked, spread itself out quite instinctively over the whole drama, as one continuous tissue; I had only, without further initiative, to take the various thematic germs included in the Ballad and develop them to their legitimate conclusions.⁷

Near the middle of the opera (Act 2 in the three-act version), there is indeed a Ballad sung by the heroine, Senta (soprano). This number, like ballads we have seen previously in early nineteenth-century opera, tells a story in miniature – about a supernatural mariner and his search for a true beloved – that is gradually revealed as the plot of the opera itself, with Senta as the true beloved and the Dutchman (baritone) as the tall dark stranger looking for a human bride. Wagner enthused in particular about one aspect of the Ballad, how its main theme occurred not just within the piece itself but was repeated as a musical motif here and there through the entire opera, whenever dramatically apposite. What Wagner was describing became called, much later, ‘leitmotif technique’, and what he stresses is that repeating symbolic musical ideas (or, as they became called, ‘leitmotifs’) has the potential to transcend the borders of single numbers, drawing what would otherwise be a collection of separate musical movements – the beads on the string – into a whole.

To point out what is narcissistic about Wagner’s account may seem obvious, but so much mythology has grown up around the leitmotif that the task is still necessary. First of all: Wagner didn’t invent either the leitmotif or the process by which themes from an allegorical ballad are spun out during an opera. We have already seen instances of such recurring themes, going back to French opera in the late eighteenth century. In the previous chapter, we saw the young Verdi at almost exactly the same time experimenting with similar devices in his opera I due Foscari (1844). Wagner could not have known Verdi’s opera, but direct models for what happens in Senta’s Ballad in Der fliegende Holländer were much closer at hand: the idea was probably derived from ‘Jadis régnait en Normandie’ (There once reigned in Normandy), the Ballad in Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831), which was a work Wagner had, so to speak, ordered by mail in plain brown wrappers long before. But it was not merely a leap in degree to go from the occasional symbolic theme that recurs here and there in a number opera (the Fliegende Holländer or Due Foscari model) to what Wagner was imagining in the early 1850s. He was by that time busy conceiving opera devoid of conventional numbers, which meant devoid of conventional structures of operatic time. To a significant extent he was imagining opera created ex nihilo, a manifestation of real compositional freethinking.

Be that as it may, Wagner’s way of historicizing his earlier operas – seeing them as way-stations towards the post-1850 pieces – was copied in most subsequent discussions, with the inevitable result that these first works were found wanting. He quickly realized this himself and, even as he was establishing his terms of reference, tried to lessen their negative impact. In the ‘Communication to My Friends’ essay, he mentions his ‘views on the nature of Art that I have proclaimed from a standpoint it took me years of evolution step-by-step to gain’, and lamented the fact that critics would ‘point them back to those very compositions from which I started on the natural path of evolution that led me to this standpoint’.⁸ But the ‘natural path of evolution’ was too powerful a symbol, particularly in the evolution-obsessed second half of the nineteenth century. Not only did such language colour perceptions of Wagner’s pre-1850 operas, it also informed more general ways of seeing opera in the nineteenth century. Not for nothing did Verdi become incensed that a few scattered recurring themes in Don Carlos (1867) and Aida (1871) were enough to make critics call him an Italian Wagner, and a late-arriving one at that. Had these critics known I due Foscari, they might have been given pause; but by then Foscari had faded from the repertory. As we shall see in later chapters, Verdi was far from alone in being subjected to such unwelcome comparisons.

However, when it comes to Wagner’s earlier operas, there is a more important distortion in the other direction: to see works such as Tannhäuser and Lohengrin in this way is to overlook their greatness, which mostly resides in another realm, and has little to do with what might be prophetic of the later Wagner. The reason is simple: it is because the strongest music in Wagner’s earlier operas is the most conventional. Their glory, why we return to them, stems from the inspiration he poured into well-worn shapes. One gets from them the clearest idea of Wagner’s greedy ear, the fact that he had listened closely to and, judging by his musical love-letters, been swept away by Italian bel canto opera, by French opéra comique and by grand opéra. Wagner the essayist was, with a few notable early exceptions in which his real musical enthusiasms overflow, generally dismissive of French and Italian opera, and grudgingly praised the Germans only so far as they led up to him. But Wagner the composer was different altogether. As a maker of music he frequently wrote out his ardour for Romance-language operas, and wrote it out in musical sound.

WAGNER THE ITALIAN

The classic cases are Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which are twins in the sense of being similar in scope and dramatic sources. Both are set in the vague middle ages, in Thuringia and Brabant respectively, and both draw on stories that Wagner derived from contemporary German Romantic updates: stock knights-and-damsels material. Tannhäuser deals with the legend of the ‘Song Contest on the Wartburg’, in which the hero Tannhäuser (tenor), who has secretly dallied in Act 1 with the Goddess Venus (mezzo-soprano), offends the Thuringian court in Act 2 by expatiating on her erotic charms in his contribution to a song contest. He is ordered to go to Rome to seek pardon from the Pope. In Act 3, returning unpardoned, he seems to be back on the road to perdition until the heroine, Princess Elisabeth (soprano), sacrifices herself for him, at which point he can die a happy man. In Lohengrin, the heroine, Elsa (soprano), has been falsely accused by two malicious schemers, the knight Telramund (baritone) and his wife Ortrud (mezzo-soprano). Elsa is in danger of being condemned for the murder of her brother; but a mysterious white knight (Lohengrin, tenor) appears on a boat drawn by a swan and offers himself as her defender. Lohengrin has a condition, though: that she must never ask his name, nor where he comes from. Assurances on this having been received, he defeats Telramund in combat and thus proves her innocence. Over the course of a long evening’s drama, Elsa’s inevitable curiosity about the identity of her knight gets the better of her and eventually she asks the fatal question. This prompts Lohengrin’s departure (the departure boat is this time drawn by a dove, making all those jokes about ‘by the next available swan’ rather unfair) but at the same time sees the return of Elsa’s brother, who was not dead, as it turned out, but en-swanned by an evil spell that is now broken.

We can see Wagner’s bel canto roots most clearly in the beautiful, big-curve melodies that emerge within the conventional numbers in both operas. But before exploring this, it’s worth savouring Wagner’s affection for Vincenzo Bellini, whom he would continue to the end of his life to call ‘the gentle Sicilian’.⁹ In the 1830s and 1840s, Wagner could pay tribute to Bellini as standard-bearer for bel canto aesthetics not just in borrowing from his melodic language but also in his prose. In ‘Bellini, a Word in Season’ – written in 1837 as a memorial piece (Bellini had died in 1835) – Wagner exhorts his countrymen to be honest with themselves about their passions:

How little we are convinced by our pack of rules and prejudices. How often must it have happened that, after being transported by a French or Italian opera at the theatre, upon coming out we have scouted our emotion with a pitying jest … let us drop for once the jest, let us spare ourselves for once the sermon, and ponder what it was that so enchanted us; we then shall find, especially with Bellini, that it was the limpid Melody, the simple, noble, beauteous song. To confess this, and believe in it, is surely not a sin. It would be no sin, perchance, if before we fell asleep, we breathed a prayer that heaven would one day give German composers such melodies and such a way of handling song.¹⁰

And he tried. In the duet between Elsa and Ortrud in Act 2 of Lohengrin, it is only the libretto that tells us we are listening to an innocent and a schemer: two women having an earnest discussion about loyalty and forgiveness. Take the words away and, particularly towards the end, we are treated to something resembling a love duet from Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830, a Romeo and Juliet story), with soprano and mezzo-soprano twining in and out of one another, an effect that survives the occasionally dense chromatic harmony reminding us of the composer’s German origins. If one looks at the score of this duet, one is struck by how many times Wagner puts the notation for a vocal turn (the sideways ‘S’) over the high points of the vocal lines: a graceful embellishment that refers to the lightness, the leggerezza, of Italianate vocal writing. I Capuleti was in fact a critical text in Wagner’s accounts of his artistic evolution. Judging by the number of times he mentions it and the passion attached to reminiscences of the event, Bellini’s opera entered his consciousness for good when he saw Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient; as Romeo in Leipzig in 1834, and again in Magdeburg in 1835. Schroeder-Devrient; the part of Romeo; Bellini’s opera; all make up a theme that returns unrepressed in Wagner’s writings throughout his life, even if the emotions became more mixed as time went by.

On the other hand, the form of the Lohengrin duet, and many effects within it, are far from the Italian gold standard. For one thing, the number splits in two. The first part involves Ortrud singing upwards to Elsa, who is safe on a balcony high above her (Romeo and Juliet come subversively to mind). Ortrud begins (in recitative) by twice calling Elsa’s name, two syllables ‘El-sa’, almost like a whispered hunting horn call, accompanied by oboes and muted horns. Muting the instruments creates a near-for-far effect, as if loud sounds are being heard at a great distance. The second ‘El-sa’ is sung to non-muted horns and flutes, as if an Ortrud very far away had instantly teleported nearer: a sign of her magical nature. They converse. After Ortrud (throwing in a few vocal ornaments and turns) convinces her victim to come down to the door, she is left alone for a few moments and uses the time to sing a revenge monologue – a conventional outburst with loud tremolo strings. When Elsa joins her and the two occupy the same space another duet begins, this time more convoluted. Ortrud drops her Italianate style: now her aim is to plant suspicions about Lohengrin in Elsa’s mind. The more emphatic and incisive Ortrud’s vocal idiom becomes – when she reverts, as it were, to prose – the more flowery and ornamental are Elsa’s ingénue responses.

But the best Italianate operatic moment comes with the return to conventional form: the end of the duet, when they sing together. Elsa’s lines are naïve: ‘Laß mich dich lehren, wie süß die Wonne reinster Treue’ (Let me teach you, how sweet the bliss of pure faithfulness). Ortrud’s are snarls: ‘Ha! Dieser Stoltz, er soll mich lehren, wie ich bekämpfe ihre Treu’ ’ (Ha! This pride will teach me, how I can defeat her faithfulness). But her specific words are, in performance, incomprehensible because the simultaneous singing cancels them out. This is where the voices start twining around one another, sometimes with echoes of one line in another, sometimes in parallel intervals. Just as Ortrud’s musical prose dominated earlier, now Elsa’s blissful mood dictates the musical mood – and because it does, the beautiful remnants of an Italian love duet come back out from the wings.

Compared to the old-fashioned operatic aesthetic given expression in this duet, the one famous leitmotif in Lohengrin – the so-called ‘Question Motif’ – is insignificant indeed: something which was obviously meant to be sinister, but which turned into a major miscalculation. This ‘Question Motif’ is an absolutely straightforward symbolic theme: as Claude Debussy, that most uncertain of Wagnerians, later said of such musical recollections,‘It’s rather like those silly people who hand you their visiting cards and then lyrically recite what is printed on them’.¹¹ It is sung by Lohengrin in Act 1, when he tells Elsa of the prohibition she must obey: ‘Nie sollst du mich befragen, noch Wissens Sorge tragen, woher ich kam der Fahrt, noch wie mein Nam’ und Art’ (Never should you ask me, nor should you concern yourself to know, whence I have come from, and what is my name and nature). It recurs whenever Elsa is wondering about Lohengrin – one can almost see her furrow her brow and look tempted on cue – and whenever scheming Ortrud tries to sow doubt and lead Elsa astray. For instance, it is blared out at the end of Act 2, after a scene in which Ortrud has confronted Elsa on the way to her wedding, and hinted that Lohengrin might not be all he seems. In traditional stagings of Lohengrin, the mezzo playing Ortrud is often required to sneer knowingly to trombone accompaniment as the curtain falls. And then, predictably, Elsa also gets to sing a breathless version of the motif when she finally asks the question in Act 3.

It is instructive to look for a moment at the twentieth-century career of the ‘Question Motif’ in film music. Music from Lohengrin tended to be used a great deal by composers in the classic sound-film era: in part because it was a popular opera in the 1930s and 1940s; in part because the ‘Wedding March’ from Act 3, via inherited Victorian ceremonial habits, had become a clichéd musical accompaniment to matrimony. But the ‘Question Motif’ is often used ironically, for humorous effect. For instance, in Michael Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), when a British war hero sends his best friend in London a postcard from Berlin, a close-up of said postcard triggers the ‘Question Motif’. In the opera the motif is too obviously a portent of bad things, too musically isolated from the contexts in which it recurs, too likely to be a mere ‘visiting card’. Again, the comparison with Verdi’s I due Foscari comes to mind, if only because that is another opera in which the intellectual lure of recurring motifs led the composer away from his best operatic instincts.

This is not the only way in which Lohengrin sometimes falters when it most obviously looks forward to the avant-garde works of Wagner’s maturity. Another instance is found in the experimental stretches of unstructured dialogue, which can become heavy going. The long, elaborate discussion between Elsa and Lohengrin in Act 3, in which they sort things out on their wedding night, is an instance of Wagner looking for the free-flowing exchanges that he would later call musical prose – his rejection of the profiles and limits of predictable melody and fixed forms. But it doesn’t work. In short, Wagner appears to have experienced a crisis with melody in Lohengrin, something hinted at in his prose writings from the time.

As in Tannhäuser, his mastery of overwhelming musical effects and small uncanny details experienced no crisis whatsoever. An example of the first: stage directors from time immemorial have struggled with the Act 1 deus ex machina, Lohengrin’s arrival on the swan boat. In its way, the apparition is as old as the hills: Zeus or Apollo arriving from heaven, against flat painted clouds, in a golden carriage dropped from the catwalks, circa 1650. Wagner wants no such artifice. We have to be convinced that this is a miracle in truth, and not a charming allegory wrapped up in stage machinery. His solution is to overwhelm us in the acoustic realm. The people of Brabant are assembled on stage to witness Elsa’s trial – she is brought on to repudiate Telramund’s accusation that she murdered her brother. Elsa has a vision that a knight from afar will defend her honour, and a herald blows his trumpet in summons. Two times, there is silence. But after the third summons and a plea from Elsa and her ladies, the swan appears in the distance and a magnificent pandemonium ensues. The orchestra begins with a near-for-far fanfare, distant-sounding trumpets and horns, a metallic miniature that will keep getting louder until it becomes a brass leviathan assailing our ears. But the most profound shock is in the chorus, up to this point a well-disciplined, somewhat tedious collective whose style runs to simple hymn-like harmonies. Now they are too amazed to be prim, and individual voices or groups of voices burst out with exclamations: Look! A swan! A miracle! These calls and cries are so rhythmically unpredictable that they sound like absolute astonishment, as if the chorus were improvising this stretch on their own, not following a script. Here we get a sense for Wagner’s special verve in creating the illusion of the un-composed, the spontaneous or the unmediated.

As for the uncanny moments, they are seldom associated with a repeating motif, and often slip in with a minimum of fanfare. Most of Act 2 (several scenes’ worth in the score) is taken up by an immense finale entailing much slow choral singing and snail’s pace processing, punctuated by the occasional spark when Ortrud and Telramund show up to cause trouble. This is a musical passage where doughty virtue glazes the eye and the villains provide welcome relief. But something odd happens with Telramund, who up to this point has a particular musical and vocal presence: bold, forthright and not completely unattractive in his obsessions with honour, transparency and protocol. Near the end, under the cover of choral sermonizing from the blameless, he approaches Elsa (who is now seriously worried about Lohengrin’s identity) and whispers a strange thing to her: ‘Vertraue mir! Laß dir ein Mittel heißen, das dir Gewissheit schaft. Laß mich das kleinste Glied ihm nur entreißen, des Fingers Spitze, und ich schwöre dir, was er dir hehlt, sollst frei du vor dir seh’n!’ (Trust me! Know that there is a way to be certain. Let me but rip the tiniest member from his body, the tip of his finger, and what he is concealing will be revealed to you!) Even stranger is the change in his voice, as if he has become a different being, from sonorous chest voice and ringing tones to fast, almost hysterical patter, sung so high in the baritone register as to verge on falsetto. For a moment, something from an unsettling Wagnerian future makes an unexpected appearance here, the feminized bloodlust of the dwarf Mime (in Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1876) or the shrieks of Klingsor, the castrated sorcerer in Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (1882). Such dramatis personae are not far from representing Wagnerian caricatures of Jews, as even a cursory reading of his infamous anti-Semitic pamphlet, Das Judentum in der Musik (On Judaism in Music, 1850), would suggest.

Perhaps this disquieting moment from Lohengrin shows us one way to understand the difference in flavour between Der fliegende Holländer or Tannhäuser on the one hand and Lohengrin on the other: that Wagner’s turn to ugliness marks an attitude that spoils his confident operatic touch. Up to Tannhäuser, Wagner was an optimist, still young, barely into his thirties. His optimism rhymes with the philosophies that engrossed him up to that point, in particular the ‘Young Germany’ movement with its energy and faith in future betterment. His writings about the theatre, about opera, literature and history have an idealistic tenor at this time, and naïve energy. In the exuberant finale to one of his fictions, ‘A Happy Evening’ (1841), the protagonist and his friend ‘R’ have just attended a concert:

‘And tonight’ – my friend broke in, in full enthusiasm – ‘it is joy I taste, the happiness, the presage of a higher destiny, won from the wondrous revelations in which Mozart and Beethoven have spoken to us on this glorious spring evening. So here’s to happiness, here’s to courage, that enheartens us in the fight with our fate! Here’s to victory, gained by our higher sense, over the worthlessness of the vulgar. To love, which crowns our courage, to friendship, that keeps firm our faith! To hope, which weds itself to our foreboding! To the day, to the night! A cheer for the sun, a cheer for the stars!’¹²

It is worth noting that the two individuals in this story have just consumed a considerable amount of punch, which may account for some of the exalted mood. But the artist-friends, strolling arm in arm and laughing at the Philistines, could just as well be members of Robert Schumann’s fictional Davidsbund from 1834, the Davids fighting the Goliaths without any sense that they might ever suffer defeat.

These were the currents of air that lofted Tannhäuser to great heights in musical terms. Like Bizet’s Carmen, it is a near-perfect opera. That has in part to do with the energy and verve in its conventional numbers, which are ideals of their types. In part it has to do with instances of what we see in Lohengrin’s Act 1 Swan Chorus – creating the illusion of music that has flown beyond a composer’s control over musical form and melodic choice, to become something seemingly more spontaneous and unguarded, the voice of the People or of Nature itself.

WAGNER’S CARMEN

Tannhäuser was by far the most popular of Wagner’s operas throughout the entire nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, with glowing reviews that evidently softened impresarios and theatre directors worldwide. Between its premiere in 1845 and the first Paris production in 1861 it was produced hundreds of times; Ernest Newman’s four-volume Wagner biography devotes an entire chapter to the phenomenon. It was the first Wagner opera played in America, being staged in New York in 1859. After the premiere, an article in the New York Musical Review and Gazette discussed its formidable reputation:

If there really is no melody, no truth, no beauty in this work, how is it possible that it has taken such a hold upon the Germans for the last eight or ten years? We saw this opera about six years ago, in Leipzig, when it was performed for the thirtieth time. The house was crowded. Since then it has been given repeatedly in small and great cities of Germany, and the statistics of all the performances of last year in that country prove that this one opera was given oftener than any other single work of the popular Meyerbeer or Verdi. And let us also say, if this opera was really in principle and treatment so exceedingly original and new, as friends and foes with different views have claimed it to be, this great success would not have accompanied it.¹³

Quaint sociological evidence of Tannhäuser’s predominance is everywhere in the historical record. The Aeolian Quarterly, a trade publication devoted to Aeolian piano roll products and the player-piano industry, reported in 1897 that:

it is a significant fact, as showing the class of music-lovers to whom the Aeolian appeals, that of all the thousands of pieces cut for that instrument, no other has had so large a sale as the ‘Tannhäuser’ Overture. Some years ago, the audience at a Crystal Palace concert, in London, were allowed to vote for the most popular overture. The ‘Tannhäuser’ came out ahead, with 317 votes; the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Mendelssohn coming next with 253.¹⁴

In 1861 in London, ‘Neville Temple’ and ‘Edward Trevor’ published their hundred-page epic Tannhäuser, or the Battle of the Bards, based on and in tribute to Wagner.¹⁵ Its literary merit is small. Tannhäuser is described as having ‘a sinuous frame, compact of pliant power’; Wolfram is ‘like an orphan child in charity / whose loss came early, and is gently borne, / too deep for tears, too constant for complaint’, which shows who wears the trousers in this particular poem. In 1917, the Victrola Book of the Opera gauges Tannhäuser’s popularity by several barometers:

There are a great many people who like to go to the opera, but who do not care for Wagner’s Ring Operas, with their Teutonic myths and legends, and their long and sometimes undeniably tedious scenes. But Tannhäuser, with its poetry, romance, and passion, and above all its characters who are real human beings and not mysterious mythological gods, goddesses, and heroes, appeals strongly to everyone. To show the wonderful vogue of this work, it is estimated that there are more than one thousand performances of the opera that take place annually throughout the world; and in Germany during the decade of 1901–1910 it was given 3,243 times.¹⁶

When the number is so specific, one feels the author has had access to a reliable pre-war statistical record.

The 1859 reviewer in the New York Musical Review, like the Victrola summary, identifies a significant truth: Tannhäuser is not music of the future. Unlike Lohengrin, there is nothing unconventional in its libretto. We know from the original composition draft and score that it was originally conceived as a number opera. It was then revised several times, a complicated story, with the most significant revision being for another assault on the French capital – also disastrous – in 1861. But in its first, 1845 form, and up to the Paris revisions, there are no long meandering discussions between characters. Yet again there are obvious elements relating to earlier German opera, particularly in the old-German local colour and its attendant choral episodes. And, as discussed in the previous chapter, many of the opera’s most glorious inspirations are clearly written in homage to French grand opéra, particularly in the big ensemble scenes and their love of sheer noise. The French delight in operatic shows was persistent and crossed the boundaries of time and taste. When the 24-year-old Marcel Proust saw Tannhäuser in Paris in 1895, he was left unmoved by the female characters or the love duets, gravitating instead towards avant-garde moments where music combined with stage images to make a kind of resonant picture:

I was extremely bored with Tannhäuser up to the solo. And in spite of the general cries of admiration, Elisabeth’s languishing prayer [in Act 3] left me cold. But how beautiful the whole last part is … the more legendary Wagner is, the more human I find him, and in him the most magnificent artifice of the imagination strikes me only as the compelling symbolic expression of moral truths.¹⁷

Proust is referring to Tannhäuser’s famous narrative solo in Act 3, in which an account of the journey to Rome is accompanied by music that gives expression to the scenes described, their sounds and colours. And while one disagrees with Proust but rarely, the most avant-garde (least artificial) passage in the opera is in fact the site of an evident truth, this very Act 3 narrative. Here, in a prefiguring of Wagner’s post-1850 style, the orchestral contribution is of greater importance, bringing with it a web of motivic connections to enrich the through-composed progress of the hero’s narration. Everything that follows the narrative, to the end of the opera, involves scenic wonders: Proust’s affinity for music that accompanies visual magic is evident. But such scenes are not ubiquitous. Generally, if two people in Tannhäuser have something to say to one another – as do the hero and Elisabeth during their happy reunion in Act 2 – they say it in the form of recitative and then a big duet.

Elisabeth’s entrance aria in Act 2 of Tannhäuser, ‘Dich, teure Halle, grüß ich wieder’ (Cherished hall, I salute you again), is a good case in point. There is a bare minimum of prosaic utterances. When Elisabeth finishes her first, fanfare-like lines and thinks back to less happy moments in the Hall of Song, her voice becomes appropriately melancholy, and the musical volume is turned down: she no longer sings finished melody, but rather some gestures accompanied by rhythmically free chord progressions, with pauses between and a plaintive melodic fragment in the oboe. But this interruption is very brief. ‘Wie jetzt’ (But now) she reminds herself: joy will return, and the opening music of the aria duly comes back in a traditional formal gesture towards balance and completion. The best part is at the very end, in which the music ignores the words because the text is now irrelevant, being just a repetition of the same motto, ‘Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir gegrüßt, du teure Halle, sei mir gegrüßt’ (I salute you, cherished hall). Wagner sets the four syllables to ascending three-note arpeggios (the last note repeated), higher each time, building up sequentially to an arched bow at the top of the soprano’s range: as perfectly formed and as moving as, say, Amonasro’s ‘Pensa che un popolo, vinto, straziato, per te soltanto risorger può’, the spectacular melodic peroration in his duet with Aida in Act 3 of Verdi’s opera.

Tannhäuser is an opera about singing, indeed about who is the best singer, and its Act 2 song contest is the central dramatic event. In this sense there is a clear expectation that beautiful melody will take centre stage. Honours in this respect are shared between Elisabeth – a role created by Wagner’s niece Johanna – and Wolfram (baritone), a knight who, unlike Tannhäuser, has no sensual blots on his résumé. Both are given big solo pieces in which melody dominates the compositional palette. Their particularly melodic music is absent from the opera’s potpourri Overture, a lacuna that one early commentator read as symbolic of their lesser power: ‘The gentle love of Elisabeth, the faithful friendship of Wolfran [sic], are alone absent from the overture; but the one is really as much drowned in religion as the other is absorbed by the complete uselessness of Wolfran’s fidelity and the ultimate triumph of Tannhäuser.’¹⁸ True, in comparison to Tannhäuser’s obvious susceptibility to sins of the flesh, Wolfram’s saintliness might seem uninteresting; nor does he get the girl. But he is by far the more captivating singer. In Chapter 1, we mentioned that his contributions in the song contest, in terms of vocal line and harmonic gesture, are musically sensual in a way that the hero’s never are. Wolfram is one of the most Italianate of Wagner’s roles: as if to emphasize this, the part is written for a high, light baritone – very rare in Wagner. He has an aria in Act 3 that, as a reward for its sheer singability, became a parlour staple in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, ‘O du, mein holder Abendstern’, the ‘Song to the Evening Star’. A marvellous review from 1882 homes in on the truth of Wolfram’s charm, referring to ‘the most melodious and juicy baritone part hitherto written by Wagner’ with Wolfram’s song in the Act 2 contest and the ‘Evening Star’ number deemed the ‘chief bits of fat in the whole opera – the nearest things in it to real, coherent, recollectable songs’, which afford ‘ample opportunities for the display of a mellow and eminently sympathetic [vocal] organ’.¹⁹

There is one single place in the opera where all-conquering song – singing that overwhelms and convinces – actually accomplishes something on stage in front of us. This comes in the final septet in Act 1, in the section where Wolfram convinces Tannhäuser, who has just extricated himself from Venusberg, to return to the Thuringian court. This septet, as we have seen, was beloved by French audiences. Much urgent discussion (Will Tannhäuser return? No, I cannot, my destiny lies elsewhere!) gets cut off by a dramatic intervention as Wolfram invokes the name of Princess Elisabeth to the sound of celestial harps. The coup de théâtre invites a pause for slow, lyric excess, and Wolfram is given sole responsibility: he describes to Tannhäuser how much Elisabeth has missed him, and he begs the hero to return.

In a curious way, the effect is of Wolfram pausing to take up a mandolin and sing a real song, since this lyric subsection is so self-contained, so formally simple (ABA, no less) and so well-framed by an orchestral lead-in. It’s even scored as if to profile pure voice, with the baritone sounding out against quiet woodwind and strings. The contrasting verse (‘Denn, ach! als du uns stolz verlassen, verschloß ihr Herz sich uns’rem Lied’ – Ah, but when you left in injured pride, her heart was closed to our singing) swerves appropriately into the minor and melancholy. And this second verse ends with a fabulous cadence, a little piece of musical pathos. The voice skips up through an interval, then retraces it downwards while filling in the missing notes of a major scale that is revealed at the end as an ornamental colour, just a step above the true minor centre. When the opening melody returns immediately afterwards – slyly, to the text ‘O kehr’ zurück’ (Oh, come back) – it seems doubly marvellous in the way it has been reintroduced. This is a classic instance of an operatic moment that seems to ask the listeners to sing along with the character, so strong is the melody’s pull: it is one of those passages in Wagner that again makes sense of his affection for Bellini, an affection that was to wane once there could be only one unassailably perfect opera composer in all history – Wagner himself. Returning in 1871 to the experience of Schroeder-Devrient and Romeo, Wagner’s view has become harsh:

No matter how absurd or trivial its shape, one could not deny to Opera a power unrivalled even in the most ideal sense. … We need but instance the impersonation, surely unforgettable by many yet alive, once given by Frau Schröder-Devrient of ‘Romeo’ in Bellini’s opera. Every fibre of the musician rebels against allowing the least artistic merit to the sickly, utterly threadbare music here hung upon an opera-poem of indigent grotesqueness; but ask anyone who witnessed it, what impression he received from the ‘Romeo’ of Frau Schröder-Devrient as compared with the Romeo of our very best play-actor in even the great Briton’s piece?²⁰

Alas, the Wagner who snarls at Bellini is a much-diminished soul.

NOISE

When Wagner finally managed to convince the Paris Opéra to put on one of his works, Tannhäuser was chosen; but that was as late as 1861. The choice has sometimes been read as evidence that the French public would have been unable to deal with the most recent Wagner, an idea that hardly bears serious scrutiny. For one thing, by 1860 Wagner had only just finished his most radical piece, Tristan und Isolde; for another, the only other post-1850 works – the first two episodes of the four-opera Der Ring des Nibelungen – were operas that Wagner would not allow to be performed separately. Perhaps the explanation for choosing Tannhäuser was simpler: that it was a wonderful grand opéra in the finest Parisian tradition. The opera also shows how spectacular the formal conventions of grand opéra could become when invigorated by a young composer. And at the time this youthfulness expressed itself not just in new thinking about instrumental sound (more of this later) or in impatience with the status quo of the operatic world, but in the kinetic energy and optimism of the big numbers, those stalwarts of so many operas past.

New instrumental sounds abound in Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, and there are different ways of reading their significance. The critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno, for instance, read Wagner’s near-for-far instrumental effects as a form of acoustic deception, a phantasmagoria that aimed to confuse by concealing the material basis for sound. This, he argued, was a way to detach the listener from an awareness of history or time, of his or her responsibility and presence in the real world – hypnotized dreamers are unlikely to man the barricades or agitate for social revolution. On the other hand, one could also see such spatial effects as an experiment in acoustic realism, of Wagner being hyper-aware of how sound is perceived in terms of distance, volume and architectural surroundings. He was a happy master of onstage (or just barely offstage) sounds: trumpets, horns, shepherd’s pipes and bells, unseen voices and lonely calls from the rigging. It was a talent that once more reveals his grand opéra tastes, even as it shows how in his hands the model mutated into unpredictable and almost unrecognizable forms.

The pièce de résistance in this regard is Act 1, scene 3 of Tannhäuser, in which Tannhäuser has been transported instantaneously from Venus’s underground lair to his old haunts in Thuringia, and lies unconscious next to a rustic Marian shrine. For almost ten minutes, every sound comes from the fictional world on- or offstage; nothing is heard from the orchestra pit. A young shepherd seems to improvise a song to spring, and accompanies himself with a random-sounding, wandering tune on his pipe (offstage cor anglais). Unseen livestock are wearing bells, which clang from somewhere in the distance. Pilgrims approach, far away at first, then coming nearer: their singing goes from almost inaudible to right there in front of us as they cross the stage. It is all completely, uncompromisingly realistic, and attempts to create the impression that no one composed this scene, it just is. The purism ends when the pit orchestra returns – unnoticed at first – as the shepherd calls farewell, ‘Glück auf! Nach Rom! Betet für meine arme Seele’ (Godspeed! To Rome! Pray for my poor soul). This wakes up Tannhäuser and the full orchestra comes roaring to life at maximum volume; the fading reprise of the Pilgrims’ Chorus gets instrumental support as Tannhäuser echoes their melody.

No description can capture the radical acoustic imagination behind this scene, the utter newness. It has to be heard to be believed. Not for nothing was it greeted with laughter and hoots of disdain in Paris in 1861, for even though sixteen years had passed since it had been composed, it seemed incomprehensible. It remains a triumph of sheer daring, and predicts the best of the Wagnerian future, passages such as the opening of Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde, or what we hear before the curtain goes up in Die Meistersinger, Act 3, scene 2.

LIBRETTO RULES

Wagner’s twenties and thirties were the period when he was most attracted to reform and revolution, to liberationist ideals that were half formed and naïve in a way that is (in a non-pejorative sense) young or youthful. His most obviously reformist writings come from the late 1840s, when his political activities were also at their height: one need only cite titles such as Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution) and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future; both 1849) to get the flavour of the enterprise. In the context, it is hardly by chance that this was also the period during which he was closest to Franz Liszt (1811–86), who was also a renegade both musically and socially. Liszt had been an extremist as a concert pianist and composer, pushing the limits of technical virtuosity in his playing and attempting to capture improvisation – which necessarily means fanciful messiness – in his musical compositions. In the late 1840s he, like Wagner, experienced a turning point, renouncing his life as a virtuoso to become Kapellmeister in Weimar (a city famous even then for its association with Goethe), devoting himself to self-consciously serious, determinedly avant-garde composition. Not surprisingly in these circumstances – and also because Liszt became an important enabler of grandiose Wagnerian projects – Wagner found the reformed virtuoso a sympathetic interlocutor.

Adorno thought that Wagner was a would-be revolutionary who secretly craved security, comfort and wealth, his self-identification as a revolutionary mere self-aggrandizement.²¹ One might also question the degree to which Wagner’s hobby of political philosophizing had much impact on his musical thinking. But we do need to remember that as an opera composer, right from the start in his early twenties with his first fledgling pieces, he was ‘revolutionary’ in one technical but critical point: he wrote his own libretti. For almost the first time in the history of opera, a composer did not depend on a professional poet to put this or that drama into shape, as words for operatic music. What did this mean in practical terms? Wagner, with his usual poetic licence, said that he often conceived actions and situations at the same time as musical ideas, and that the two were implicated in one another’s genesis. In practice, though, he was much more conventional, following the traditions of opera composers in other countries and other centuries. He always wrote the libretto first and got to the music once the words were finished, polished and sometimes even published. Of course the fact that he wrote his own libretti also meant that if he wanted a scene that dispensed with traditional numbers in favour of free dialogue, he had no need to cajole some painting-by-numbers professional into writing something out of the ordinary. Quite simply, there was no friction to overcome in rethinking the formal terms in which opera had always been written. This aspect became hugely important in the post-1850 operas. If there was going to be an opera composer who changed the fundamental ways in which operatic music communicated, it was almost bound to be someone who wrote his own words.

Here, with the question of the how and the how-to of a libretto, we come to the surprisingly practical origins of the earthquake Wagner was about to unleash. While working on Lohengrin, he was already looking ahead to the next libretto. He decided to use the story of Siegfried at the court of the Gibichungs, a classic tragedy with a famous source in Middle High German poetry, the Nibelungenlied, and in earlier Norse sagas. He wrote the libretto – calling it Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death) – in 1848, a year in which he also finished an essay dabbling in grand speculations about the connections between Norse myth, Friedrich Barbarossa (the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor) and, of all things, the Holy Grail. Then his revolutionary contretemps with the Dresden police intervened, the ‘Wanted Poster’ was issued and he fled into exile without even managing to hear the premiere of Lohengrin, which Liszt staged at the Weimar Court Theatre in 1850.

The libretto of Siegfrieds Tod, which went with Wagner to Switzerland, was in technical terms bizarre to a fault. First of all, Wagner decided to imitate medieval German poetic style by writing it in alliterative rather than rhyming poetry – that is, the verse lines (and often many words within) had matching initial consonants rather than rhyming vowel sounds at the line ends. This may not sound like much of an innovation, but the decision has serious consequences for the rhythmic and melodic design of any vocal inspiration. The stresses in alliterative poetry are unpredictable and constantly redistributed; there is no inevitable sing-song effect to the sung line. In other words, there is no way to predict, as all previous operatic libretti had allowed, that a four-bar phrase which happens to fit well for line 1 will be at all useable for line 2, where three bars or five may be needed. By his choice of this eccentric style of poetry, Wagner preordained an unprecedented degree of melodic discursiveness and rhythmic freedom in any forthcoming music. The second radical aspect of the libretto was that it extended Wagner’s nascent leanings towards dialogue and interchange. While there are still many grand opéra hallmarks in Siegfrieds Tod – notably a big trio at the end of Act 2, with the anti-Siegfried conspirators joining their voices in condemnation – these are surrounded by solo or conversational marathons. There is an immense, wandering monologue for Siegfried’s doomed beloved, Brünnhilde, just before she casts herself on his funeral pyre at the end of the opera; and Act 1 contains an extremely long, three-way conversation among denizens of the Gibichung court, in which they complain about their lassitude and speculate on the (not-yet-arrived) hero Siegfried. Unlike any operatic trio that had preceded it, this last libretto section has no simultaneous singing anywhere in sight, not even at the end.

These two formal points – the unconventional, alliterative prosody and the decision to write long discursive scenes with no formal verses for operatic numbers – were extraordinarily radical, so much so that they seem to have paralysed Wagner musically for almost five years. He began the music of Siegfrieds Tod in 1850, but broke off after getting part-way into Act 1, scene 2. One explanation is that his musical capacities had not yet caught up with the implications of his libretto, and that he was experienced enough to know not to go on. His own stated reason for laying down the pen was more elaborate, but does refer to the approaching earthquake; it is probably true in part, and also makes excellent legend-fodder. As Wagner saw it, the problem was not with prosody or structure, but with the fact that the opera’s first scene was a narrative: three Norns (Fates) explain to the audience the pre-history of what we are about to see. We need to know that a magic ring was forged and cursed; that Siegfried won the ring in mortal combat; and that the curse spells disaster for Siegfried, Brünnhilde and various Gods (who happen also to be Brünnhilde’s and Siegfried’s immediate relatives). What is more, we need to know how these Gods are related, and what their investment is in one another. So the Norns have to tell us. The problem, Wagner wrote, was in the corresponding musical telling. How can the music of the Norns refer to a past that doesn’t itself exist in musical form?

Wagner concluded that he must bring that past into being as music, by enacting the events the Norns will describe. So he drafted another libretto that concerned the events before Siegfrieds Tod (called Der junge Siegfried – Young Siegfried, 1851) and showed how his hero got the magic ring; and then yet another libretto about Brünnhilde, who befriended and tried to protect Siegfried’s parents from the wrath of the Gods (Die Walküre – The Valkyrie, also 1851); and finally a last libretto about Brünnhilde’s parents and how the magic ring was forged by a dwarf and cursed in the first place (Das Rheingold – The Rhine Gold, written 1852). And as a prelude to writing these three extra libretti that explain everything leading up to the death of Siegfried, he also felt he needed to work out his personal place in the history of opera and, in theory, how to write the music for these increasingly radical new libretti. And so, endlessly loquacious, he wrote his largest theoretical work, the dense treatise Oper und Drama, in 1850–51.

Perhaps because these four linked libretti delve into notions of racial purity, inherited power, the despoliation of nature by thieving, dark, half-people, and the natural superiority of German heroes, Wagner around the same time wrote On Judaism in Music, a disquisition on the inferiority of Jewish artists and the dangers inherent in their continued existence. It is a tract extreme even among anti-Semitic literature of the time. His diminishment was now well in hand, a circumstance that makes the knot represented by his work in the fallow years 1848–53 – the adjective is now revealed as purely ironic – even less easy to untwist.