Chapter 23: Class of 1813: Wagner and Verdi

I. Wagner A. Introduction 1. Few artists have had the impact across a diversity of fields that Wagner had. 2. In addition to a powerful musical imagination and impressive technique, he wrote prolifically about his views, which aids a study of the composer.

B. Art and Revolution: Wagner’s Early Career 1. Wagner’s musical career had a slower start than most of the others we have studied. 2. His third opera, Rienzi (1838–40), was the most successful of the early works. a. It is similar to French grand opera. b. Wagner had wanted it to premiere in Paris, but it was only accepted in Dresden. c. While in Paris he became familiar with Berlioz’s music. 3. Soon after the premiere, Wagner was offered a prestigious job as Royal Court Kapellmeister, which enabled him to supervise production of his next opera: Der fliegende Holländer (1843). a. This was his first opera on a subject from German legend. b. It is considered his first masterpiece. 4. With the Dresden Uprising (1849), Wagner had to leave the city. He had been drawn into revolutionary politics. He wouldn’t return to Germany for almost fifteen years. 5. Two more grand Romantic operas followed: Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. a. These two operas prompted Brendel’s New German School. 6. Dutchman dealt with a phantom sea captain, but Tannhäuser was based on a historical person from the Middle Ages (see Chapter 2). a. Wagner contrasts the religious pilgrims’ music (choralelike in melody and texture) with the seductive music of Venus. b. The knight is ultimately redeemed by the sacrificial love of the virginal Elisabeth. c. In the “Rome monologue” in the final act, Wagner introduces what he later calls unendliche Melodie, a seamless stream in which every note is thematic and meaningful. 1) The orchestra supports the web of emotions, ideas, and associations with “reminiscence motifs.” 7. In a manner similar to unendliche Melodie, the prelude of Lohengrin does not consist of contrasting sections but works toward complete formal unity.

C. The Artwork of the Future, Modeled on the Imagined Past 1. Wagner was the first composer to write his own librettos. 2. No Wagner opera premiered between 1850 and 1865. a. He spent the years from 1848 to 1853 thinking about his art, which produced significant changes. b. For several years he lived in Switzerland, writing and studying contemporary thinkers and activists. c. Schopenhauer was an important influence at this time.

3. Wagner developed an idea that the ancient Greeks had united the arts, but that these had subsequently split into different areas. He saw a reunification of them in Gesamtkunstwerk (total or united art work). a. As the arts split, people looked to Christianity for solace. Wagner saw this as weakness.

D. From Theory into Practice: The Ring of the Nibelung 1. The result of the time spent theorizing was the largest musical entity in the Western literate tradition: The Ring of the Nibelung. a. It took Wagner twenty-five years to write. b. It takes about fifteen hours to perform. 2. Wagner ties together the story of the German folk hero Siegfried with the history of the gods (Medieval Icelandic epics known as Eddas). 3. After beginning with Siegfried’s story, Wagner realized he needed to begin the story earlier: a preexisting musical reality that connected everything. 4. He backed up to the point where Wotan becomes the central figure (in Die Walküre). He committed the “original sin” by embedding his spear in the World Ash Tree. a. The rest of the Ring (destruction of the gods) is atonement for this action. 5. Wagner wrote the “poems” to the operas before composing.

E. Wagnerian Leitmotifs 1. The preferred genre for these works is “music drama,” not “opera.” 2. Wagner created ways to unite the music and ideas over a period of several days. a. There is a large-scale key structure at work, as well as tonalities associated with various elements. 3. He did not write the usual “numbers” but let the action continually evolve. 4. He used leitmotifs (which can be very small) to signal more than the words were telling the audience. a. More than 100 leitmotifs appear in the Ring. b. Many authors have compiled them, beginning with Hans von Wolzogen. 5. The motifs can signify many things, including characters, places, objects, emotions, and even abstractions such as “fate.” 6. They can appear in the orchestra or vocal parts. 7. Oftentimes leitmotifs sound similar; this is a way to impart the web of interrelations that Wagner presents. a. A noteworthy example is the simplistic E-flat major triad that opens the entire cycle. It takes on various meanings as the cycle proceeds.

F. Words, Orchestra, and Theater 1. Wagner struggled with verse structure for the poetry. He was not satisfied with modern verse structure and decided to invent a speech-melody of his own. 2. He based his poetry on the idea of Stabreim, an old bardic system of rhyming with letters. 3. The result has not received complete satisfaction for modern critics, but Wagner believed it to be a significant part of the work.

4. The use of the poetry and leitmotifs contribute to the “sea of harmony” that he created, swathing the audience in as many aural arenas as possible. 5. The harmony wanders through a broad spectrum of tonal centers, rarely stopping by avoiding authentic cadences. 6. His works demanded new instruments in the orchestra and extraordinary staying power from the singers. 7. Wagner also wanted a new theater structure for them, which was made possible when King Ludwig II came to the throne in the mid1870s. The result was Bayreuth.

G. The Ultimate Experience: Tristan und Isolde 1. Thinking that he would never be able to have the Ring performed, Wagner took a break while composing Siegfried and wrote two other works: Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger. 2. The story of Tristan comes from the Middle Ages and was rather famous. 3. In this work, Wagner wished to express longing and desire in music. The obvious answer was to create tension and delay resolution. 4. The tension is palpable from the opening prelude, which features the “Tristan” chord.

H. How Far Can You Stretch a Dominant? 1. Wagner’s real tonal innovation was not the Tristan chord but the failure to resolve the dominant seventh to which it moves. 2. In Act II, after spending the night together, Tristan and Isolde sing a song cursing the sunrise. a. The Medieval “dawn song” is known in German as the Tagelied. b. In the third section of this segment, Wagner presents one motive twenty-eight times, ever moving the harmony up a half-step while the bass descends by the same interval. c. When the bass finally reaches the F# (dominant) to which the scene has been headed, Isolde sings A# (leading tone) and resolves it to a high B, but the harmony underneath is not B major but instead the seventh of a dominant ninth as the two lovers are discovered. 3. The third act ends with the famous Liebestod in which Isolde is transfigured by an orgiastic death by love. a. The music recalls the scene discussed above, but this time resolves properly in the most obvious authentic cadence in the entire opera. b. Isolde’s soul passes into “night’s wonder world” where it joins Tristan’s.

I. Life and Art: Beyond Good and Evil 1. The moral conventions that Wagner disobeys in Tristan und Isolde (and elsewhere) in part reflect what was going on in his own life. a. Wagner had many affairs during both of his marriages. b. The affair with Mathilde Wesendonck looked similar to the love triangle in Tristan. c. He openly lived with Liszt’s daughter, Cosima, while she was still married to Hans von Bülow. 2. Wagner believed a great artist should be allowed to do what he needed to do to inspire his art. a. This derives partly from Nietzsche’s famous “beyond good and evil” comment that artists were not subject to the same rules as everyone else.

3. Wagner frequently explores the forbidden and suppressed. a. Freud studied these ideas. 4. He was very persuasive at convincing his listeners of his views. Many of these are scary: a. German identity leading to xenophobia b. Bigotry (against Jews, enlightened French, etc.) c. Against internationalism and rationality 5. The end of Die Meistersinger illuminates Wagner’s aggressive nationalism.

J. The Last Opera: Parsifal 1. Parsifal is based on a Medieval knight who is involved with the search for the Holy Grail. 2. The knight Parsifal has a task to redeem, and the opera is obsessed with community and purity. a. Some see it as a Christian opera. 3. The special orchestral effects in the work were made possible by Wagner’s opera house (Bayreuth) and its sunken/hidden orchestra. 4. It is an emotionally compelling musical experience.

II. Verdi A. Verdi: Upholding the Italian Tradition 1. Verdi and Wagner were born in the same year. 2. Wagner’s influence has made him seem the more important composer according to the way music history has been written, but that does not mean he is better. 3. During his lifetime, Verdi was generally the more famous composer. 4. Verdi saw a major distinction between the North (“sons of Bach”) and South (“sons of Palestrina). 5. Germans had dominated instrumental music and Italians vocal, but Wagner changed that. a. Verdi was concerned about the decline of Italian music.

B. Early Verdi: The Galley Years 1. Verdi worked as a staff composer in major Italian opera house 1839–53. 2. Because he was at the beck and call of others, writing on commission, Verdi likened these years to being in the galley of a Roman ship. 3. Italian opera was pretty much standardized, but each had its own style called a tinta. 4. Verdi wrote nineteen operas during this time. 5. Nabucco (1842) brought him to national prominence, and in 1844–47 he composed eight operas. a. The first of these is Ernani (1844).

C. “Viva Verdi!”: Risorgimento Politics 1. Verdi became the most performed Italian opera composer in the mid-century, during the Risorgimento—the period when Italy struggled for national unity.

2. One author, Giuseppe Mazzini, argued that the long-suffering Romantic hero was wretched, and the proper role of literature was “to soothe the suffering soul by teaching it to rise up toward God through Humanity.” 3. Opera could inspire the educated classes to action by providing a political conscience. 4. Verdi’s style enforced these ideals because it sought to make tangible cruelty, strife, force, and aggression.

D. The Popular Style: “Va, Pensiero” 1. Verdi’s operas included large choral numbers that were to rouse the listener. a. Because it was communally performed, it gave the appearance of solidarity, which aligned it with Risorgimento. 2. The characteristic example of this type of chorus is “Va, Pensiero” from the third act of Nabucco. a. The text is a paraphrase of the 137th Psalm. 3. Rossini said it was a “grand aria” for multiple singers. a. It resembles the cantabile of a Bellini aria, but the phrases are regular in the style of folk or street music. b. It did become something that people in the street sang, becoming an unofficial national anthem for the Italian nation. c. It was sung by people crowding the streets at Verdi’s funeral. 4. A legend arose associating Verdi’s name with the national movement (V.E.R.D.I.=Viva Vittorio Emanuele, Re d’Italia). a. While some of the popular attributes of this legend are not true, the fact that the association even existed is a testament to Verdi’s role in Italian nationalism. 5. A new type of singer developed during these years, one with a much larger voice. a. The tenor voice in particular changed, becoming the tenore di forza with the entire strength of the full voice carried throughout the entire range.

E. Tragicomedy in the Shakespearean Manner 1. Verdi dominated the librettist of Ernani, Piave, which was a reversal of the typical relationship. a. In this regard, Verdi controlled his later operas almost to the extent that Wagner did. 2. Verdi sought dramatic realism in his operas. a. Like Shakespeare, Verdi merged elements of all existing dramatic genres into a single idiom known as “tragicomedy.” b. In this regard, Verdi differs significantly from Wagner, who sought to align Greek aesthetics with epic subjects. 3. Verdi’s final operas were based on Shakespeare plays Otello and Falstaff.

F. Il Trovatore and La Traviata 1. Verdi wrote three masterpieces in three years: Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata. a. These have never left the performed repertory. 2. Il trovatore is the most conventional of the three. 3. Verdi took several risks with La traviata. a. He based it on a play that was currently running.

b. It takes place in contemporary time. c. It is based on the story of a courtesan. 4. The novel on which the opera was based, by Dumas the younger, was somewhat autobiographical, and Verdi’s life also had parallels with the opera. 5. Even in this earlier opera, Verdi combines tragedy and mirth.

G. Rigoletto: Opera as Modern Drama 1. Verdi’s irony is at its fullest in Rigoletto. a. It was his most Shakespearean work. b. The plot hinges on a single irony. 2. Verdi presents different types of drama within the opera. a. The first scene of Act I is comic, the second tragic. b. The final act is a gruesome mixture of comedy and tragedy. 3. Verdi is able to use music to take care of some of the weaknesses of Hugo’s original play. a. These are realized in the quartet of the final act. b. He makes the Duke’s character different by making it a tenore di forza role, but a cynical lover, not the romantic hero. 1) Verdi knew the Duke’s aria “La donna è mobile” would become a very popular tune, and he kept it secret until the last moment possible. c. The quartet is actually a double duet, the Duke and Maddalena sing to each other, and Rigoletto and Gilda sing to each other. 4. Analysis of the action is in the text.

H. A Job Becomes a Calling 1. After these operas, Verdi turned away from the cantabile/cabaletta pairing into a more realistic flow. 2. Pathos became a major factor in Italian opera. 3. He wrote two operas in the French grand-opera tradition. a. These are Les vêpres siciliennes and Don Carlos. 4. He received a commission from the tsar for La forza del destino and wrote Aida for the opening of the Suez Canal, performed in Cairo. 5. After being accused of imitating Wagner, Verdi retired and became a farmer. 6. He was lured out of retirement to compose operas based on Shakespeare, with the librettist Boito (with whom he revised Simon Boccanegra). a. The first of two Shakespearean operas was Otello. b. In this work he endeavored to create a “continuous finale” in which the idea of the group pieces in Mozart/Da Ponte comedies is stretched over whole acts.

I. Masterly Amusement: Falstaff 1. Verdi was led to opera via a tradition of buffa, mixed with seria. He shunned the supernatural. He strove for present action and let humankind be responsible for its own fate. a. Wagner worked from the tragic tradition, reveled in the supernatural, and worked within static tableaux. 2. Differences between the two can easily be drawn from their final operas: Falstaff and Parsifal.

3. Verdi worked, he said, for his own amusement. He essentially returned to buffa. 4. Both composers achieved a seamlessness in their final works. 5. Both composers used melodic reminiscence. 6. Falstaff ends with a joyous fugue, which seems to give a nod to the “sons of Bach” by showing that he, too, could compose in this manner.