2 Wagner and beyond

John Deathridge

Wagner was not the only one to change the course of opera’s history in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. And indeed only his most fanatic admirers have ever thought otherwise. It is hard nonetheless not to think of him as someone who left an indelible stamp on twentieth-century opera. Every figure of importance is said to have reacted to him positively or negatively, and rarely indifferently. The possibility exists that this is just another part of the Wagnerian myth that has spread itself like a vulture over Western music since the end of high romanticism, in spite of formidable opposition. The great conductor Hans von Bülow insisted with his usual caustic wit that Richard Strauss should be called Richard III in the dynasty of German music as a Richard II after Wagner was inconceivable (Kennedy 1995 , 9). W.H. Auden ventured to suggest that Wagner had no real successors at all, calling him ‘a giant without issue’ (cited in V. Stravinsky and Craft 1978 , 400). Not everyone needed to take an interest in him after all, while some of those who did paid him the briefest of respects and quickly went their own way. Igor Stravinsky tells a nice story of how he was persuaded by Diaghilev to go with him at short notice to Bayreuth in 1912 to see Parsifal , even though it meant interrupting work on Le Sacre du printemps (Stravinsky 1936 , 67–8). With dismay he noted the mausoleum-like interior of the festival theatre, deplored the cult-like performance, lambasted the Wagner faithful for putting up with it – and simply fled. He did admire ‘the web-like blending of the orchestra from under the stage’, which meant that Parsifal might have been a headache, but at least ‘a headache with aspirin’ (Stravinsky and Craft 1966 , 189).

But the driest of statistics can still hint at the scale of Wagner’s presence in the twentieth century, including some of its contradictions. The well-known distaste for him among the modernists of the Weimar Republic shrinks not a little in significance when set against the cold facts of operatic life at the time. Performances of Wagner’s operas in German-speaking theatres in 1926–7 amounted to 13.9 percent of the total, easily beating Verdi into second place at 11.3 percent, Puccini into third at 7.8 percent and Mozart into fourth at 6.6 percent. In contrast, the number of performances of all new operas amounted to a mere 4.5 percent (Köhler 1968 ). In the 1920s and 1930s, Wagner was excoriated by progressive thinkers and linked musically by scurrilously minded theatre composers to perilous subjects. When Paul Hindemith cited King Marke’s music from Tristan und Isolde in the castration scene in his one-act opera Das Nusch-Nuschi (1921) his morally hidebound audience (predictably) prompted a scandal. And among other memorable Wagner-deflating moments is the line ‘cash makes you randy’ in Bertolt Brecht’s and Hanns Eisler’s Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (composed 1934–6), sung by a bawdy procuress to the opening of Tristan with obvious relish. Avant-garde antics like these, however, only served to enhance the popularity of Wagner’s works, which continued to dominate the operatic stage with ease.

Except for the unwary, the precise nature of Wagner’s influence will probably always be elusive. Part of the problem is Wagner himself, or rather the way circumstances led him to present his work to the world. The simple fact is that the daring project about opera and drama he launched in literary form in Swiss exile soon after the Dresden uprising of 1849 unleashed a war of words on an international level which, as the reaction of the influential French critic François-Joseph Fétis shows, set the tone of the debate about his fight for the soul of opera before a note of the major works on which his reputation now rests had been composed, let alone heard. (Fétis attempted to disavow Wagner’s writings on the future of opera and drama in a seven-instalment philippic in the Paris periodical press in 1852, followed by another three polemical articles a year later, despite the fact that he still knew practically nothing of Wagner’s music except the overture to Tannhäuser : see K. Ellis 1999 .) Indeed, by the end of the 1850s the battle and its terms of engagement – ‘Total Work of Art’ ( Gesamtkunstwerk ), ‘Music of the Future’ (Zukunftsmusik ), ‘Unending Melody’ (unendliche Melodie ) are just a few of the slogans Wagner bandied about – were already notorious among cognoscenti and to some extent the public at large, even though there had been virtually no exposure to the music to which they actually related. In its edition of 20 November 1858, the satirical London weekly Punch – to cite just one example – referred disparagingly to Wagner and ‘other crotchet-mongers of the Music of the Future ’. How that squared with the best-known of Wagner’s pieces in London at the time, the Tannhäuser Overture and the Wedding March from Lohengrin , both of which were extremely popular precisely because they looked back to Mendelssohn rather than to a brave new operatic world in the future, is anyone’s guess.

If the controversy about Wagner began to rage in Europe while Der Ring des Nibelungen (composed 1848–74) and Tristan und Isolde (composed 1856–9) were still incomplete and unperformed, it is hardly surprising that similar splits between theory and practice in the debate about his influence exist to this day. Certainly it was unhelpful that theory and practice initially appeared largely in reverse order. When Wagner’s ideas about opera were discussed with such harsh polemics in the early 1850s, the chances were strong even then that certain slogans would stick no matter what the reality of the works to which they related turned out to be. These same slogans, plus a few ingrained habits arising from them such as the Great Leitmotiv Hunt or the chase for the proverbial Gesamtkunstwerk in which all the arts are supposed to find themselves miraculously on an equal footing, inevitably spilt over with disconcerting regularity into accounts of operas by other composers where they were used – and often still are – like Rorschach tests to diagnose ‘Wagnerian’ tendencies.

In fact not a single stage work by Wagner uses so-called leitmotives in the same way as the next. Quite apart from the obvious point that composers after him often used recurring motifs in a manner derived from other, usually non-German, sources, or from the relatively primitive use of motifs in Wagner’s early operas while also alluding (confusingly for some historians) to his later music dramas in terms of harmony and melody (see, for example, Huebner 1993 ), it seems pointless to take the existence of motifs as a hard-and-fast rule for detecting his influence without first defining more closely the different ways he used such a technique himself .

Nor is all the talk about a supposed synthesis of the arts in most cases much more than shallow high-mindedness. The claim that Wagner wanted to put his music on the same level as the other arts is to confuse an argument about particularism (he took the fairly standard left-Hegelian line that the separation of the arts reflected the deleterious fragmentation of modern industrial society and the resulting alienation of the individual) with a bland notion of equality. Admittedly, misunderstanding of the issue in Wagner’s so-called Zürich writings (1849–51) has arisen in part because of his love affair at the time with left-Hegelian dialectics, which to the uninitiated can appear mainly inscrutable. At the root of the confusion is his quasi-Hegelian argument for music involving both its subservience to the other arts and, precisely because of that subservience, its ultimate redemptive power. Thus we read in the essay ‘The Art-Work of the Future’ of ‘the power [of music] to deny itself in order to hold out its redeeming hand to its sister arts’ and in ‘Judaism in Music’ (which despite its revolting racism is in Wagner’s terms actually a seminal essay about music) that ‘music can articulate the most sublime of truths through renewed interaction with the other arts.’ (See R. Wagner 1911/1914 , volume 3, 96–7, and volume 5, 74. For a different interpretation, which to a large extent reflects the standard view in Wagner scholarship, see Nattiez 1993 , 128–38.) In other words, well before 1854 when he first read Schopenhauer, who famously placed music at the centre of his philosophical ideas, Wagner was already making it clear that music is the crown-jewel of the arts – not the classical music of old, to be sure, but a different kind of music which needed the other arts more than it had ever needed them before. It must interact with them, derive its power from them, let them act as catalysts in allowing it to grow up, to come of age.

Despite all the impressive talk of Wagnérisme – fundamentally a literary concept – or ‘the birth of film out of the spirit of [Wagner’s] music’ (Adorno 1981 , 107), there is no getting away from music as the fons et origo of the entire Wagnerian project. Given the huge cultural responsibility Wagner wanted music to bear, this by no means excludes politics, and it is true even when the emphasis is placed on words, despite serious misapprehensions about this issue in particular. There is some truth to the idea that the strange alliterative language Wagner first used in the opening work in the Ring cycle, Das Rheingold , which has the effect of everyday speech rather than verse, and the first successful setting of a libretto in actual prose, the tavern scene in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (written 1868–9; revised 1871–2), both anticipate a later fashion for the operatic ‘bleeding slice of life’, as Tonio expresses it in the Prologue of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892). And indeed realistic operas with prose libretti like Charpentier’s Louise (1900) became immensely popular in Europe around the turn of the century. But Das Rheingold is far from being ‘the musical equivalent of prose drama’ accounting for the ‘inspirational limitedness’ of its music (Magee 2000 , 130), or an instance where ‘word and tone, each contributing to its share of the synthesis, are blended inseparably into a single unit’ (Stein 1960 , 85). If a work so obviously dominated by rich musical invention can be misjudged this badly (Wagner was so proud of it he sent a copy to Brahms in 1875 with a note pointing out its prodigious number of themes and the ingenious ways he had managed to vary and develop them: see Kloss 1909 , 570), it is hardly a surprise that the fabled Gesamtkunstwerk , still rising to the surface of the Wagner literature and its vast oceans, has yielded scant insight into his historical role .

Wagner’s Ten Commandments

If we abandon the Great Leitmotiv Hunt and the chase for the Gesamtkunstwerk , what do we have left? Carl Dahlhaus has already said in an important essay on Wagner’s influence that no historian in their right mind would ever claim that the composer’s theory contains the only valid criteria with which to judge his successors (Müller and Wapnewski 1992 , 547). Nor, it should be added, are the claims set out in Wagner’s prose works the only means of measuring his own achievements, except perhaps for the most dogmatic of his admirers (and enemies). Nonetheless it makes sense to look at the bold and intimidating attack he launched against ‘opera’ and his insistence on the rise of what he liked to call ‘drama’ over its ashes, if only to understand the enormous impact his work made on other composers, and why even the strongest of them seem to have reacted with surprising reticence, much as an attentive schoolchild might to a stern and charismatic teacher in the presence of whom even the mere thought of a spirited riposte can feel less than wise. Edward Lockspeiser once remarked that the almost brutal finality of Wagner’s idea of drama was in itself an aggressive obstacle for anyone brave enough to want to contribute meaningfully to the operatic stage after his death. And Lockspeiser rightly compared the historical stop-sign that his work seemed to present with Claude Debussy’s reluctance to complete certain of his most cherished projects for the stage which he expressed in a letter to Pierre Louÿs in 1895, and which remained with him for the rest of his life (Lockspeiser 1978 , volume 2, 215). The dream-like incompleteness of Debussy’s work does indeed make a striking comparison with Wagner’s goal-directed obsessiveness – ‘Bayreuth or bust’, as Stravinsky once succinctly put it ( Stravinsky and Craft 1966 , 139).

Moreover, it is easy now to underestimate Wagner’s powerful presence on the musical scene in Europe during the final decade of his life, let alone that of his second wife Cosima, who after his death dominated his heirs and other keepers of the Bayreuthian flame sometimes with brutal language reminiscent of a military campaign. In a letter to Strauss dated 7 January 1890, for example, she speaks of ‘purging’ the Rhineland and the area around the River Main and ‘occupying’ it with her favourite Bayreuth luminaries who with her formidable influence held, or were about to hold, important theatrical posts in that part of Germany (C. Wagner 1980 , 204). Indeed, apart from Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893) – an exception that proves the rule – the impressive number of operas listed near the start of Dahlhaus’s essay that were written with obvious allegiances to Wagner – Ernest Reyer’s Sigurd (1884), Edouard Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys (1888), Strauss’s Guntram (1894), Hans Pfitzner’s Der arme Heinrich (1895), Vincent d’Indy’s L’Etranger (1903), August Bungert’s Homerische Welt (1896–1903), and to which many more can be added, including Felix Weingartner’s Genesius (1892) – owe their place in the admittedly capacious graveyard of past operatic disasters not only to inferior talent, but also to a puritanical party-line emanating from Bayreuth that simply inhibited the progressively minded operatic composers of the day. Certainly it may not be a coincidence that strong works with clear links to Wagner such as Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Strauss’s Salome (1905) only really began to emerge in the first decade of the twentieth century when the influence of the Bayreuthians was already in sharp decline and copyright restrictions imposed on Wagner’s works for 30 years after his death were rapidly nearing their end .

Still, Wagner was always more than happy to explain his mission to anyone willing to listen. And against expectations he usually did so with exceptional clarity and succinctness. On 17 January 1873 in Berlin he read the libretto of Götterdämmerung , the fourth part of his Ring cycle, to an invited audience and prefaced the reading with an exposition of his entire programme for the future of ‘drama’ (R. Wagner 1911/1914 , volume 9, 308–10; for an idiosyncratic English translation, see W.A. Ellis 1892–9 , volume 5, 305–6). It reads today like a manifesto – one of the clearest and shortest he ever wrote – and like all good manifestos it is pithy and shrewdly polemical. It needs to be emphasized perhaps that Wagner, who on this occasion was in distinguished company including Prince George of Prussia and the Crown Prince of Württemberg, almost certainly did not intend to unfurl his project to his exalted listeners like holy commandments thundering down from Mount Sinai. But one wonders nevertheless whether the ten points he made in his talk came across like that to some. A composer who believes in true drama, he said in so many words, shall:

1. write no more operas;
2. attend to the dramatic dialogue, the focus of the music;
3. not covet the lyrical in opera;
4. regard German music as victorious over all its rivals;
5. marry music and drama in a way that appeals not to abstract reflection, but to feeling;
6. allow music to reveal the most intimate motifs of the drama in all their ramifications;
7. regard the modern orchestra as the greatest achievement of the modern age;
8. allow the modern orchestra to combine the archetypal moments provided by music in ancient tragedy with the action of the entire drama (Wagner’s emphasis);
9. extend the dramatic dialogue over the entire drama like a spoken play, but articulate it solely in music;
10. create a new kind of drama that appeals not to opera-lovers but to truly educated persons concerned with the cultivation of a genuine German culture (eine originale Kultur des deutschen Geistes ).

The supposed demise of opera

It is true, as scholars always insist, that Wagner was not the sole destroyer of the so-called number opera inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Greater continuity and flexibility in adapting dramatic moments into wider musical expanses without the stop-go character of older opera divided into recitatives, arias, choruses and ensembles is also noticeable in the most interesting French and Italian works for the musical stage in the nineteenth century. That Wagner himself learnt a thing or two from these non-German sources, in particular the operas of Scribe and Meyerbeer, is indeed one of the great unstated facts in his public pronouncements about his own project, though in private he tended to be more frank about it. It is difficult to deny, however, that the widening of tonality and thematic continuity in his mature works, and their vast tracts of music with swift changes in stylistic level and syntax, together constitute a bold adventure in harmony and large-scale structure that left an indelible mark on opera and the history of music in general.

Coupled with the (now underestimated) literary impact of Wagner’s manifestos against opera, which codified its demise not only with polemical brevity but also with eye-crossing tedium in longer theoretical treatises that nonetheless seem to have impressed influential figures in the later part of the nineteenth century like Nietzsche and Strauss (see editor’s postscript to R. Wagner 1984 , 525, 531–2), his music dramas were undoubtedly one of the main reasons for the declining status of ‘opera’ in the nineteenth century – opera, that is, as a series of items performed exquisitely by renowned singers for the sake of sheer enjoyment and in which meaningful drama (at least according to Wagner) had only peripheral status. Theodor Adorno was not being entirely perverse when he pointed out that the revival of the number convention in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951) – an opera which at first sight seems about as far from Wagnerian drama as can be imagined – was only possible as ironic stylization because the damning verdict which Wagner as theorist and as artist had long since delivered on the enclosed forms Stravinsky sought lovingly to resuscitate still retained its validity (Adorno 1978b , ‘Wagners Aktualität’, 548–9).

It is even likely that Wagner’s own works would have stood little chance of survival had they not paid more than just a few respects to the opera industry they were supposed to be undermining. Beloved moments like Siegmund’s ‘Spring Song’ in Die Walküre (1870) or the famous Quintet in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) have served the popularity of his music well. Nor is it exactly a secret that the Wagner repertoire has had more than its fair share of formidable singer cults, even if they have become increasingly eccentric and isolated over the years. (The rarity value of first-rate Wagner singers in the twenty-first century has practically turned them into the equivalent of the northern right whales of the Western Atlantic whose pending extinction is always woefully – and not unjustly – predicted by small groups of dedicated activists.)

The war against opera and its supposed vices was therefore never completely unsympathetic to composers who continued to believe in the object at which Wagner’s intellectual aggression was directed. Puccini, for one, was always willing to learn from Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Parsifal (1882) in particular. And exactly for this reason German critics felt compelled at once to appropriate his first substantial European triumph Manon Lescaut (1893) as part of the Wagnerian legacy. A typical example is Alfred Kühn, who wrote enthusiastically of Puccini that ‘no one has ever understood so well how to make such beautiful music out of Wagner’s musical initiatives ’ ( 1894 , 64). Given Wagner’s and Puccini’s almost antithetical use of music for dramatic purposes (as we shall see), the author’s emphases could hardly be more misleading.

The real cause of the pre-emptive critical strike was that along with Mascagni’s hugely successful Cavalleria rusticana (1890) Puccini’s opera actually posed a threat, showing modern international audiences that an entirely different kind of operatic dramaturgy was still possible. Vivid characters, believable situations, scenery without heavy mythological detail, shameless coveting of the lyrical, fast-moving dialogue and the very roots of drama itself were brought back to real life, as it were, well beyond the reach of the internalized subjectivity of Wagner’s phantasmagorias. Indeed, no one was clearer about this than Puccini himself, who said in an interview with a German journalist defending the right of the Wagner family to restrict performances of Parsifal to Bayreuth after its copyright ran out in 1913:

I am not a Wagnerian; my musical education was in the Italian school. Even though I have been influenced by Wagner like every other modern musician in the way I use the orchestra for illustration and in the thematic characterisation of persons and situations, as a composer I have always remained, and still remain, Italian. My music is rooted in the peculiarity of my native country.

(Reported in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , 79 (1912), 241)

Puccini was being ingenuous, perhaps, in insisting on a counterweight to Wagner’s fourth and tenth commandments demanding the cultivation by educated persons of a genuine German culture. An Italian school of opera seemed to be still alive and kicking, and moreover for some high-minded intellectual elites it was proving to be disconcertingly popular, and with little sign of fatigue. But in view of the increasingly cosmopolitan strategies of opera composers around the turn of the century (to which ironically the overtly nationalist stance of Wagner and Puccini had contributed), Puccini’s point about his supposed Italian roots is surely less significant than his fundamental difference of opinion with Wagner about the nature of opera – a difference which on a broader level was to have palpable consequences for the whole future of the genre.

Wagner’s new drama and its challengers

Like Puccini and many other composers of opera around the turn of the century ( Debussy and Strauss immediately spring to mind), Wagner had all his life been interested in the spoken theatre. And the fundamental question he kept asking himself was: what precisely is the difference between a drama that relies on words and one whose raison d’être is music? His response is embedded in his eighth commandment (with rallying support from the second, fifth and sixth) which advocates a link through music between the individual moments of a drama and its entire action. What he meant was that in musical drama it was possible to create a logical chain of structured presence infinitely greater in depth and power than it ever could be in a spoken play precisely because it was always musically bonded with other moments both future and past inside the same dramatic structure. Admittedly the idea was not without its rhetorical baggage, including a specious comparison with music in ancient Greek tragedy and his much-trumpeted intention to revive the spirit of Aeschylean drama in a modern guise using newly invented myths of his own based on sources from the Middle Ages.

A more accurate and insightful account of what he actually achieved, however, comes not from Wagner, but from one of his most imaginative interpreters. In 1895, at one of the most significant moments in the history of Wagnerism, 300 copies of Adolphe Appia’s La Mise en scène du drame wagnérien were printed in Paris and rapidly devoured by small groups of symbolist poets, anti-realists, producers, composers – anyone interested in the artistic avant-garde of the day. And in this ground-breaking document they found a definition of Wagnerian drama that comes extremely close to its oneiric world and internally prescribed sense of time that in literature and music were already turning out to be the most durable aspects of Wagner’s legacy:

What characterizes Wagnerian drama and constitutes its high value is the power it possesses, by music, to express the interior drama, whereas spoken drama can merely signify it. As music is Time , it gives to the interior drama a duration that must correspond to the length of the performance itself . . . Therefore, given the special nature of music, the interior drama cannot possibly find a satisfactory model for its development in the time-frame provided for spoken drama by life itself.

(Appia 1982 , 41–2; original French text in Appia 1983 , volume 1, 261–83)

The musical realists of the 1890s, taking their cue from Bizet’s Carmen (1875), had already thrown down the gauntlet to music’s supposedly exclusive right to create ‘interior drama’ by inventing a new kind of opera where music, and not just the spoken word, had the right to an exterior temporality – or at least an illusion of it – driven by ‘life itself’. The idea of fast and furious events conditioning internal emotional states within a dramaturgy taking leanness and concision to a radical extreme was of course the prerogative of Verdi. But with the huge success of Wagner’s example to contend with, Verdi’s successors were all the more determined to put ‘life’ to the fore with realistic action with which any audience could immediately identify, as opposed to the internal states of mind in Wagnerian drama that claimed to exist outside real time.

These starkly opposed views of operatic dramaturgy were highly influential in the twentieth century. And some of the most interesting operas took a radical stance on either side. Schoenberg’s one-act opera Erwartung (composed in 1909) is frequently cited as a daring experiment in atonality with a lineage that can clearly be traced back to some of the bolder moments in Wagner’s harmony which stretch tonality to its limits. But what is really Wagnerian about it is its almost self-consciously interior sound-world that continuously threatens to engulf its neurasthenic protagonist (a woman searching frantically for her dead lover) and its references to the language of dreams inside a dramatic space ‘on the border of a forest’ – the opening stage direction – which is essentially without concrete social identity. True, accepting Wagner’s premise unconditionally, as Pfitzner did in Palestrina (1917), could also bring with it a sense of high-minded didacticism and belatedness. Palestrina looks at first sight as though it should be a historical drama about a sixteenth-century Italian composer. In fact, using Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as a model, it is an allegory with considerable ahistorical pretensions about the superiority of German music which Pfitzner himself described as ‘autumnal’ – a melancholic farewell to the Wagnerian ideal .

Jettisoning Wagnerian interiority altogether on the other hand, or half-parodying it as in Jim’s defiant aria to the coming of day in Brecht’s and Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), only served to expose the hollow ambitions of full-scale works that had nothing really significant in the long term to put in its place. The outstanding exceptions are nearly all the mature operas of Leo Janá ek. Indeed there could hardly be anything less like Wagner’s lengthy psychological explorations of character entwined in labyrinthine musical structures. Janá ek’s best works for the stage are justly admired for their concision, raw emotion, sinewy harmony, bare textures, direct expression and a dramatic immediacy that goes directly to the heart of the listener. Even some of his subjects are simply inconceivable in the context of Wagner’s concept of temporality where real historical time can never exist, even in its most grotesque forms – the journey of the philistine Prague landlord Brou ek to the moon and the fifteenth century in The Excursions of Mr Brou ek (1920), for instance, or the heroine Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Affair (1926) who can live for 300 years.

Apart from Janá ek, most valiant efforts to recapture or to reject Wagner’s idea of drama pale before the achievement of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), one of the undisputed masterpieces of modern opera. Berg had to twist the knife twice: besides turning Wagner’s concept psychologically on its head, he also set it on a dangerous collision course with its challengers. In his 1929 lecture on Wozzeck , Berg himself formally eschewed ‘the Wagnerian recipe of “through-composing”’ (Redlich 1957 , 261–85; 267), and famously relied on traditional forms like the passacaglia and sonata to ensure musical cohesion. Indeed, to describe Wozzeck without careful qualification as a post-Wagnerian opera at all can be seriously misleading. On one level it is a realistic melodrama on a par with Puccini’s Tosca (1900) in which its protagonist also suffers appalling abuse. (Not insignificantly both operas take their time-frame of ‘life itself’ from spoken plays.) But on another its fifteen scenes are highly subjective musical journeys into deracinated states of mind closer to the central idea behind Wagnerian drama, from which, as we have seen, Puccini explicity distanced himself. The complex orchestral environment each time envelops the characters, not to explore rich Wagnerian lives to be sure, but human existences that have been devastated and emptied out by modern social conditions. Berg’s compassionate spirit, which owes not a little to a profoundly ironic adaptation of Wagner’s idea of interior drama on an ambitious musical scale, is never more in evidence than it is in this astonishing work .

For composers working in a post-Wagnerian environment, negotiating between Wagner’s example and a radical rejection of it was often more important than adhering rigorously to the one or the other. Not that this guaranteed unalloyed triumph. Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (1912) and Ernst K enek’s Jonny spielt auf (1927) veer awkwardly between idealized musical spaces and realistic scenes of petty bourgeois life (e.g. the bizarre scene in K enek’s opera in which the hero Max shares his sorrows with a singing glacier outside his hotel in the Alps) and it is doubtless this uncertainty of dramatic aim that has helped to consign these works, and others of the same ilk, to the limbo of Fascinating Operas of the Past (FOPS) – occasionally revived, but stubbornly grounded on the remoter borders of the repertoire.

Admiring historical studies of FOPS from the 1920s and 1930s will probably never be in short supply. What is sorely missing is a sober critical investigation into the reasons for their initial success and long-term failure which takes a hard look at their Wagnerian and anti-Wagnerian pedigree. Jonny spielt auf – probably the most famous example – was taken up after its premiere by over 30 stages in German-speaking countries during its first season and around 20 foreign theatres during the next two years, making it one of the greatest operatic hits of all time. But history has been less than kind to it and it is simply no good blaming its subsequent lacklustre fame solely on the influence of Goebbel’s Nazi propaganda machine, which notoriously excoriated the work, among other reasons because the character Jonny is a negro jazz-band musician who first enters carrying a golden saxophone – a sexually uninhibited image that could hardly be more removed visually and musically from the interior spaces of Wagner’s music dramas. Indeed, the resolute refusal of Wagnerian drama to move outside the subjective musical worlds of its characters, thus measuring itself idealistically against the ‘impurities’ of real life, was shamelessly exploited by Hitler, whom Goebbels described as listening to Wagner as if ‘the drama were in artistic unison with his political being’ ( 1936 , 67). It was only logical, therefore, that the image of Jonny should be emblazoned over the brochure of the Nazis’ notorious 1938 Düsseldorf exhibition Entartete Musik (‘Degenerate Music’) as a telling symbol of everything opposed to the racist musical ideals of the Third Reich.

But public demand for performances of K enek’s opera had already begun to wane before the Nazis assumed power in 1933 . Unsettling though the political upheavals surrounding the so-called Zeitopern of the 1920s and early 1930s were, their deliberately ephemeral topicality is not quite enough to explain their weaknessess. Alone the label Zeitoper (opera of the times) marks the opposition of these works to the Wagnerian ideal of an operatic dramaturgy beyond history, including Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage (1929) and Caspar Neher’s and Weill’s Die Bürgschaft (1932). A more fruitful line of critical enquiry could well lie in a closer scrutiny of the role of music in relation to the perception of dramatic time about which composers were often confused, or which they simply miscalculated – a sympathetic failing perhaps in view of the social pressure that was increasingly being brought to bear on opera, especially after the First World War. If reflection on Wagner’s influence can teach us anything, it is that he raised the stakes of opera to such a pitch that it proved extremely difficult for those after him to choose convincing forms of musical dramaturgy in a spectrum of possibilities which in no small measure due to his own example had become much broader, and to reconcile that choice with the heavy demands placed on works of art in the modern era. In the case of opera, that included a growing sense of unease about its validity which, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, Wagner himself had already forcefully expressed .