Music about Morning and Sunrise, Day 4 – “Dawn” from Gotterdammerung by Richard Wagner

This week’s theme is…Music about morning and sunrise!  Every day is like a gift, a chance to start anew and clear away whatever happened on the previous one.  The gift is always announced by yet another appearance of an old friend, the sun, who rises to greet us in the morning.  Because of our subjective view of astronomical features the sun seems to rise in the morning, first filling the sky with dawn’s glorious painting, keeping us in suspense, and then finally showing itself in full splendor.  This has been an inspiring image for many musicians who have sought to illustrate that cycle through sound.  This week we look at a variety of such examples.

Music about Morning and Sunrise, Day 4 – “Dawn” from Gotterdammerung by Richard Wagner

 

You’ve seen pictures like this before, right?

When you see it, a specific word probably pops into your head, and I bet it’s “opera”, right?  Well, you sure wouldn’t be wrong.  But let’s look a little deeper, because the fat lady with the horns is specific to a certain kind of opera, and the history of opera as a whole is much older and considerably more varied than the kind she represents.

That horned lady’s name is Brunnhilde, and she’s one of the main characters in an opera, well, actually a tetrology of operas, by a German composer named Richard Wagner.  Wagner was one of history’s greatest creative geniuses, and also a bit of a megalomaniac.  Had you managed pull him aside from his busy schedule for a quick interview, he may have intimated to you his feeling that the entire history of opera, almost 300 years’ worth, existed merely to bring about his grand designs of the 1850s and beyond.  He was just that kind of blowhard.  But most music lovers would probably agree that he had the goods to back up his claims.  Even those who don’t like Wagner (like my wife, for example), tend to admit that he was certainly a unique composer, capable of realizing his visions, visions which attained to unprecedented levels of scope, passion, and psychological effect on the part of its listeners.  Wagner was making history, and he probably knew it.

So, who is Brunnhilde, the fat (she doesn’t have to be fat, by the way) lady with the horns?  She’s a valkyrie of Norse legend, one of the daughters of the god Wotan who fly around on winged horses, scooping up the souls of fallen warriors and transporting them to their eternal reward in a mythical realm called Valhalla.  You’ve probably heard their entrance music, the famous Ride of the Valkyries, probably Wagner’s greatest and most recognizable hit.

But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves.  It would be good to understand how Wagner started to form his ideas in the first place, and to do this it is helpful to know something about the founding of one of Western history’s most significant forms of artistic expression: opera.

Anyone can write an opera.  YOU can do it.  You really can!  Just make up a little story, preferably with two characters, divvy up the dialogue more or less evenly between them, and then set the lines to music.  Boom!  You’ve created an opera.  Of course, once you’ve done that, you ought to start asking all sorts of aesthetic questions about musical style, proportion, dramatic form, instrumental accompaniment, costumes, makeup, scenery, stagecraft, etc.  Operas, when written and presented in their richest form, incorporate all of these into a massive form that is both entertaining and edifying, truly some of the most detailed and involved works within the human experience.  The word opera is Latin and means “great work”.  The best operas in history move audiences deeply and offer acute social commentary.  Sometimes they start movements.  There have been countless varieties with different languages, styles, national flavors and philosophical aims.  And, amazingly enough, we can actually trace the origin of European opera to a very localized time and place, which is something we can’t do with most other forms of music.  

The recent Renaissance had ignited Europeans’ latent love of learning and hunger for cultural advancement, and many minds turned to the philosophy and art of the ancient Greeks to rekindle millennia-old ideas.  Enthusiasts of Greek drama deduced that it was probably sung entirely, or at least to a large degree, and they also suspected that, if realized, the format would reveal some kind of deep secrets of humanity.  So they set about to reproduce the Greek manner of dramatic presentation.  It is, of course, difficult to say how close they came to the mark (at least until time travel is perfected!) and the new sung dramas, created by a group of aristocrats in Florence meeting to collaborate in the rooms of one Count Giovanni d’Bardi right around the year 1600, may not have exactly unlocked any deep secrets of humanity, but they were captivating to listeners and the fledgling concept of opera quickly caught fire, steadily spreading through all the major Italian cultural centers over the course of the seventeenth centuries, and after that to other places such as France and Germany.

As opera enjoyed its first century its scale increased, its orchestral accompaniment deepened, and its singers became superstars, tackling roles of significant substance and vocal virtuosity.  The history of opera, like that of any great human endeavor, is infinitely nuanced with names, techniques, styles, business transactions and more.  But, long story short, while the Italian, and to a lesser extent French (which was invented by an Italian – see this post), flavor dominated European opera consumption during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The German flavor gained prominence and waged serious competition through the nineteenth.  For more about the first significant figure of German opera, see this post.

Wagner’s life spanned the better part of the nineteenth century.  Evidently he had an eye to work in opera quite early and did not leave notable examples in any other genre.  Of the operas, there are only 13 complete, but they pack an artistic and philosophical punch, maybe more concentrated than the work of any other composer.  His early operas were exercises in models by composers writing in the grand French style, albeit with a German strength derived from Carl Maria von Weber.  But steadily, and with great force, Wagner’s philosophy was emerging and finding expression.  While still in his thirties he began work on what most see as his most important contribution to human history, the four operas of The Ring of the Nibelungen.

Laid end to end, the four operas last about 15 hours, and they are sometimes performed on successive nights, a marathon of the first order for the lead singers, orchestral players and conductor.  Wagner was well aware of the novelty of his way of thinking, which unified like never before the libretto, music, philosophy, singing, stage design, and acoustics of the operatic production into a central concept he called gesamtkunstwerk, which can be roughly translated as “total art”, although you really have to live in it a little to comprehend its depth.

Wagner was controversial as he lived, and remains controversial today.  The primary reason is that it is difficult to extract the polemical ideas of anti-Semitism and Germanic supremacy which guided so much of his thought from the fruits of his artistic expression.  The operas of the Ring, and those that came after it, are steeped in a Teutonic arrogance that can be difficult to overlook.  There are also overtly anti-Semitic themes and situations in some of these operas.  And they are not without historical impact.  The polemical permit Wagner’s operas have been seen to grant to Germans to exercise their supreme rights may very well have contributed to the boldness of Hitler’s Nazism; Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer and his music became iconic for the Third Reich.

We should never isolate Wagner’s disturbing philosophy from his music, but for those who can see past it, the rewards are considerable.  Wagner’s music, then as now, was quickly recognized for its overpowering effect, achieved through forceful singing, dense harmony, and orchestras of unprecedented size and color.  For his muscular dramas, a new kind of singer was required, a singer of significant strength and stamina.  That is why Brunnhilde is so often portrayed as fat, although Wagnerian sopranos are not always fat, just powerful.  Not all singers are well-suited to Wagnerian roles; it is something of a specialty.

Additionally, the great impact of Wagner’s late music dramas rises from what can be seen is an unbilled lead character: the orchestra.  Wagner enveloped his operas in a continuous blanket of dense orchestral sound, rich with short themes that represented different characters, props and ideas, and created some magnificent orchestral works in the process, always within the opera.  Wagner may have written only operas, but he was one of the greatest orchestral composers in history.

One of my favorite orchestral excerpts from the Ring of the Nibelungen comes from the fourth opera, Twilight of the Gods.  It comes very near the beginning, and illustrates the dawn of the first day after the hero, Siegfried, successfully penetrated a ring of magical fire to couple with the fallen valkyrie, Brunnhilde (the lady with the horns).  It’s like a mythical, Teutonic Sleeping Beauty.  If you want to know the whole story, read about it here.  But be warned, it is long, dense with German names, and rich in incest (you’ll see).  You can find a shorter synopsis here.  Listen to the orchestral Dawn, followed by Siegfried and Brunnhilde’s rapturous duet, and see if you can’t experience a bit of what brought the controversial Wagner’s first audiences to states of, often literal, ecstasy:

 

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