David Vernon - Disturbing the Universe: Wagners Musikdrama

Disturbing the Universe copyright 2021 David Vernon

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Excerpts from Wagners works have been translated by the author.

First edition September 2021

Interior layout by miblart.com

Cover photograph by vlue/DepositPhotos

ISBN:

978-1-5272-9924-5 (paperback)

978-1-5272-9923-8 (ebook)

Published by Candle Row Press

To

Karita Mattila

in friendship, love and admiration

Acknowledgements

Although this book is dedicated to one very special artist in particular, opera in general, and especially Wagners, requires a legion of forces for it to succeed: singers, players, designers, technicians, producers, administrators and a whole host of other talents. Those on stage get the glory and the glamour, but so many others are needed, and without them we cannot enjoy the immense riches of this vast and complex medium. To all those who help create this extraordinary art form: my eternal thanks.

Like composing, writing is a solitary activity. But like opera or musikdrama! publishing is a group effort, and I am grateful to the many literary and non-literary forces which have helped shape this book and bring it to its final form.

Special final thanks are due to my amazing editor, Elyse Lyon, who sees what I cannot see and always knows what I am trying to say. Any errors are, of course, my own.

Introduction :

Glyndebourne and Grenades

R ichard Wagner was not an opera composer; he was a music-dramatist. Wagner perceived that music, especially symphonic music, could do more than simply accompany singers on the opera house stage. It could also tell difficult stories about complex individuals. It could minutely examine characters minds, motivations, moods even their souls. It could debate politics, theology and metaphysics. It could not only sound frightening or captivating, violent or beautiful, but could take listeners on vast intellectual, emotional and spiritual journeys, deep into subjects normally reserved for poets, priests or philosophers. Music, Wagner saw, could work in such a dramatically dialectical way that it could approach Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Schopenhauer for theatrical flexibility, expressive profundity and cerebral sophistication.

Think of opera today and, alas, music is not often the first thing that comes to mind, let alone intellectual activity. We still tend to imagine evening gowns and dinner jackets; champagne and cummerbunds; divas and debutantes; ruby and gold horseshoe auditoriums; gourmet hampers from Fortnum & Mason on the lawns at Glyndebourne. In a word: posh. In two words: elitist entertainment. Wagners own attempt the Bayreuth Festival to get away from this ghastly and snobbish state of affairs itself almost immediately became the leading event on Germanys social calendar: a gossip factory, a rumour mill, a symbol of conservatism and a place to be seen .

It might, therefore, surprise some people that Wagner not only stood on the barricades of the Dresden revolution but helped make hand grenades to lob at the police. He wrote numerous seditious pamphlets arguing for the destruction of contemporary society, the toppling of monarchies, an end to property ownership and, yes, the abolition of opera houses, those facilities of middle-class divertissement. Human nature being human nature, unable to know what is good for itself, the revolution failed, of course. But Wagners musical and dramatic bombs did not fizzle and fade away into the status quo. His musikdramas persist today as violent, energetic, explosive expressions of radical, world-shattering fervour and social commitment, dynamically arguing for a different and better future for all. Richard Wagner, poster boy for fascists and plaything for rich playboys, is, in fact, the ultimate anarchist.

To come into contact with Wagners art is to experience deep sensual pleasure, profound emotional feeling, complex intellectual debate and otherworldly spiritual illumination. Wagner is a lover, a scholar, a shaman and a sorcerer. He is a truth-seeker and a myth-maker, a prophet and a historian, a doctor and a cleric. Wagners art is a library, a brothel and a church. It is a sunrise and a snowstorm, a vista and a labyrinth, an island and a road. It exposes malice and humiliates pain. It charts reality through a dissection of fantasy. It refuses to stand still, its internal energy reaching into infinity, but its precision and dexterity avert loss of control. Wagner is a juggler and a magician, an acrobat and a scientist, an engineer and an artist. His art destroys the false boundaries of convention and declares eternal emancipation. Wagners musikdramas decline to play by the rules or observe any of the social graces. Propriety, modesty and decorum are alien to their spirit and foreign to their understanding.

What is it that makes Wagners art so endlessly powerful? So influential, seductive and repellent? So simultaneously creative and destructive? So disruptive and divisive? And where did it come from?

Beethoven, Berlioz and others had developed the symphony to an unprecedented level of intense and erudite expression. But Wagner knew that such intricacy and subtlety could be applied to the world of opera, where composers too often wrote orchestral music to order, by prescription, or simply to show off. They flaunted shallow musical effects to dazzle audiences, who themselves were often there only to be seen or, at best, mildly entertained. Opera libretti, too, were seldom better than fourth rate: they didnt need to be good, because no one was paying attention, or because it was necessary merely to get the flimsy characters from situation A to situation B with a minimum of fuss in time for the next flamboyant aria or multifarious ensemble. The orchestral music didnt need to engage with the action on stage; it just needed to parade and amuse.

Wagner knew that things could be better: that the erudition of the symphony, the string quartet and the piano sonata the holy trinity of classical musical form could be brought to the opera house, as could the power and poetry of the great dramatists. Some opera masters, especially Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and Bellini, had come close, but, for Wagner, much as he admired those geniuses, even their radical innovations had congealed into conventions, customs which had stuck and, worse, become deep rooted in the culture of Europes musical theatre. The virtuoso singing, sensational stage pyrotechnics and futile plots of the opera house were, to Wagners sensibility, hollow, meaningless, directionless. They were a wasted opportunity. Stage effect and bravura vocal technique Wagner would certainly cultivate, but only for the overall effect of the drama, not simply for their own sake.

Wagner sought, on the one hand, to cultivate the sophistication of the non-musical elements of opera (text, acting, lighting and so on), asserting all the arts to be ineludibly equal and united. Yet on the other hand, and at the same time, he strove to heighten the refinement of the musical component, eventually seeing music as the most important and powerful element of emotional-intellectual expression. It is this apparent contradiction unity and superiority which is the key to Wagners distinctiveness and originality, the paradox wherein lies how he was different to what had gone before and which would be the prototype for the many who would follow. Strauss, Janek, Schoenberg, Bartk, Prokofiev, Berg, Britten and countless others would, in their very idiosyncratic ways, follow Wagner not only in expanding the orchestral component to opera but also by cultivating the seriousness and quality of the libretti they set and the overall intellectual and artistic experience of their works.