“Tannhäuser … a disease from which I have recovered.”
—Liszt to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein
Early in 1842, Wagner knew he had failed to conquer Paris. In April of that year, he crossed the Rhein with Minna, relieved to return to Saxony and turn his back on the erstwhile dream of an eye-watering success at the Opéra. “This is something I must now leave behind me forever,” he admitted to his friend, the minor philologist Samuel Lehrs in 1843; “we opera composers cannot be European—so the question is—either German or French!”1 Of course, this was something of a Hobson’s choice for Wagner as he assumed his post as royal Kapellmeister at the court of Dresden that year. But the instability of the German states during the 1840s made Wagner’s statement about musical allegiance more complex than it might seem at first. After the serious harvest failures between 1845 and 1847 gave way to rising food costs and bread riots, and a downturn in the business cycle led to crippling bankruptcies and growing social unrest, it was hardly surprising that at the beginning of 1848 the widespread demand for liberal democratic reform emerged as outright bloody revolution.2
Fourteen months after the barricades were first erected in the Prussian capital, Wagner’s Dresden also erupted into violence; between May 3 and 9 of 1849 he aligned himself with the provisional government. Indeed, Ernest Newman presented persuasive evidence in 1937 that Wagner was a confidant among Dresden’s republican agitators. In the May uprising he apparently acquired hand grenades and hunting rifles, assumed a role as lookout atop the Dresden Kreuzkirche, and printed inflammatory placards demanding “Are you with us against the foreign troops?”3 Mere weeks after Wagner’s arrest warrant had been issued and he had fled the relative sanctity of Liszt’s Weimar, he disdainfully coupled the political status quo to the modern stage in Germany, lamenting that the one plays itself out on the other by materializing “the ruling spirit of our social life.”4 This assertion would become self-reflexive for Tannhäuser and Lohengrin when Wagner followed up his participation in the abortive political revolution in Dresden with a prescription for aesthetic revolution in opera, one that effectively relegated even Lohengrin to an aesthetically adolescent “snakeskin.”5
However unsubtle Wagner’s mapping of politics onto art may be, his ideas remained susceptible to dubious misreading, as the traditional rhetoric of physical presence and persuasion became reliant on more anonymous technologies of mass communication. The incremental, fractured dissemination of his works and essays ensured that his post-1848 revolutionary ambitions were all too easily read into the pre-1848 works. Thus, in the 1850s, Lohengrin (1848) and Tannhäuser (1845) were received proleptically as “music drama.” Wagner tried to clear up the confused chronology in both Opera and Drama (1851) and A Communication to My Friends (1851). In the former, he excused himself: “I must make mention of myself here, admittedly only in order to disclaim the suspicion that has grown in the reader, that I had, with this portrayal of the complete drama, also attempted to explain my own artistic works in the sense undertaken, that I accomplished in my operas the demands made by me, thus, that this intended Drama had already been accomplished.”6 And in A Communication, he lamented that “views on the nature of Art that I have proclaimed from a standpoint it took me years of evolution step-by-step to gain, [critics] seize on for the standard of their verdict, and point them back to those very compositions from which I started on the natural path of evolution that led me to this standpoint.”7 It seems that Wagner regarded the proleptical reception of his works as one reason for their lack of widespread acceptance by critics in the early 1850s, a view he protested vigorously.
The majority of German critics, however, continued to judge his most recent operas as exemplifications of the tenets laid down in his Zürich essays (1849-51), adding to the “misunderstandings” that Wagner privately dubbed “the depths of the most utter mindlessness.”8 The composer, pianist, and writer Joachim Raff explained the problem most clearly in The Wagner Question (1854), a dialectical commentary on Lohengrin’s position within Wagner’s aesthetics: “By chance, the public received the two books [Artwork of the Future, Opera and Drama] before hearing Lohengrin and Tannhäuser…. These operas were naturally appointed as ‘operas of the future’ and their music in particular ‘music of the future.’ The truth is, however, that the operas had appeared long before the essays and have little or nothing in common with them…. The press reviewing the operas found no time to look for their own position on the Wagner question; they drew their particular conclusions about the aforementioned operas from Wagner’s theories, conclusions that Wagner himself explains as his future artistic activity.”9
This situation resulted in crisp tensions between celebrations of Wagner’s artistic progress and charges of his failure to adhere to the stated theories. His public image vacillated between the charlatan and savior of German opera, and many writers—following their uncomfortable first encounters with what Slavoj Žižek terms the Wagnerian Sublime10—simply recoiled at the hubris, rebuking his aesthetic direction and calling for him to reform not opera but himself: “Are we to believe that Wagner entirely suppressed the illusion or made it unnoticeable; that he has transferred the stirring truth of actual drama completely to the higher realm of music? Absolutely not.”11 With a few articulate exceptions, Wagner’s aesthetic aspirations were roundly reviled in the German states as megalomaniacal.
Wagner recognized that being understood in a print-enabled discourse—whether on bloody revolution or cultural politics—was particularly difficult since the definitions of most things—especially “politics”—were at stake during the Nachmärz. He confessed to Frédéric Villot in 1860 that “when all is said and done [an artist’s theories] can only expect to be understood by one who already shares his artistic standpoint.”12 Much ink was spilled over Wagner’s aesthetic discourse during the 1850s since “understanding” in Wagner’s sense required agreement among politicized factions that often had little appetite to see eye to eye.
With pen and baton, Liszt sought to address the difficulties arising from what he perceived to be misunderstandings of Wagner’s operas and unjustified distortions of their aesthetic value. In this, he aspired to clarify what he felt had been obfuscated in the vortex of Wagner criticism following his escape to Paris, when he temporarily secured notoriety among Germany’s literati as a revolutionary with hand grenades in one hand and manuscript paper in the other.
Liszt’s Weimar performance ofTannhäuser on February 16, 1849, was the first since the Dresden premiere in 1845. If theaters had been uninterested in staging Wagner before the revolution, they were positively afraid of putting his name on the playbill for some time after it. Liszt’s decision to stage Tannhäuser in Weimar thus came to involve political as well as artistic risk.13 Accordingly, this opera would prove the occasion around which Liszt’s lopsided relationship with Wagner first began to solidify. Wagner is profuse in his gratitude to Liszt, who responded with an outstretched hand: “I thank you with all my heart for the thanks you proffer me. Once and for all, number me in the future among your most zealous and devoted admirers; far or near, count on me and dispose of me.” Wagner for his part responded in like fashion: “If the world belonged to us, I believe we should do something to give pleasure to the people living therein. I hope we two at least shall agree with each other… and thus be our alliance sealed!”14 As is well known, Wagner’s fiscal irresponsibility and Liszt’s generosity characterized the early stages of this “alliance”; and though it was a unique meeting of musical minds, the extent to which it could ever be said to have been a balanced, reciprocal partnership remains doubtful.
In May 1849, Wagner secretly audited a rehearsal of Tannhäuser in Weimar and expressed delight at the proposed piano transcription of the overture and “Abendstern” scene before fleeing Germany.15 While exiled in Paris some months later, Wagner read Liszt’s 1849 Tannhäuser essay in the popular daily Journal des débats with mixed feelings.16 His tactful response praised Liszt’s innately performative nature, and was no doubt intended to foster a powerful ally (it was also the first letter to Liszt in which Wagner used the familiar “du” address):
You wished to describe my opera to the people, and instead of that you have yourself produced a true work of art. Just as you conducted the opera, so have you written about it: new, entirely new, and from your inner self. When I put the article down, my first thoughts were these: This wonderful man can do or undertake nothing without producing his own self from his inner depth … everything in him tends to absolute, pure production, and yet he has never yet concentrated his whole willpower on the production of a great work. Is he … too little of an egoist? Is he too caring, and does he resemble Jesus on the Cross, Who helps everyone but Himself?17
If Wagner’s ostensive praise veiled a certain resentment at again being reduced to an insolvent black sheep in Paris, and now a criminal in Germany to boot, he was more explicit in grumbling later that the coincidental appearance in Paris of Liszt’s article and of himself “has given a distinct color to my position in Paris… as black as possible.”18 Others received the essay with more enthusiasm, however; the teenage Hans von Bülow regarded it as “written in a perfectly masterly, superb manner,” and particularly admired Liszt’s translation of Wagner’s German poetry into a French aesthetic.19
Liszt conceived the Tannhäuser monograph as promotional material for Wagner in Paris (both men had hoped to help secure a performance of Tannhäuser there). The essay thus began as a mere poetic description of the plot for the Journal des débats. When Liszt decided to produce a brochure containing both his Tannhäuser and Lohengrin essays in 1851, as well as a report on the Herder and Goethe festival in Weimar, he expanded his original 1849 article into a full personal reflection, a narrative analysis revealing his own experience of the work, though still for the purposes of Wagner propaganda. This was drafted between April and June 1851, and the larger brochure, titled Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard Wagner par Franz Liszt, was published (in French) later that same year by Brockhaus of Leipzig. A year later, this was translated into German by Ernst Weyden, and published by Franz Carl Eisen of Cologne as Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin und Tannhäuser. Von Franz Liszt. (Aus dem Französischen.) Mit Musik-Beilagen.,20
Unlike the post-performance article from 1849, aesthetic distance and a complex of influences affected this second stage of his writing about Tannhäuser. First, Theodor Uhlig’s recent article on the Tannhäuser overture asserted that Wagner had rejected his earlier artistic directions on several occasions, that the overture’s existence (though not its musical content) was his one and only concession to outmoded tradition, and that Wagner flatly disputed the possibility of expressing anything particular in “absolute” music.21 Second, Liszt was keenly aware of Eduard Hanslick’s review praising the opera but intentionally disregarding the overture in 1846 as “not satisfactory as [an] independent musical [composition].”22 Liszt appears to have avoided direct engagement with this critique by addressing what Hanslick did not—namely literary-poetic analysis, mythical background, and the overture as an independent musical composition. Third, Liszt had now read Art and Revolution and Artwork of the Future.23 This exposure to Wagner’s new ideas unsettled—if not entirely reoriented—Liszt’s understanding of Wagner’s pre-1849 aesthetics (he confessed to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein in May 1851 that Tannhäuser was now “a disease from which I have recovered”), though he also admitted to a certain lack of comprehension.24 Fourth, Liszt’s correspondence suggests that, as with Marie d’Agoult, he permitted his long-term mistress Sayn-Wittgenstein to help him draft portions of the expanded essay. The extent of her involvement is difficult to ascertain in the absence of a holograph. At precisely this time, Liszt was encouraging the princess’s literary ambitions, and she wrote to him of her intent to write about Tannhäuser, which Liszt appears to have ignored. Given the princess’s lack of musical education, her fondness for literary allusion, and the existence of corroborating evidence from Peter Cornelius, Kleinerz and Winkler deduced in their edition for the new Liszt Sämtliche Schriften that only a brief analysis of character depiction in part 4 of Liszt’s essay is likely to have been written by Sayn-Wittgenstein.25
Like the Lohengrin monograph on which it was modeled, Liszt’s extended 1851 version of the earlier Journal de débats essay on Tannhäuser pioneers a new mode of opera criticism, blending discussion of poetry, music, dramaturgy, plot, and character type. But whereas the Lohengrin essay is more extensive in this respect, and was written only after Liszt had absorbed the aesthetic lessons of Wagner’s Artwork of the Future, the first version of the Tannhäuser essay, as mentioned above, began as promotional material— a historically informed retelling of the plot in French. In its final version, then, the Tannhäuser essay actually merged two different stages in Liszt’s reception of Wagner’s opera.
Liszt’s Tannhäuser essay is written in four parts. The first renarrates Wagner’s plot within its historical background, drawing extensively on the libretto (essentially taken from the 1849 publication); the second (included here) is a descriptive analysis of the overture viewed as a closed, independent symphonic form; the third presents a linear description of Wagner’s drama in its musical setting; and the fourth section is an overall assessment of the score’s significance as the beginning of a new era of dramatic art.
Liszt’s poetic style and individualized descriptions signal the degree of his personal investment in the essay. Even in 1849, he confirmed what Wagner termed his “purely productive” act to the Grand Duke Carl Alexander, declaring: “This poetical analysis of Wagner’s [Tannhäuser] libretto was for me only an opportunity to express something that I feel very deeply.”26 But in view of Liszt’s aspiration toward a new genre of symphonic “poetry,” his later characterization of the overture as a “symphonic whole by itself… an independent composition … in spite of [Wagner’s] own theories,”27 and his interpretation of Wagner’s thematic motives as “so characteristic that they contain in themselves all the striking sense demanded by the musical thought … [requiring] no explanatory text”28 may have struck the exiled composer as particularly self-serving. Liszt carefully emphasizes the overture’s “classical form,” though lets slip his propagandistic agenda through hyperbole, stating that one could not ask for “more perfect logic in the exposition, development and solution of its premises.”29 Although poetic premises are surely different from their formal, topical, or procedural equivalents, Liszt’s interpretation of Wagner’s instrumental music, in express contradiction of his stated theories, marks the beginning of an ideological rift between them. This would widen during Liszt’s Weimar decade, when he solidified his commitment to a newly expressive symphonic genre and increasingly distanced himself from the Wagnerian “musical drama.”
A little over a year after Liszt’s essay was published as a German brochure by Eisen, the Boston-based American music critic John Sullivan Dwight translated parts of this German text for serialization in his own publication, Dwight’s Journal of Music, during November and December 1853.30 Only the first three sections of Liszt’s four-part essay appeared in the journal at this time. The fourth section, concerning Tannhäuser’s historical significance, was omitted because “the article has already reached a greater length than we anticipated.”31 We present here what Dwight called the “minute and glowing” analysis of the overture. His translation of a short section from the beginning of the essay’s third part was reprinted in the same journal a decade later, suggesting that Dwight felt Liszt’s narrative description was more appealing, and of more practical use, to readers than the more propagandistic historical assessment of Wagner.32
Foreign terms such as motive, tremolo, and thema are not in italics in Liszt’s French and Weyden’s German text, but I have retained italics from Dwight’s translation to remain as close as possible to his original expression. Nevertheless, I have modernized many of Dwight’s nineteenth-century spellings throughout this reprinted translation (syrens, Shakspear, coöperation, etc.) In addition, minor modifications have been made to punctuation.
FRANZ LISZT
Wagner’s Tannhäuser
II. The Overture
Translated by John Sullivan Dwight, Dwight’s Journal of Music, 1853
The overture to this extraordinary opera is in itself a no less wonderful production.33 It sums up the ideas of the opera in brief. The chant34 of the pilgrims and the song of the sirens are introduced, like two members, which find their equation in the finale. The religious motive appears at first quiet, deep, with slow pulsations, like the instinct of the finest, the sublimest35 of our feelings; but gradually it is overflooded by the insinuating modulations of the voices, full of enervating languor, full of soul-lulling, although feverish and excited pleasures: seductive mingling of pleasure and unrest! The voices of Tannhäuser and of Venus rise above this hissing, foaming yeast of waves, which swells continually higher. The voices of the sirens and bacchantes grow continually louder and more imperative. The enchantment36 reaches its climax; it leaves no chord within us silent, but sets every fibre of our being in vibration. The quivering, spasmodic tones now groan, now command in lawless alternation, until the resistless yearning for the infinite, the religious thema, gradually comes in again, subdues to itself all these sounds, melts them together into a sublime harmony and unfolds the wings of a triumphal hymn to their fullest breadth.
This great overture forms a symphonic whole by itself, so that we may consider it as an independent composition, separate from the opera which precedes it. The two leading thoughts, which are developed in it, ere they blend in their tremendous confluence, clearly express their entire character, the one with fury, the other with an irresistible influence, absorbing all into itself. These motives are so characteristic that they contain in themselves all the striking sense demanded by the musical thoughts, entrusted purely to the instrumentation. So vividly do they depict the emotions, which they express, that one needs no explanatory text to recognize their nature; not once is it necessary to know the words which are adapted to them afterwards.37 To maintain that these were necessary to the understanding of this symphony, would be to imitate those of whom Shakespeare says, they “paint the lily and adorn the rose,”38 etc., or at least to imitate certain Chinese writers, who, to make the purport of their style clear to their readers, see fit to write in the margin of their books: “Deep Thought” —“Metaphor”— “Allusion,” etc., whenever such occur in their writings. In Europe writers and composers may presume more on the understanding of their public, on the eloquence of their art and the clearness of their diction. It would be to torment oneself with scruples, like the learned scholars of the Celestial Empire, to be unwilling to separate the overture to “Tannhäuser” from its opera, out of the fear that it might not be understood or might not prove interesting. Its glowing coloring depicts the passions, which animate it, too intelligibly, to give any room for such precaution.
Rhythmical and harmonic figures, distributed amongst violas, shrill39 violins (divided over several desks) and wind instruments (pianissimo), accented by slight drum beats, and cut off into broken periods; groups of notes, ascending in swift spirals, losing and finding themselves in inexplicable windings, detaching themselves from an almost unbroken web of tremolo and trills frequently and strikingly modulated, enable us, by an entirely novel effect of languishing and amorous euphony, to recognize the magic arts of the sirens. The rich repertory of the existing music of this kind offers, as it seems to us, no such bold image, no such striking reflex, no such exciting stimulus and entrainement of the senses, of their brain-whirling intoxication, their prismatic illusions. Now and then tones glide in, which pass before the ear, as certain phantoms glimmer before the eye … seductive, penetrating, unnerving—faithless! Under their artificial, silky softness one perceives despotic intonations, feels the quivering of rage. Here and there ring out sharp, cutting tones of the violins,40 like phosphorescent sparks. The entrance of the drums makes us tremble, like the far off echo of an insane orgy. Chords occur of a deafening intoxication, which remind us that the Messalinas41 found their festivities not unadorned with horrors; that they did not deny themselves the satisfaction of seeing the bloodiest spectacles combined with amorous dallyings; that they knew how to unite barbarous pleasures with the dangerous emotions that are inspired by beauty. The presence of the Maenads and their tumultuous dances in the Venus-grotto soon confirm this impression; this distinguishes this most original development of the very acme of voluptuousness above all the musical compositions which have so frequently attempted to describe the same thing. Once borne away by these wildly exciting, ravishing effects, one oversteps the sphere of ordinary temptations. Wagner has by no means contented himself with the free and easy motives, used by most of those whose inspiration answers to the taste and tendencies expressed in the scenes of a Rubens, or a Teniers, when they wanted to portray the fascination and tyrannical seductions of the mother and the queen of love. His mental ear knew how to detect the indescribable subtlety of those graceful tones, which resound at the court of Cytherea, but to which only a small number consecrated by the Graces ever penetrate, ushered in by a smiling crew who offer them the cup of joy, in which a strange, mysterious, fateful, but by no means a coarse and brutal intoxication is to be found. A German genius needed something of a Shakespeare’s universal intuition, to become so penetrated as it were with the blood of antiquity, and inspired with an effervescence so entirely foreign to the gloomy fermentations of the North.
Sensual passion is here represented with the tumultuous delights of a refined voluptuousness, which dull, cold, heavy natures cannot at all conceive of, but which energetic natures, that demand more than every day impressions, dream of and pursue exclusively: lofty and at the same time tender organizations, who give their superabundance of vitality a ready prey to every accident, and who let their stormy passions overflow without restraint, so long as they can find a channel broad and deep enough to contain their roaring, raging, and ungovernable waves. One must marvel how, in Wagner’s production, the power of treatment is never destructive of tenderness. It was not easy for him to secure both these characters.42
In the midst of this harmony, which overflowing, sparkling, looms forth like a more and more dazzling mirage, we are suddenly awakened by a dramatic interest, when the feeling, vague as it may be, becomes individualized in two melodic phrases, one of which sounds to us like a cry of triumph and delight, mingled with a challenging expression, while the other lulls us with seductive invitation.
To scale majestically these dazzling precipices of voluptuousness and pleasure, the composer had to raise himself to an unwonted pitch of exaltation. The religious thema, once already drowned by this multitudinous hum of tones, that brushed past the ear with glowing breath, tingling at the fingers’ ends, bewildering the brain, exciting the nerves, like fabled promises and mystical enchantments;—the religious thema, emerging again from this wild delirium, from this voluptuous languor, ran great risk of seeming cold, dreary, dry and barren, a mere soulless denial of contentment…. But it is by no means so. This holy motive rises before us not at all like a stern master, silencing the shameless whispering that rustles through those caves of hidden joys. In their presence it stands not gloomy and apart. It flows clearly and softly, creeping over all the strings, that vibrated with such sweet allurements; it holds them down, one by one, although they struggle against it with a bitter desperation. But ever clear and tranquil, in spite of this resistance, it extends its empire, transforming and assimilating all the friendly elements. The masses of glowing tones crumble into fragments, which form more and more painful discords, till they grow positively repulsive, like essences just turning into staleness; and joyfully we see it rising into a grand spiritual song, and overflooding with its radiance all the tempting illusions that preceded, as it spreads along, like liquid sunshine, brighter and brighter, till it swells into a mighty stream, that bears our whole soul and being on with it to an ocean of glory!43
If we express ourselves at great length about this new opera of Wagner, it is because we cherish the conviction that this work carries in itself a principle of vitality and of glory, which will one day be universally recognized. The innovations which it contains, are drawn from the true powers of Art, and will justify themselves as acquisitions of genius. Accordingly, in speaking of the overture, we may remark that one could not desire of a symphonic poem that it should be written more consistently with the rules of classical form, or that it should have a more perfect logic in the exposition, development and solution44 of its premises. Its arrangement is just as precise,45 at the same time that it is richer, than that of the best models in this kind.
The first sixteen bars lay the first half of the religious thema in E major (see Example 1) in the lowest register of the clarinets, horns and bassoons, making a cadence on the dominant. The second part is wonderfully modulated through the violoncello, to which the violins add themselves in the ninth measure (see Example 2). The whole thema is then repeated fortissimo by the brass instruments in the same key, to a much more lively rhythm in eighth-triplets, continually accompanied by a descending diatonic figure in sixteenth-triplets. During the sixteen following bars the second half of the thema is modulated by the wind instruments to the same rhythm of triplets,46 mezzo forte, diminuendo and piano; but the figure in sixteenth-triplets, repeating itself only in every second measure, produces a decrease of the rhythm, corresponding to the decrease of power and fullness. The repetition of the whole, merely moderated in the first sixteen bars,47 forms the end of this introduction upon an inversion of the diminished seventh chord.
Example 1.
Example 2.
The Allegro [Example 3] begins with an indication of the alluring and voluptuous motive (a), immediately followed by a member of a rhythmical phrase (b), which serves it for an appendix, then develops itself completely in the overture, and only disappears in the religious thema again resumed as the finale. The motive, indicated at first, fully develops itself only some thirty bars later [Example 4], with the figures which we have already mentioned, when we spoke of the character which Wagner has given to the temptation scene of the sirens.
Example 3.
Example 4.
It lasts through more than twenty bars and is crowned by an outburst of the little appendix phrase (b) gradually swelling up through three ascending chords,48 whose bacchic dissonance stuns both ear and mind.49 The foregoing figures are again resumed pianissimo until the appearance of a lovely melody50 in G major (afterwards in the opera itself assigned to Venus): which is first given to the clarinet, is continued by one violin in the register of the highest harmonic tones, carried still farther through a fantastic arabesque of the voluptuous motive (traced out by the violas and thrown into half shadow, as it were, by a tremolo of the violins), and then dies away in F sharp. It gives place to the transition phrase, which had introduced the melody in B, a plaintive scream, which, this time on the ground tone of F
, ends, through a chromatic progression, with the return of the same melody upon the tonic.
Example 5.
The Coda recalls the leading features of the commencement of the Allegro, and swells to a furious climax by a chromatic descent upon the ground-tone of B, which brings out the last repetition of the appendix phrase (b). At this moment, on the same dissonant chord which we have had before on the first entrance of the livelier tempo in 4/4 measure (E, G, A
, C
; but this time on the ground-tone of B), returns the well-known51 figure in sixteenths, with the religious theme again, which now with accelerating speed mounts through various inversions of this chord, without pause or intermission, and again descends decrescendo through a chromatic scale, making a cadence on the tone of E. Thereupon the religious theme appears again in all its completeness through an accompanying figure52 (two 4/4 measures against one 3/4), and is borne along upon the tone-wave of this peculiarly impassioned figure, which rushes onward like a stream of fire.53 After sixty measures of this rhythm the theme begins again anew, anew increased (three54 4/4 measures against one 3/4), with all the brass and other wind instruments setting in fortissimo. Thus the conclusion stands in perfect symmetrical relation with the introduction. This conclusion moreover centuples the effect of the introduction and reaches that sublime announcement of a thought and of the power of an art, by which masterpieces secure the admiration of centuries, by the rising of the theme in a form more gigantic than we have any example of in any analogous work, as well as by the altogether unusual hastening of the rhythm in the accompaniment.
Although we have already remarked that the composer of “Tannhäuser” has lent to the passions represented under the name of Venus a character in correspondence with that name so dear to the fair Grecian land, yet we repeat again that there is absolutely no necessity of knowing the opera, the adventures of the Ritter Tannhäuser and the myth of Dame Venus, so singularly transplanted into the Middle Ages, in order to apprehend the musical drama in this overture. It is not merely a sort of gigantic prelude, to prepare the mind55 for the emotions of the play that is to follow; not a necessary introduction, a short and solemn prologue, limited to the office of enchaining the minds of the audience in the region of feelings, which are designed to occupy it. It is unlike those orchestral pieces, which, without containing a single motive of the opera, which they announce, or possibly repeating some few of them, always form a necessary complement to the whole, by transporting the feelings of the spectator into the scene and atmosphere of the play….56 This overture is a poem upon the same subject with its opera, and57 quite as comprehensive as the opera. Out of the same thoughts Wagner has made two different works; and since each is intelligible, complete, and independent of the other, they maybe taken separately without sacrificing any of the meaning of either. They are bound together by identity of feeling and expression, but for the very reason of this identity they do not need to be mutually explained. If we must quote fact and experience in confirmation of our assertion, we will only say, that we have had this overture brought out, and that it was received with the most enthusiastic admiration, without one of the musicians who performed, or of the public who applauded, having had the slightest knowledge either of the subject or the text58 of the opera. We cannot fear, therefore, that so much time will have to pass, as was necessary until Mozart’s Quartets were no longer torn up by the musicians as unperformable, or until Beethoven’s masterpieces were no longer treated as grotesque and absurd innovations, before this overture will belong to the repertoire of standard pieces, which will be long and repeatedly brought out by the great musical establishments.
We find a confirmation of our opinion that Wagner, in spite of his own theories, felt more impelled to create a symphonic work, than anxious to put a prologue to his drama, in his violation of the rules of acoustical perspective (if we may be pardoned the expression) by such an extended development of the motive, which is to be immediately resumed as the curtain rolls up. The laws of climax, so indispensable to scenic effects, would be utterly violated, (for what forzando59 is there left to be added to the crescendo already reached by the song of the sirens long before the play begins?) if the spectacle, the dance and the human voice did not conceal the difficulty; did not by their magic, their cooperation and their art lend a new stimulus to curiosity; did not enhance the stormy impetuosity of the orchestra; did not rescue the public from that need of repose—which those who are most excited feel the most and revive again the well nigh exhausted interest seeing that the last word of the tragedy, that is about to be represented, has already been so powerfully uttered.
1. Wagner to Samuel Lehrs, 7 April 1843, Dresden, in Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York and London, 1988), 107-8.
2. For more information on the social and economic unrest as well as the political conditions that prepared the ground for widespread revolution in 1848, see David Blackbourn’s detailed history of the topic, The Long Nineteenth Century (New York, 1998), 138-74.
3. Newman pursued a “common sense” approach rather than a “judicial enquiry” into the available details to weigh the evidence of Wagner’s active involvement in the Dresden uprisings of May 1849. He summarizes that “far from his being a mere curious spectator of events, [Wagner] was as active a participator in [the Dresden uprisings] as most.” See Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner: 1848-1860 (London, 1937), 2:24-102, here 87.
4. Richard Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in The Artwork of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London, 1895; repr. 1993), 1:43.
5. Wagner to Adolf Stahr, 31 May 1851, in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe (henceforth SB) (Leipzig, 1967-2000; Wiesbaden, 1999-), 4:57-58.
6. In Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London, 1893; repr. 1995), 2:211.
7. A Communication to My Friends, in Ellis, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1:284.
8. “in der absoluten gedankenlosigkeit,” Wagner to Theodor Uhlig, 27 July 1850, Zürich, in SB, 3:363.
9. Raff, Die Wagnerfrage (Braunschweig, 1854), 5-6 (my translation).
10. Slavoj Žižek, “The Politics of Redemption, or, Why Richard Wagner Is Worth Saving,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London and New York, 2006), 231.
11. Quoted in August Hitzschold, “Zur Physiologie des musicalischen Dramas,” Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 23 (3 December 1853): 177 (my translation).
12. Quoted in Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, 1991), 70.
13. His stated motivation was to “establish firm roots for these masterpieces in German soil,” in La Mara, ed., Franz Liszt’s Briefe, (Leipzig, 1893), 3:136.
14. Liszt’s words from his letter of 26 February 1849; Wagner’s from 1 March 1849. See Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, trans. Francis Hueffer (New York, 1897; repr. 2005), 18-21.
15. Liszt first told Wagner of his plan for the two transcriptions on 26 February 1849, to which Wagner responded on 1 March: “I feel highly flattered by your proposal.” See Hueffer, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, 21. The warrant for Wagner’s arrest (Steckbrief) was printed in the Dresden Anzeiger on 19 May 1849, one day before the scheduled performance of Tannhäuser.
16. The article “Le Tannhaeuser” appeared in the feuilleton section of the Journal des Débats on 18 May 1849, which had a sizable circulation of 10,600 in 1849. The same article appeared again two days later in La Musique. Gazette de la France Musicale. This double publication is unusual and may have been an attempt to hold Meyerbeer’s continued ascendency in check; that is, to counter the enormous success ofLe prophète, which had premiered in Paris on 16 April of that year. The Tannhäuser essay subsequently appeared with musical examples in Brockhaus’s pamphlet Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard Wagner par Franz Liszt (1851) and was translated into German by Ernst Weyden (Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin und Tannhäuser, 1852). For full details, see Franz Liszt, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Rainer Kleinertz and Gerhard Winkler (Wiesbaden, 1989), 4:211-39 (henceforth SS).
17. Wagner to Liszt, 5 June 1849, Paris, in SB, 3:72.
18. Ibid., 3:73.
19. “Liszt reproduces the opera’s content almost with Wagner’s words, transferring German poetry to French in a way that one would hardly have thought possible.” Billow to his mother, 21 June 1849, Leipzig, in Hans von Bülow, Briefe und Schriften, ed. Marie von Bülow (Leipzig, 1896, 1908), 1:179 (my translation).
20. Full details of the genesis, revisions, and translations of these two essays are given in the excellent commentary by Gerhard Winkler and Rainer Kleinertz to volume 4 of Liszt’s complete writings. See Liszt, SS, 4:211-33. For details of the editions and translations published during the nineteenth century, see SS, 4:234-39.
21. Theodor Uhlig, “Die Overtüre zu Wagner’s Tannhäuser,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 34 (11/18 April 1851): 153-56, 165-68, here 154. Wagner’s own brief program to the overture for performance in Zurich posited specific objects and images as the elements of the music’s expression. This appeared in the same journal in 1853, along with an extract from his instructions on the performance of the opera. See Wagner, “Über Inhalt und Vortrag der Ouvertüre zu Wagner’s Tannhäuser,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 3 (14 January 1853): 23-25.
22. Eduard Hanslick, “Richard Wagner, und seine neueste oper Tannhaeuser” in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Dietmar Strauss (Vienna, 1993), 1/1:65. English translation from Hanslick’s Music Criticism, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants (New York, 1988), 37. Liszt almost certainly read Hanslick’s review, for the twenty-two-year-old law student had borrowed Liszt’s personal score to write it.
23. “I am looking forward to your book [Oper und Drama]. Perhaps I may try on this occasion to comprehend your ideas a little better, which in your book Kunst und Revolution I could not manage very well.” Liszt to Wagner, 1 March 1851, in Correspondence, 85.
24. “le Tannhäuser étant pour moi une malade dont je suis guéri.” Liszt to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, 8 May 1851, in Franz Liszt’s Briefe 4:112.
25. Full details of correspondence and manuscript evidence relating to the thorny question of Liszt’s authorship are discussed by Kleinertz and Winkler in Liszt, SS, 4:225-56.
26. Liszt to Grand Duke Carl Alexander, 23 May 1849, Weimar, in Franz Liszt Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Adrian Williams (Oxford, 1998), 272.
27. Franz Liszt, “Wagner’s Tannhäuser,” trans. John Sullivan Dwight, Dwight’s Journal of Music 4 (26 November, 3 December 1853): 27, 66.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Ibid., 15.
30. Ibid., 49-50, 57-58, 65-66, 73-75, 81-82.
31. The fourth section concerning Tannhäuser’s historical significance was omitted because “the article has already reached a greater length than we anticipated.” See Dwight’s Journal of Music 4 (17 December 1853): 82.
32. See Dwight’s Journal of Music 24 (12 November 1864): 339.
33. Liszt’s term oeuvre is more typically translated as “work.”
34. Dwight’s synonym for song, chant, is misleading in a modern context. Liszt’s term chant and Weyden’s Gesang connote both song and singing, and both terms are repeated in their respective texts rather than being replaced by a synonym. See SS, 4:108-9.
35. Dwight’s invocation of the sublime is perhaps overly casual, for Liszt’s French reads grand and Weyden’s German höchsten.
36. Dwight’s term “enchantment” does not convey the sense of motion implied by Liszt’s l’agitation or Weyden’s Bewegung.
37. “Not once” slightly exaggerates Liszt’s text, which simply says “il est inutile de connaître les paroles,” and which Weyden translated as “es ist überflüssig, die Worte zu kennen.” SS, 4:108-9.
38. See Shakespeare, King John, 4.2.12-13: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,/To throw a perfume on the violet.”
39. Liszt refers neutrally to the higher register, “les violins à l’aigu,” and Weyden to “Violinen in hoher Lage” so the modern connotation of a piercing high sound in Dwight’s translation shrill is misleading.
40. Liszt refers specifically to “mordantes de violin.” SS, 4:110.
41. Liszt refers specifically to “les Cléopâtras” (and Weyden to “eine Kleopatra”). Valeria Messalina and Statilia Messalina were both Roman empresses who became the third wives of Emperors Claudius and Nero, respectively.
42. Dwight did not include Liszt’s continuation: “And only their coming together, however, could bring transports of violent and languorous desire—the secret of which each man wishes to discover—to desire without tenderness [i.e. lust]. / And all this is in the middle of this harmony which numbs you by the quantity of its fine flowing sounds, the fact that it is sustained, incomprehensibly intoxicating and impassioned, all-enveloping like lakes of desire.” SS, 4:110 (my translation).
43. Dwight omits twenty-nine lines of Liszt’s text, in which he expounds on the public’s inability to judge new works of art that are not easily classified, even though such works may offer more depth to an understanding of art than superficial norms. Liszt also explains that a thorough knowledge of past and present musical forms is a prerequisite for an understanding of new works, for a lively imagination can easily distort (dénaturer/entstellen) unfamiliar music, and the veracity of views resulting from this distortion becomes dependent on mere chance. See SS, 4:112-15.
44. Liszt’s term dénouement connotes more the theatrical outcome of a symphonic process than a “solution” to an equation, though Weyden’s translation was Lösung, which served as Dwight’s original. Dénouement is typically translated in modern German as Auflösung (resolution) or Entwirrung (disentanglement), though neither would ordinarily be used to describe symphonic form. In this instance, resolution or simply the anglicized French original are perhaps the most appropriate English translations for Liszt’s dénouement.
45. Dwight omits Liszt’s phrase “just as clear” (aussi claire / ebenso klar). See SS, 4:114-15.
46. This should read: “During the following sixteen measures the woodwinds allow the second half of the theme to die away with the same triplet rhythm, mezzoforte, diminuendo, and piano.” See SS, 4:116.
47. Dwight mistakenly corrects Liszt’s text and appears to assume incorrectly that Wagner repeated the full opening sixteenth measures of the overture at the end of the maestoso section. Liszt writes correctly that Wagner repeated only eleven measures. SS, 4:116.
48. Dwight omits the musical illustration printed in Liszt’s original pamphlet (overture mm. 113-22), meaning that Liszt’s sixth and final illustration is given by Dwight as his fifth.
49. Dwight’s translation “mind” is misleading. Liszt’s wordsens and Weyden’s Sinne connote more a physical sense than disembodied or ideal mental perception, more typically referred to as l’esprit or Geist.
50. Liszt uses a French term from Aristides Quintilianus, mélopée (Weyden: Melopöie), as opposed to mélodie.
51. Dwight’s adjective “well-known” is not quite the same as Liszt’s déjà entendue.
52. Liszt does not mention the accompaniment here, only the augmentation.
53. Dwight omits Liszt’s incessamment or Weyden’s ohne Unterlaß.
54. Italics not used in Liszt’s text.
55. Liszt’s term l’âme means soul rather than mind.
56. Dwight omits five lines, in which Liszt further substantiates his point about transporting the listener’s mind into the musico-dramatic world of the opera to come.
57. Liszt uses the subordinating conjunction mais (Weyden: aber) rather than Dwight’s and, illustrating that Liszt felt there was an implicit contradiction of orthodoxy in the idea that an overture can be quite as complete and essentially aesthetically equal to the opera itself.
58. Dwight’s text should not be interpreted here only as the libretto, for Liszt refers specifically to the partition de l’opéra (in Weyden: Partitur der Oper).
59. Rinforzando in Liszt’s text.