Triple Compound Toe Tappers, Day 2 – BONUS DOUBLE POST – Ride of the Valkyries from The Valkyrie & Music of Transformation from the Rhine Gold by Richard Wagner

This week’s theme is…Triple Compound Toe Tappers!  4/4 time is so prevalent in music of all styles that it has a nickname, “common time”.  If you say “common time” to a musician, you can bet they will understand that you intend each measure to have four beats, and each beat to divide in half.  Given its nickname, you may sometimes find a letter “C” written at the beginning of a musical score to indicate this.  There is another meter that I am tempted to nickname “rare time” and may start representing it with a letter  “R”.  It is compound triple, meaning there are three beats per measure and each beat is divided into 3.  Always written with a 9 on top of the time signature, the super lilty compound triple, like a waltz within a waltz, is, in my experience, the rarest of all of the meter types.  But there’s enough notable examples to fill a week with great music, so enjoy!

Triple Compound Toe Tappers, Day 2 – BONUS DOUBLE POST – Ride of the Valkyries from The Valkyrie & Music of Transformation from the Rhine Gold by Richard Wagner

There’s a phrase that has entered our language because of the operas of Richard Wagner.  It is “Wagnerian”, and can have different connotations depending on the context.  But the simplest and most common use of the phrase regards the length and scale of something.  If you describe something as having “Wagnerian scale” it means excessively long, with shadings of excess and being overblown.  It’s an understandable use of the word, because Wagner’s operas are pretty long.  Funnily, they’re not the longest in history though.  While Wagner’s operas commonly run at about 4 hours, I have come across operas that last between 5 and 6 hours, like this one for example, which predates Wagner’s great essays by almost exactly 200 years!  In fact, that opera, Cesti’s Golden Apple was so long that it was presented over two successive evenings when it premiered at the celebration of the marriage of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and Margaret Theresa of Spain in 1668.  And if you think Wagner’s long stretches are boring, I double dog dare you to sit down and listen to The Golden Apple for 2 hours.  You can bring some popcorn.

But “Cestian” just doesn’t have the same ring (har!) to it as “Wagnerian” does, so that’s the phrase that stuck.  And it doesn’t hurt that his ideas and personality seem so arrogant and grandiose; it’s not just the length of the thing that is labelled “Wagnerian”, it’s also the self-important intention behind it.  And Wagner may have been self-important, but many people would agree that there was some substance to many of his ideas, well, the musical and dramatic ones at least.  You always have to filter out much of the polemic regarding philosophy and race, but that’s a different story.

And Wagner’s operas are, well, Wagnerian.  His most famous work, The Ring of the Nibelungen lasts for 15 hours.  Don’t let that number throw you though; it’s actually 4 different operas and they are intended to be produced on four successive nights at three to four hours per evening.  If it strikes you as obsessive for one to be enthusiastic about attending such an endeavor, I would ask you to think of any friends who might enjoy a similar marathon with Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, or any other serial fantasy of that nature.  It’s really just an entertainment subculture, arguably the granddaddy of all of them.  It was like the original movie marathon.  And Wagner makes it worth one’s while, well, if you enjoy his music he does.  Over the course of the Ring a listener or viewer will be exposed to a generous handful of truly significant and overpowering orchestral set pieces.  These really make the Ring what it is.  Unlike older forms of opera, in which the central building block is the vocal aria, Wagner’s Ring focuses on the orchestra as the prime storyteller with the singers more or less fitting quasi-sung dialogue into the texture the majority of the time.  It’s probably something of an acquired taste, but the orchestral pieces really make the magic, and are often enjoyed out of the context of the operas.

By the way, if you want to get your mind around the story of the Ring cycle, you should listen to Anna Russel’s hilarious summary:

She clearly knows the Ring and must admire it considerably in order to have studied it closely enough in order to put that presentation together.  But the brilliance is that she describes it from the point of view of someone who finds the whole thing absurd, which it sort of is.  Still, Wagnerians like her too, and she has been invited to Bayreuth to do her spiel (for more about Bayreuth, see this post).

If you have a marathon of any of the film franchises mentioned above, Star Wars, Harry Potter or the like, you will come to rely on a certain musical device to keep the story straight across all of that time, whether you realize it or not.  All of those series will use leitmotifs to tell the story, constantly recalling themes in association with characters, ideas, or events.  You may not even be aware that this is happening, but the psychological impact of this device is profound and helps you to keep track of the story, at the same time layering a rich emotional resonance on top of it all.  Wagner pioneered this technique (see this post) and some film composers have become quite practiced at it (see this post), allowing them to tie together films franchises that span decades or more.

If you get to know the Ring cycle a bit, you will realize just how full of leitmotifs it is; it’s like the molecules out of which the thing is built and that is not in any way an exaggeration.  After you get to know it and you sit down to listen, you will realize that you are literally hearing them at every moment; all the time, Wagner is creating these associations and reminding you of them.  It’s actually astounding the level of detail and integrity with which the Ring is worked out, and that’s probably why it took him 25 years to write it all.  Someone like Handel would have written operas that lasted for that amount of time in a year or two, just turning them out to fill the season.  But Wagner was working in a different way.  The orchestral set pieces, too, are really just made of leitmotifs, but on a grander scale.

There are two significant leitmotifs in the Ring cycle that are in compound triple meter, that is, they are best written with a 9 on top of the time signature, and they have three beats per measure with each beat divided into three.  One of them is very famous, and the other one could be very famous, but isn’t.  And the two peoples they represent couldn’t be more different.

One of the triple compound leitmotifs is the one which constantly runs through the most famous excerpt from Wagner’s Ring, the Ride of the Valkyries.  Found at the beginning of the final act of the second opera, this strong and bracing overture and chorus accompanies the bold, purposeful Valkyries as they perform their sacred duty of deciding the fate of warriors in the field of battle, transporting the fallen ones to the mythical Norse afterlife of Valhalla.  While the opening orchestral part is often played by itself, within the opera it transitions seamlessly into the Valkyries’ first scene with the sisters singing a haughty “Hi-ho”, or the German equivalent anyway.

 

While the Ride of the Valkyries is the most famous excerpt to feature this motive, it does appear throughout the other operas as well, always signalling an association with Brunnhilde, the most significant Valkyrie to the story, when she is a god (see this post):

 

When Brunnhilde is a mortal, she has a different motive, and it forms the basis of this magnificent orchestral interlude – see this post.

The other great compound triple meter motive, less famous than the Valkyrie motive, is that of the Nibelungs.  The race of trolls after which the whole operatic cycle is named, it is one of them, Alberich, who initially sets the whole crazy story in motion, stealing the gold guarded by the Rhine Maidens in the Ring cycle’s very opening scene (see this post).  He delivers the gold to the Nibelung’s deep underground realm and charges a fellow troll and master smith, Mime, with the task of banging it into a helmet that will give Alberich great magical powers.  Later in the first act the gods Wotan and Loge travel down to the realm of the Nibelungs through a sulfurous tunnel in order to grab the Rhine Gold with the intention of paying off two giants, named Fasolt and Fafner, who have built Valhalla and seized the goddess Freia for their compensation.  Since Freia is no longer available to serve her golden apples of perpetual youth to the gods, they begin to age, hence Wotan’s motivation to pursue the Rhine Gold deep in the realm of Nibelung Land.  If you found that confusing, you should really watch Anna Russell’s synopsis 🙂  Or, you can spend a year or two studying the operas; I promise it becomes easier to keep track of, but it is quite dense.

Like the Valkyrie motive, the Nibelung motive is in triple compound with sharp dotted rhythms.  Where the Valkyrie motive feels noble and powerful, the Nibelung motive seems squat and conniving.  

 

 

While it appears throughout the cycle, its most prominent and impressive appearance is during an orchestral interlude toward the middle of the first opera which accompanies Wotan and Loge’s descent into the realm of the Nibelung.  Called Wervandlungsmusik, literally “Music of Transformation”, the foreboding and grandiose orchestral piece is one of the highlights of The Rhine Gold and a terrific opportunity for the set designer to stage an impressive descent into the subterranean realm.  The stagecraft of the Ring is often one of the great pleasures of viewing a Ring cycle.

 

As Wotan and Loge descend we hear the rhythmic and labored pounding of 18 tuned anvils (at least by Wagner’s original conception) all resounding the rhythm of the Nibelung motive in unison, representing Mime’s order to create the magic helmet, the Tarnhelm.
Some of the orchestral pieces within Wagner’s epic Ring cycle have gone on to have lives of their own, existing as individual pieces divorced from their original contexts, what some have described as “bleeding chunks of Wagner”.  They are almost always constructed from leitmotifs, the molecules out of which Wagner constructed his mythical universe.  The characters of both the Valkyries and Nibelung, as different as can be, were both drawn by Wagner with the rhythmic sharpness of triple compound meter.

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Rivers, Day 3 – The Rhine Gold by Richard Wagner

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 3 – The Rhine Gold by Richard Wagner

From what I’ve heard, the piece which holds the record for the longest number of annual performances since its composition is Handel’s oratorio Messiah which premiered in 1742.  There has never been a year since then which did not feature a performance of Handel’s beloved Messiah somewhere at some season.  And today, there must be thousands of performances in whole or part each year all over the world.  You never have to travel very far to catch Messiah around the Christmas or Easter seasons.  Classical music is full of traditions such as these.  It seems Messiah did not have to work very hard to become the tradition that it did; while he was a skilled entrepreneur and promoter, I can’t imagine that Handel would have taken the time to dwell on a project like Messiah in order to help it take hold like that.  He was incredibly prolific, composing 40 operas (for more about them see this post and this one) and more than 20 oratorios (for more about one of them see this post) over the course of his career.  Messiah is an oratorio – while he must have promoted it in some way at some point, he would have been moving on to the next project quickly.  So that indicates to me that something about Messiah warmed the heart of the Christian and music-loving world and managed to slip into regular performance quite naturally.  Not all traditions have managed to take hold quite this easily.  There is one particular tradition which its primary promoter strove mightily to entrench during his lifetime, a task which his descendants and champions assumed upon his death.  Even today, this particular tradition is complex, ever-shifting, and in need of constant attention to maintain its primacy.  The tradition to which I refer is the Wagnerian Festival at Bayreuth, Germany.

Richard Wagner was that special kind of visionary who always managed to find within him the drive to keep pursuing his goals, no matter how discouraging the obstacles in his path.  A man of lesser convictions would have quit long before the first Bayreuth Festival was held in 1876, when he was 63 – the fruition of his life’s work, and a long struggle full of criticism and rejection.  But as the saying goes, if it was easy, everyone would do it!  Wagner had harbored ambitions to compose operas for as long as he could remember.  He had completed his first opera at the age of 20, a full four decades before the first Bayreuth Festival, and his early operas all bore strong resemblance to styles already in existence, such as those by Weber (for more about Weber, see this post) and the French grand operas by composers like Meyerbeer.  Wagner had scored hits and misses with his early, derivative operas, riding out the waves which rack the career of any creative figure, but he constantly had the sense he was destined for bigger and better things.  We had visions of a new kind of opera, which he called total art work, and began composing his magnum opus, a (long-winded, depending on who is evaluating it) 15-hour telling of ancient Germanic myths called The Ring of the Nibelungen in 1848 at age 35.  He would complete it at age 61 in 1874, 26 years later.  You can read more about Wagner’s approach to the creative process of The Ring here and here.

The Ring cycle, as it is commonly called, is not exactly 15 hours at one sitting, but is split into 4 different operas, each with its own beginning, middle and end, The Rhingold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods.  They are sometimes performed individually, and they all have their own highlights that are worth hearing, but Wagner’s vision was to present them all on consecutive nights, a vision he ultimately realized in 1876 at the first Bayreuth Festival.  Wagner had worked toward structuring his life so that it was free of uninvited stress and influence from forces he did not desire.  In the early 1870s he worked in earnest to inaugurate his vision of holding a festival devoted only to the performance of his operas in a secluded place that he could essentially take over, and so he found Bayreuth in Bavaria, just 30 miles from the Czech border.  While Bayreuth boasted a beautiful opera house already…

…Wagner’s new operatic vision required acoustical and spatial resources that it did not offer, and so he set out to build his own theater, known as the Festspielhaus.  Again, he endured rejection on the way to building it.  His fundraising efforts began with meeting the with German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who denied his requests (if only Bismarck could have seen the future…?).  He then tried offering a paid subscription, but the results were unsatisfactory, even with with the foundation of Wagner Societies to concentrate interest in maximize donations.  Finally, he fell back on a former patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a great admirer of Wagner’s who had settled earlier debts.  The King acquiesced and provided the necessary sum to build the theater.  This was in 1874, and the theater was finally completed by 1876.

For the first time, Wagner’s complete Ring tetralogy was able to be presented on four consecutive nights, August 13 – 17, just as he had envisioned.  In attendance were Edward Grieg, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a handful of political dignitaries.   Both Tchaikovsky and Grieg were complimentary of the event, and thus began the tradition of prominent composers in the Western tradition making their pilgrimage to the Bayreuth festival to drink from the font of Wagner.  For more on another composer who did this, see this post.  But in spite of its positive reception, Wagner found that establishing a tradition such as this presented perpetual financial challenges.  The logistics of a Bayreuth Festival are complex and expensive, and they always will be.  Wagner found himself in considerable debt after the first Bayreuth Festival and so was not entirely free of unwanted projects, for example this march composed for the American Centennial of the same year which compensated him $5000, worth more than $100,000 today!

 

The first Bayreuth Festival was held less than a decade prior to Richard Wagner’s death, and so artistic directorship became a dynastic affair, with his wife Cosima assuming the office and then passing it to their descendants.  To this day, descendants of the Wagner clan are still favored for this position.  The current co-directors are half sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier.  They are both great-granddaughters of Richard Wagner and great-great-granddaughters of Franz Liszt:

The Bayreuth Festival is very much a tradition, but a complicated one.  Due to the logistics and expense, the Ring Cycle has not been performed annually, and in certain years the festival has not been held at all.  It still runs on a combination of ticket sales and state subsidies from the German government.  It is also complex in that it was a major cog in the Nazi propaganda machine, an image the administration of the festival has worked very hard to shed in the years since the Second World War.  If you would like to see the contemporary marketing of a distinguished tradition almost 150 years old, look at the website:

http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/english/english_156.html

Wagnerian websites, podcasts, credit card sales, promotional videos.  Even though the promotion, people, and governments have changed, the music is still the same.  A production of the Ring cycle begins and ends in the Rhine River.  The glorious opening of the first opera, The Rhine Gold, finds three Rhine Maidens frolicking beneath its waves as a sinister dwarf, Alberich, steals the magical gold in their charge, thus setting off the events of the ensuing evenings.  If you ever catch a production of The Rhinegold, at Beyreuth or anywhere else, this is the music that you will hear at the beginning of it all, Wagner’s noble evocation of the motion of the Rhine River and the very act of creation itself:

Handel’s Messiah may hold the record for uninterrupted performance since composition, but Wagner’s complex operation has arguably had a greater impact on the course of humanity, artistically, politically and socially, even if his Bayreuth Festival cannot match Handel for consistency.  With ambitious goals come messy execution; it was true in the 1870s and is true now.  Wagner’s story still serves as a supreme example for all visionaries in training.

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Musical Farewells, Day 5 – “Leb’ wohl, du kuehnes, herrliches Kind!” from The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner

This week’s theme is…Musical Farewells! Parting is such sweet sorrow, but it’s always inevitable.  Musicians have explored the rich feelings of saying goodbye for as long as there has been music.  This week we examine examples of this from all across history.

Musical Farewells, Day 5 – “Leb’ wohl, du kuehnes, herrliches Kind!” from The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner

 

You’ve heard this, right?

A classical music greatest hit if there ever was one, Ride of the Valkyries is probably the most famous little stretch of an enormously long tetralogy of operas composed by German musician, polemicist, and megalomaniac, Richard Wagner.  The tetralogy as a whole is called “The Ring of the Nibelungen”, based on a collection of myths and legends about the lineage of an ancient German royal family, the Burgundians, who settled in the northern lands during the 5th century.  Like so many myths and legends it is of course difficult to tell what is fact and what is fiction.  Much of it is clearly fantastical in nature, containing passages about dragons, gods, dwarves, magic fire and more.  But it may be written about actual historical figures.  However real it was, the themes and images that filled it proved to be highly nourishing to Germans throughout history, informing their language and artwork with a mythical depth and grandeur.  This could be abused, and ever since the interwar period, when images and phrases from the Nibelung myths helped to bolster the National Socialist vision and agenda, the myths must carry forth their association with its propaganda as well.

But for many Germanic peoples throughout history, the Nibelung myths were the equivalent of Homer’s Greek epics, even coexisting with the Christian story and offering its own take on Teutonic striving, for better or worse.  For the religiously unorthodox Wagner, the Nibelung myths provided a steady and inspiring source of inspiration that he did not always find in Christianity.  And the most famous telling of the myth is Wagner’s massive operatic tetralogy, composed over the course of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.  It is clear from details of his personal and artistic life that for Wagner the Nibelung myth, as well as other stories he set to music, were more than just texts.  The two children he sired by Cosima (von Bulow at the time, but that’s another story!) were named for the protagonists of The Ring and Tristan und Isolde.  For Wagner the struggle was real, and he read himself into the strokes of the heroic stories he adopted and adapted.  Had he fathered any children with his first wife, Minna, I am inclined to think he would not have chosen such names, primarily because he had not yet formed his artistic mission with clarity at that time, but also because continuing his family tree with Cosima, the daughter of Franz Liszt, reflects a genetic expression of his music of the future – the genes of Wagner and LIszt commingled and the resulting creatures carry Wagner’s mythical heroes into the realm of everyday society, just as Wagner’s operas carry the commingled artistic genes of Liszt and Wagner into the concert hall.  It’s just one odd and creepy resonance with the story of Wagner and his family tree…

Wagner had scored some successes with previous operatic projects.  They tended to be written in imitation of other styles already in existence, and he never quite seemed satisfied with them, nor the manner in which they required him to pander to the, in his opinion, asinine tastes of the Parisian public.  He was generally dissatisfied with the status quo of operatic composition and performance in most places .  Wagner had a bigger and considerably more challenging, if imperfect, vision in mind, and the tetralogy of The Ring was its grand expression.  It is true that he penned three more great operas after his ideas germinated in the grandeur of The Ring: Der Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal, but I find that those three tend to appeal more to connoisseurs of Wagner and of opera in general.  The music of The Ring manages to carry Wagner’s artistic and philosophical vision with strength and clarity while, at the same time, possessing a mass appeal that the later three operas do not.  Most people, however they feel about Wagner and opera in general, can probably find something within the 15 hours of The Ring that they would consider appealing and impressive; less so for the others I suspect, even as masterful as they are.  And so, Wagner’s greatest hit, the Ride of the Valkyries, comes from The Ring, specifically the second opera of the four, The Valkyrie.

Something that you may not know is that The Ride of the Valkyries illustrates a very significant and influential device of operatic storytelling which Wagner applied for the first time, and most systematically, in The Ring, the leitmotiv.  If you’ve seen Star Wars then you are somewhat familiar with the leitmotiv technique.  John Williams applies a very similar feature to facilitate unity and cognitive ease of viewing across the breadth of the various Star Wars films, even the most recent ones.  A leitmotiv, simply put, is a musical theme that is associated closely with a character or idea in the plot.  The composer can simply evoke the theme when necessary to help the audience remember the character or idea when appropriate (okay, maybe it’s not so simple – there are aesthetic and technical considerations that must be mastered to use them convincingly).  Here is an article about William’s themes and motives in Star Wars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Star_Wars#Composed_for_the_original_trilogy

Star Wars is a thoroughly worked-out and impressive system, but Wagner’s is even more thorough and intricate.  Pages are given to the analysis of the network of leitmotivs in The Ring:

 

http://www.wagnerheim.com/page/15

On the previous link, Allen Dunning has cataloged 178 different leitmotivs in Wagner’s Ring.  They are constantly worked into the thick orchestral accompaniment that flows through all of the operas (for more about Wagner’s orchestra, see this post).

Ride of the Valkyries accompanies the first appearance of Brunhilde and her Valkyrie sisters, all daughters of king of the gods, Wotan, in the tetralogy, and is a fully worked-out orchestral set piece.  But the motive which forms its basis returns at other points in the operas.  And now that you have Ride of the Walkyries in your ear, we can watch another notable scene from the same opera and hear that motive in a different setting.  It’s kind of long, but fans of The Ring, myself included, can’t get enough of it and I am always deeply absorbed and amazed by this scene once I start listening to it.  If you want to skip Brunhilde’s monologue and cut to the chase, start at 4:00.  The rest of the opera is all Wotan, although Brunhilde’s presence is in integral part of the emotional drama:

 

Do you hear the theme from Ride of the Valkyries pealing from the trombones at that moment?  It’s another statement of that motive at a key moment in the drama.  What’s going on here is that Brunhilde has disobeyed her father’s wishes – well, his command anyway; their wishes are actually congruent – by protecting the wrong man in a recent fight.  If you want to take in the whole, convoluted, incest-ridden mythical story, read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Walk%C3%BCre#Synopsis

But long story short, Wotan must punish Brunhilde for her disobedience, and so strips her of her immortality and puts her in a deep sleep on a rock where she is vulnerable to the advances of any mortal man.  He is duty-bound, but really doesn’t want to do it, and it pains him, which Wagner illustrates most convincingly through his extended monologue at the end of the opera.  (Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt, claimed to be transfigured after listening to her first husband and Wagner champion, Hans von Bulow, play that scene at the piano.)  But in a twist at the end, he decides to extend a measure of protection and surround his beloved sleeping, now mortal daughter, with a ring of magical fire which will burn until a true hero is able to cross it and wake her up.  Who is that hero?  Well, you’ll just have to watch the third opera to find out, but there’s plenty of hints in the second one too.

This final scene is packed with different leitmotivs, darting in and out of the orchestral texture.  You can study them if you want to get an idea of what you are hearing, but the music is enjoyable even without knowing.  Still, it adds a considerable layer of musical and semiotic meaning to know a bit about Wagner’s leitmotiv system.  I’ve shown this scene to music students and raised my hand every time I heard a new leitmotiv enter the orchestration; I probably raised my hand a good 20 times over the course of that excerpt.  They are literally everywhere, and I can’t imagine the level of detail which pervaded Wagner’s musical imagination as he applied this system to 15 hours of some of the densest music ever composed.
Wagner was not the first to use the leitmotiv technique, and it owes much to the practice of “thematic transformation” pioneered by his father in law, Liszt (Cosima’s father) in his influential symphonic poems, composed mostly in the 1850s.  For more about Liszt see this post.  This resonance is certainly one reason that Liszt and Wagner found each other to be kindred spirits in forging the “music of the future”.  But Wagner’s Ring applies thematic unity on an entirely different level, a level that is as finely-wrought and also as much larger than life as the grand and intricate myths that inspired him, his philosophy, and his art.

 

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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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