Wagner, R. Archives - Paul Thomason

WAGNER’S LOHENGRIN — A BEL CANTO WORK IN DISGUISE?

“[Adelina] Patti continued her new departure into Wagnerland by singing Elisabeth’s prayer from Tannhäuser,” wrote George Bernard Shaw on July 18, 1894. “Now, if I express some skepticism as to whether Patti cares a snap of her fingers for Elisabeth or Wagner, I may, after all these years of ‘Una voce’ and ‘Bel raggio,’ very well be pardoned. But it is beyond all doubt that Patti cares most intensely for the beauty of her own voice and the perfection of her singing. What is the result? She attacks the prayer with the single aim of making it sound as beautiful as possible; and this being precisely what Wagner’s own musical aim was, she goes straight to the right phrasing, the right vocal touch, and the right turn of every musical figure, thus making her German rivals not only appear in comparison clumsy as singers, but actually obtuse to Wagner’s meaning.

“If Patti were to return to the stage and play Isolde, though she might very possibly stop the drama half a dozen times in each act to acknowledge applause and work in an encore…the public might learn a good deal about Isolde from her which they will never learn from any of the illustrious band of German Wagner heroines who are queens at Bayreuth, but who cannot sing a gruppetto for all that.”

George Bernard Shaw

Shaw, who knew a great deal about the art of singing and spent much of his tenure as music critic bullying the best singers of his day into adding Wagner to their repertory, ends with a couple of sentences that should be posted above the desk of everyone responsible for casting opera today: “Wagner means his music to be sung with the most exquisite sensitiveness in point of quality of tone and precision of pitch, exactly as Mozart did…I am really tired of going to the theater to hear the best music associated with the worst singing, and the best singing in the worst music.”

Unfortunately for most opera singers — to say nothing of audiences — Wagner himself often sabotaged the performance of his works with “exquisite quality of tone” by making sheer survival a preeminent consideration in some of his best-known roles. If a singer is worried primarily about just getting out the notes, being heard above a roaring orchestra, and making it to the end of the evening, vocal nuance and quality of tone are likely to be jettisoned early on, in the interest of staying afloat through a performance of Brünnhilde, Siegfried, Isolde, or Tristan. It is possible to sing Wagner’s heaviest roles beautifully and still be heard, but how often does God send along a Kirsten Flagstad?

In Lohengrin, Wagner wrote an entire opera for human-size singers. To borrow an analogy from the world of sports: if Amina in La Sonnambula and many of her bel canto cousins can be compared to a hundred-yard sprinter, and Siegfried or Tristan to an Olympic weight lifter, then Lohengrin might be an ice skater, who needs stamina and physical strength, but also grace and poise, as well as the ability to maintain a fluid, long line. In Lohengrin, Wagner wrote roles that make their greatest effect, not through sheer lung power but with the ability to infuse a beautiful vocal line with all the nuances and yes, charm, a singer would use to bring to life an opera by Bellini or Donizetti. This in the process of constructing an opera made up of arias, ensembles, choruses and finales, which — when properly performed — send shivers of delight down the spines of bel canto fans.

Wagner himself was thoroughly familiar with bel canto opera. As a young conductor he had prepared and led countless performances of the repertory. While conducting in Riga, he even went so far as to doctor up a performance of Bellini’s Norma by writing an additional aria for bass and male chorus, “Norma, il predesse.” (During his early years in Paris, Wagner tried to talk the great bass Luigi Lablache into adding the aria to his portrayal of Oroveso, but this idea was turned down on the grounds that Norma was too well known by the public to insert extra music.) In Paris, Wagner often heard the great singers of his time, such as the tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini, and the performances left an indelible impression on the young composer.

“R[ichard] sings a cantilena from I Puritani and remarks that Bellini wrote melodies lovelier than one’s dreams,” Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary on August 3, 1872. “The melody recalls Rubini to him, how wonderfully he sang it, and he observes: ‘Our German singers have to go about it in an entirely different way, because they have not got this gift.’ ” In March 1878, Wagner entertained guests by playing parts of Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi, La Straniera, and Norma. “There is real passion and feeling here, and the right singer has only to get up and sing it for it to win all hearts,” Cosima quotes her husband as saying, “I have learned things from them which Messrs. Brahms & Co. have never learned, and they can be seen in my melodies.”

Indeed they can. Take Elsa’s entrance aria, “Einsam in trüben Tagen.” Like many bel canto entrance arias (Lucrezia Borgia’s “Com’è bello,” for instance), on paper it looks simple, but to make its effect, it must be not only beautifully sung but mined for every emotional and musical nuance, a difficult feat. Otherwise the aria falls flat.

In the best bel canto tradition, Wagner uses the vocal line itself to describe Elsa’s character. Her pure, trusting nature and lack of worldly experience is reflected in her rather narrow vocal range: only from E‑flat above middle C to A‑flat at the top of the staff, a note she sings only twice during the entire aria. Yet her simple vocal line is studded with grace notes — beginning in the very first measure — and Wagner constructed the aria to provide numerous opportunities for portamento, and for a soprano to color phrases by using crescendo and diminuendo, as well as by taking subtle liberties with the rhythm, to vary their shape.

Rosa Ponselle

A prime example of a singer doing exactly what needs to be done to bring the aria to life is to be found at the end of Rosa Ponselle’s 1923 recording. Though Ponselle never sang the role onstage, she recorded the aria in German and, on the basis of this excerpt, could have been a superb Elsa. In the last phrase, “was ich bin!,” Ponselle lingers on the E‑flat at the top of the staff (“was”), then slowly reduces its volume, before using a portamento down to the G (“ich”) and gently leaning into and caressing the last note (“bin”). With just these three notes, there can be no doubt that Elsa is already in love with her champion, even though he has not yet appeared. It is superb drama, conveyed solely through the voice.

Ortrud too gains considerable power when she approaches her phrasing from a bel canto standpoint, rather than being content merely to be a vocal blowtorch. Listening to Lohengrin excerpts performed by the Vienna State Opera during a visit to Paris in 1933 (Volume 16 of the Vienna State Opera Live series from Koch/Schwann), I was stunned by Gertrude Rünger’s great Act II outburst, “Entweite Götter!” Where many Ortruds simply bellow the F‑sharps at “Wodan!” and “Freia!” in monochromatic fashion, leaving the depiction of the drama to the orchestra, Rünger hits the climactic notes cleanly, exactly on pitch, elegantly. (Remember, Ortrud is a noblewoman, and her family ruled the country for generations before the upstart Christians took over.) Rünger then borrows from Wagner’s dynamic marking for the timpani, making gradual crescendos on both of the F‑sharps. This gives her performance an astounding sense of power in reserve. Just by her vocal inflection on those two notes, Rünger lets us know her Ortrud still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve.

In the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, the singer’s voice was supreme. The orchestra was used to support and frame the voice, never to compete with it, a method Wagner incorporated in Lohengrin to a surprising degree. Of course, it is Wagner, so the Lohengrin orchestra is an important part of the drama. But even a cursory glance at the score shows a considerable amount of a cappella singing, which Wagner uses to great dramatic purpose.

Take Lohengrin’s entrance. After being heralded by a rousing eight-part chorus and fortissimo orchestra, Lohengrin’s first phrase is sung — a cappella. In fact, most of his farewell to the swan is unaccompanied; what discreet orchestral color Wagner uses is marked pianissimo and is supposed to diminuendo further from that pianissimo. Clearly Wagner meant to use Lohengrin’s first thirteen measures to seduce the audience by purely vocal means, by the way the tenor shapes his phrases, by the elegance and grace with which he sings Wagner’s embellishments.

Another example of Wagner’s use of a cappella singing appears at the beginning of the Act I finale, shortly before Lohengrin and Telramund fight their duel. Here, Wagner had the audacity to write an a cappella quintet! As if it were not tough enough for the singers to stay squarely on pitch, Wagner makes it even tougher: Ortrud, who has been standing around ever since the curtain went up (about fifty minutes before), finally sings for the first time all evening — a cappella. When Wagner brings in the first male chorus, then the orchestra, the effect is nothing short of hair-raising.

But then, Wagner also clearly understood the wonderful bel canto tradition of the two-part operatic finale, that massing onstage of chorus and principals, all of whom give voice to their (separate) feelings at that moment, first in slow tempo, then much more quickly. One of the tricks bel canto composers used to build excitement during the finale was to give one or two of the principal singers a long, flowing melody that would float ecstatically above the pulsating rhythm of the chorus, orchestra, and choppier vocal lines of the other soloists. Donizetti used the device to great effect time after time — at the end of Act II of Lucia di Lammermoor, for instance.

Wagner follows this example at the end of Act I, during the general rejoicing that follows Lohengrin’s defeat of Telramund. He gives Elsa a broad vocal line (even embellishing her music at one point with a turn) that effectively dominates the otherwise intensely rhythmic finale. In perfect Bellini or Donizetti fashion, Wagner keeps stretching the length of Elsa’s phrases, finally asking her to stretch one word, “Alles,” for seven and a half measures as she holds a high B‑flat for four of the measures, then moves stepwise (still singing the first syllable of “Alles”) down to C. It’s all about beautiful singing, and an Elsa in radiant voice, coupled with the right conductor, can bring down the house every time.

Perhaps it is in the bridal-chamber scene of Act III that Wagner wrote Lohengrin’s most heartfelt music. The intimacy he wrote of the duet for Elsa and Lohengrin, “Das süsse Lied verhallt,” calls for the purest bel canto singing from the tenor and soprano. For the duet to make its maximum effect, both singers must use the same sense of rubato that Maria Callas did in her 1949 recording of “Qui la voce.” It is the subtle speeding up or the slight hesitation a master singer uses that truly brings the melody to life.

Franz Völker as Lohengrin

There are two recordings of “Das süsse Lied verhallt” that illustrate this vividly, both based on the deservedly legendary 1936 Bayreuth performances of Lohengrin with Franz Völker and Maria Müller. The commercial recording (on Teldec CD) is conducted by Heinz Tietjen, and the sound is more than good, But to be really swept away by the power of Wagner at his bel canto best, listen to the thirty minutes worth of excerpts from the live July 19, 1936 Bayreuth performance (available on various labels). Under the magical baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Völker and Müller simply are Lohengrin and Elsa, overwhelmingly in love. Their music pulsates with emotion: the vocal lines have a truth and life that are almost unthinkable today. The carefully controlled, dreamy quality of the performance reminds us powerfully that once upon a time the Germans were viewed as a romantic people, not a brutal, militaristic society. Listening to Völker and Müller sing “Das süsse Lied verhallt,” one can easily understand why tenors like Enrico Caruso, even Fernando De Lucia, would chose to sing the part of Lohengrin — in Italian, of course. (Though Caruso never recorded any of the arias, De Lucia recorded an Italian version of “Mein lieber Schwan.”) One can also understand how Jean de Reszke could, and did, successfully alternate performances of Lohengrin and Faust, or Lohengrin and Roméo et Juliette, at the old Metropolitan Opera House.

And listening to the ebb and flow of the melodic line as gloriously spun out by Furtwängler, Völker, and Müller, one is also reminded of the sheer power a melody can have — and how often in Lohengrin Wagner made his dramatic and emotional points by composing some of the most beautiful bel canto music ever written.

This article originally appeared in the March 14, 1998 issue of Opera News magazine.

The art at the top is The Arrival of Lohengrin in Antwerp, a mural by August von Heckel (1882 – 83).

RICHARD WAGNER — THE RING, PART IV. GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

“The most astounding fact in all Wagner’s career was probably the writing of the text of Siegfried’s Death in 1848,” says Ernest Newman in Wagner as Man and Artist. “We can only stand amazed at the audacity of the conception, the imaginative power the work displays, the artistic growth it reveals since Lohengrin was written, and the total breach it indicates with the whole of the operatic art of his time. But Siegfried’s Death was impossible in the musical idiom of Lohengrin; and Wagner must have known this intuitively.”

Even so, it is unlikely that in November 1848 Wagner understood his new opera would not be completed for decades, or that it would — under the title Götterdämmerung—be the culmination of one of the greatest masterpieces in all of Western Civilization, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Earlier that year Wagner had finished orchestrating Lohengrin. He was becoming increasingly active in the political turmoil sweeping Dresden, (as well as much of Europe). He also made sketches for operas based on Friedrich Barbarossa and Jesus of Nazareth. That summer he had written “The Wibelungen World-history from the Saga,” and then, “The Nibelungen Myth as Sketch for a Drama” (dated October 4^th, 1848). But there is no indication at this time Wagner was actively planning on mining the Nibelung saga for more than Siegfried’s Death.

In May 1849 the uprisings in Dresden were put down and Wagner — who was wanted by the police for his political activity — fled, eventually settling in Switzerland. He produced a number of prose works over the next few years, including the important Opera and Drama, written during the winter of 1850 – 51, and planned an opera called “Wieland the Smith.” But in 1850 he also revisited his libretto for Siegfried’s Death, making some musical sketches.

The more Wagner thought about it, the more he realized that for Siegfried’s Death to truly be understood by the audience, they needed to know more about what had gone before, so in 1851 he wrote the libretto to Young Siegfried, followed by Die Walküre, and then Das Rheingold, spelling out in greater detail why the events of Siegfried’s Death occurred. It was not until October 1869 — after composing the music for the first three works in the Ring, as well as Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg—that Wagner again took up the task of composing the music for the drama now known as Götterdämmerung. The name change reflected a significant shift in the opera itself, from the death of its hero to the downfall of the gods themselves.

In the earliest version of the story, Brünnhilde took the body of Siegfried to Valhalla where his death redeemed the gods. Before igniting Siegfried’s funeral pyre, she announced, “Hear then, ye mighty Gods; your wrong-doing is annulled; thank him, the hero who took your guilt upon him…. One only shall rule, All-Father, Glorious One, Thou [Wotan]. This man [Siegfried] I bring you as pledge of thy eternal might: good welcome give him, as is his desert!”

There has been much speculation about why Wagner changed the ending of the Ring, from this optimistic one in which Wotan and the gods continued to rule, to the ending we know today, in which the gods perish. Sometimes this sift is attributed to his discovery of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, but that did not occur until the end of 1854, at which point Wagner had completed the text for the Ring. Wagner’s optimism in a new social order for Europe began crumbling as the revolts of 1848 and 1849 were crushed, and by the time he began making a prose sketch for Young Siegfried in May 1851, he noted: “Guilt of the Gods, and their necessary downfall. Siegfried’s mission. Self-annihilation of the Gods.”

Wagner told his Dresden friend August Röckel that he had always followed his inner instincts when writing his operas, rather than what he said — or thought — he believed, which is why even his operas Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin dealt with themes like tragedy and renunciation, rather than reflecting the political and social beliefs he had at the time. Reading Schopenhauer, he said, had allowed him to intellectually understand why his artistic instincts had been true all along.

When originally planning the Ring, he told Röckel, “I had constructed a Hellenistically optimistic world for myself which I held to be entirely realizable if only people wished it to exist, while at the same time seeking somehow ingeniously to get round the problem why they did not in fact wish it to exist.” But since he “remained faithful to my intuitions rather than my conceptions — what emerged was something totally different from what I had originally intended.” Finally, he explained, he understood that “the key-stone” for the Ring “consists in an honest recognition of the true and profound nature of things, without the need to be in any way tendentious.”

Röckel, who had only read the libretto of the Ring, asked Wagner a question that has puzzled audiences at Götterdämmerung from the beginning: “Why, seeing that the gold is returned to the Rhine, is it necessary for the Gods to perish?”

“I believe that, at a good performance, even the most naïve spectator will be left in no doubt on this point,” Wagner replied. “It must be said, however, that the gods’ downfall is not the result of points in a contract…; no, the necessity of this downfall arises from our innermost feelings. Thus it was important to justify this sense of necessity emotionally…. I have once again realized how much of the work’s meaning (given the nature of my poetic intent) is only made clear by the music. I can now no longer bear to look at the poem [the libretto] without music.”

This is a significant insight into Wagner’s view of the nature of both drama and music, views he held very early. When he was fifteen years old, Wagner wrote a play called Leubald und Adelaïde, a “great tragedy,” he later recalled in his autobiography, “drawn largely on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen.” There are ghosts, revenge and mayhem galore. The hero goes mad, and as Ernst Newman explains, “stabs Adelaïde, finds peace in the approved later Wagner manner, lays his head in her lap, and passes away in a gratified Verklärung, under her blood-stained caresses.” When Wagner showed the play to his family they were horrified he was wasting his time with such foolishness and neglecting his studies.

“I knew a fact that no one else could know,” Wagner later wrote, ”namely, that my work could only be rightly judged when set to the music which I had resolved to write for it.” No trace of his music exists, if, indeed, it was ever written. But the point is that from the beginning, Wagner’s view of drama depended on its most significant points being made through music. In a letter to the composer Franz Liszt, he explained the special nature of the music he was composing for the Ring. “The thing shall sound [the italics are Wagner’s] in such a fashion that people shall hear what they cannot see.”

Thomas Mann brilliantly summed up the relationship between Wagner’s words and his music in the speech he gave on the 50^th anniversary of Wagner’s death: “The texts around which it [the music] is woven, which it thereby makes into drama, are not literature — but the music is. It seems to shoot up like a geyser from the pre-civilized bedrock depths of myth (and not only ‘seems’; it really does); but in fact — and at the same time — it is carefully considered, calculated, supremely intelligent, full of shrewdness and cunning, and as literary in its conception as the texts are musical in theirs.”

Which is why Wagner’s inner daemon know he could not compose the music of Götterdämmerung until he had achieved absolute mastery of his compositional technique, something he explained to Röckel “has become a close-knit unity: there is scarcely a bar in the orchestra that does not develop out of the preceding unit.” As he composed the Ring Wagner greatly expanded his use of leitmotifs — bits of melody, harmony, rhythm, even tonality — far beyond merely representing a character or an object. They became infinitely malleable, and Wagner put them together in ways that became not only increasingly subtle, but also superbly expressive, adding layers of drama and emotion to the events taking place on stage. Even if listeners have no knowledge of the leitmotifs, Wagner’s music is still enormously potent and can be a life-changing experience.

“Music drama should be about the insides of the characters,” Wagner said. “The object of music drama is the presentation of archetypal situations as experienced by the participants [Wagner’s italics], and to this dramatic end music is a means, albeit a uniquely expressive one.”

At first glance, after the three preceding parts of the Ring with their uninterrupted flow of the drama, the libretto of Götterdämmerung might seem a throw back. It has recognizable, easily excerptable arias, a marvelous love duet, a thrilling swearing-of-blood-brotherhood duet, a chilling vengeance trio, and rousing choruses. But it is important to remember that when Wagner finally began to compose the music for Götterdämmerung he did not rewrite the libretto, other than making some changes in the wording of Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene. He knew the libretto worked exactly as it should, providing him with precisely the words and dramatic situations he needed to write some of the greatest orchestral music ever conceived. And it is through the music that Wagner can make dramatic points much more vividly than could be made through words.

One of the most shattering parts of Götterdämmerung is Siegfried’s Funeral Music. Even played in the concert hall, shorn of the rest of the opera, it makes a tremendous effect. In its proper place during a performance of the full drama, it is overwhelming. A bit of insight into why this is so comes from the diary of Wagner’s second wife, Cosima. The entry for September 29^th, 1871 reads:

“I have composed a Greek chorus,” R[ichard] exclaims to me in the morning, “but a chorus which will be sung, so to speak, by the orchestra; after Siegfried’s death, while the scene is being changed, the Siegmund theme will be played, as if the chorus were saying: ‘This was his father’; then the sword motive; and finally his own theme; then the curtain goes up and Gutrune enters, thinking she had heard his horn. How could words ever make the impression that these solemn themes, in their new form, will evoke?”

Cosima does not mention the concept of a Greek chorus in connection with the Immolation Scene or the great orchestral outpouring that follows Brünnhilde’s words. But it is impossible not to think of it as a magnificent musical threnody for everything that had gone before. A profound summing up of all the complex lives, situations, and emotions that had to be expressed by the orchestra at that moment because mere words could not do justice to them, or provide the catharsis that allows for a true transformation, and a new beginning — all of which Wagner’s music does, perfectly, at the end of Götterdämmerung.

Several years after the Ring had been given at Bayreuth in 1876, Cosima noted in her diary: “In the evening, before supper [Richard]… glances through the conclusion of Götterdämmerung, and says that never again will he write anything as complicated as that.” For some Wagnerians, he never wrote anything better.

A slightly different version of these notes appeared in the Metropolitan Opera Playbill, January 2012.

The art at the top of the page is part of Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s production of Götterdämmerung for the Salzburg Easter Festival 1967 – 72.

RICHARD WAGNER — THE RING, PART III. SIEGFRIED

In May 1857, Richard Wagner wrote to his friend Julie Ritter: “Although I have completed only the first act of Siegfried this winter, it has turned out better than I could ever have expected. It was completely new ground for me. Now that this act has turned out as it has done, I am convinced that young Siegfried will be my most popular work, spreading quickly and successfully, and drawing all the other dramas after it….But it seems increasingly probable that the first performance of the whole thing will not take place before 1860.” As things turned out the first performance “of the whole thing” — Wagner’s four-part cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen—did not take place until 1876. The orchestration of his opera Siegfried was not completed until February 1871, after one of the most troubling gestations in the history of music.

It had all started in the autumn of 1848 when Wagner wrote “The Nibelungen Myth as Sketch of a Drama,” based on his own reweaving of ancient Germanic and Norse myths. His tale of the rise and fall of the gods, the creation of the hero Siegfried (“the most perfect human being”), and his union with Brünnhilde, eventually grew from one opera to four. By 1857 Wagner had completed the libretto to the entire work, and composed the music to the first two operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.

But only a month after his letter to Julie Ritter, Wagner wrote to his friend, the composer Franz Liszt, “I have finally decided to abandon my obstinate attempts to complete my Nibelungs. I have led my young Siegfried into the beautiful forest solitude; there I have left him beneath a linden tree and have said farewell to him with tears of heartfelt sorrow: – he is better there than anywhere else.” Wagner — as usual — was in desperate need of money and the publisher who had agreed to buy his score to Siegfried and the last opera of the cycle, Götterdämmerung, had withdrawn the offer. “And so,” Wagner explained to Liszt, “I am now resolved upon a course of self-help. I have conceived a plan to complete Tristan and Isolde without further delay; its modest dimensions will facilitate a performance of it, and I shall produce it in Strasbourg a year from today…I am thinking of having this work translated into Italian and offering it to the theater in Rio Janeiro…I shall dedicate it to the Emperor of Brazil…and I think there should be enough pickings from all this to enable me to be left in peace for a while.”

It was a mad plan and, like many of Wagner’s attempts to make money, came to nothing. Wagner had not yet finished the prose sketch for Tristan, to say nothing of the actual libretto, or the music. His plan original plan “of leaving Siegfried alone in the forest for a year, in order to give myself some relief in writing a Tristan und Isolde” (as he told Julie Ritter in July 1857) eventually stretched to twelve years. During that time he not only finished Tristan, but revised his opera Tannhäuser for Paris, and wrote Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as well. Bavaria’s new king, Ludwig II took the throne in 1864 and became Wagner’s patron. Wagner also began an affair with Liszt’s daughter Cosima while she was still married to the conductor Hans von Bülow. Wagner and Cosima eventually married, but not before setting off a major scandal in Munich that threatened his standing with the king.

More than once, during this chaotic twelve-year hiatus, Wagner turned back to Siegfried but it was not until February 1869 he “put the finishing strokes to the second act of Siegfried” as he informed King Ludwig. By September he had finished the music to Act III, but to avoid having a performance of the work given in Munich (as had happened to the first two operas in the Ring, very much against his will), he delayed finishing the orchestration until February 1871, making excuse after excuse to the King.

There are numerous logical “outer” reasons that kept Wagner from doing any significant work on Siegfried for twelve years, but more than likely the true reason lay within Wagner himself. Deep within his psyche he undoubtedly realized that he needed to gain a more complete mastery of his individual compositional style before writing the music for the great confrontation between Siegfried and Wotan, and then Siegfried’s awakening of Brünnhilde.

Siegfried is the comic opera of the Ring, but it is also the great turning point of the entire cycle, where Wotan, whose concerns dominated the first two operas, gives way to Siegfried and Brünnhilde. As Wagner wrote to his good friend August Röckel, “Following his farewell to Brünnhilde [at the end of Die Walküre], Wotan is in truth no more than a departed spirit: true to his supreme resolve, he must now allow events to take their own course [the italics are Wagner’s], leave things as they are, and nowhere interfere in any decisive way; that is why he has now become the ‘Wanderer’: observe him closely! He resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence, whereas Siegfried is the man of the future whom we desire and long for but who cannot be made by us, since he must create himself on the basis of our own annihilation.”

Of all the major characters in the Ring, Siegfried is probably the one who has been most misunderstood. Comedienne Anna Russell’s description (“…he’s very young, and he’s very handsome, and he’s very strong, and he’s very brave, and he’s very stupid — he’s a regular Little Abner type.”) is the one many opera goers have, but it is not accurate. Siegfried is not a badly socialized adult, he is a teenager. Boisterous one minute, brooding and introspective the next. Emotionally he’s more on par with Cherubino in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, or Octavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, than Wagner’s Tristan or Siegmund. His only influence, other than nature itself (which he reveres) has been Mime, an evil manipulative dwarf who plans to use Siegfried to kill Fafner and regain the Nibelung treasure. “Even speech I’d scarcely have mastered, had I not wrung it out of [you],” Siegfried tells him, which tells us just how caring Mime has been.

Like most mythic heroes, Siegfried does not know his true parents, has never experienced their nurturing love, and has been forced to trust his own, inner instinct for survival. This instinct has made him hungry for knowledge, distrustful of Mime, and it is this instinct that leads him to file down the fragments of his father’s sword to re-forge into his own, rather than trying to patch them together with solder as Mime has tried to do. “I’ve grown as old as cave and wood but never saw the like!” Mime mutters as he watches Siegfried at work. Psychologically it’s a masterstroke on Wagner’s part to show Siegfried forging his own manhood (of which the sword is a symbol) rather than simply accepting someone else’s sword (identity) and using it as his own, as his father Siegmund did in Die Walküre. Siegmund simply accepted Wotan’s sword, so when he tried to use it in opposition to Wotan’s wishes, it broke. But when Siegfried uses it again Wotan in Act III he is successful because the sword is no longer borrowed from Wotan, Siegfried has made it his own. He has become his own man, a hero. And that is why he can easily pass through the magical fire surrounding the sleeping Brünnhilde, awaken her, and claim her as his mate.

It is through Wagner’s astonishing music that we can truly intuit the complex truth of his characters. While working on Siegfried Wagner wrote to Liszt, “Only in the course of composing the music does the essential meaning of my poem [the libretto] dawn on me: secrets are continually being revealed to me which had previously been hidden from me. In this way everything becomes much more passionate and more urgent.”

For Siegfried’s exuberant entrance in Act I Wagner wrote scampering eighth notes for his laughter that eventually climb to a high C, but only a few minutes later, Siegfried’s music is tender when he speaks of the birds in the forest, and it becomes filled with longing when he speaks of his mother’s death. At the moment Mime finally shows Siegfried the pieces of his father’s sword, Wagner’s orchestra tells us unmistakably what a significant moment this is. The very sound of the orchestra instantly becomes brighter. A listener does not need to intellectually know the trumpet plays the musical motif associated with The Sword and the strings counter with the motive known as Siegfried’s Youthful Strength in order to emotionally experience the great burst of energy and enthusiasm that explodes from the orchestra at that moment. It’s the perfect depiction of Siegfried suddenly understanding, deep inside, that this is what he needs to take the next step in life.

The music of the first two acts is dominated by the dark sound of the lower instruments in the orchestra. Act I takes place in Mime’s cave, set deep in the woods. Act II is set next to Fafner’s cave, deep in the forest. Until we meet the Forest Bird toward the end of Act II all the singers have been male. This means that Wagner’s musical palate has been largely the equivalent of a Rembrandt late self-portrait — predominately dark but filled with subtle hues. So when Siegfried defeats the Wanderer and climbs the mountain to find Brünnhilde, the change in Wagner’s music is nothing less than astonishing. It’s the equivalent of stepping outside and taking a deep breath of fresh, clean air after being in a cramped room. The sound of the orchestra changes as woodwinds and violins become more prominent, as do the harps (Wagner asked for six). The higher Siegfried climbs, the higher and more transparent the musical becomes until when he reaches the summit only the first violins are playing, their music going still higher up the scale. “He looks around for a long time in astonishment,” the stage directions say, and just as the violins approach a sustained C above high C, four trombones — very softly — sound the three chords that make up the Fate motif, the same three chords that had accompanied Wotan’s standing in the very spot where his grandson now stands. At the end of Walküre Wotan had stopped to look back with infinite regret at the sleeping Brünnhilde. Now Siegfried stands in wonder, filled with awe, and soon eagerness, to continue his heroic journey.

A slightly different version of these notes appeared in the Metropolitan Opera Playbill, October 2011.

The art at the top of the page is part of Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s production of Siegfried for the Salzburg Easter Festival 1967 – 72.

RICHARD WAGNER — THE RING, PART II. Die Walküre

“My Walküre turns out terribly beautiful,” Richard Wagner wrote to his friend, the composer Franz Liszt on June 16^th, 1852. “I hope to submit to you the whole poem of the tetralogy before the end of the summer. The music will be easily and quickly done, for it is only the execution of something practically ready.”

For neither the first, nor the last, time in Wagner’s life, things did not work out quite as he had planned. By the end of that year he had, indeed, finished the libretto (or “poem” as he called it) to his four-part cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”) based on stories from ancient Germanic and Norse myths. But the music for Walküre was not finished until December 1854, and it was another year and a half before he finished the orchestration.

The Ring begins with Das Rheingold, a one-act work Wagner called a “Preliminary Evening.” Die Walküre (“First Day of the Festival Play”) is next, followed by Siegfried, then Götterdämmerung. It all started in 1848 when Wagner wrote eleven pages he published as The Nibelungen Myth as Sketch for a Drama. But it was almost 30 years before the first performance of the completed work was given in a theater Wagner had constructed specifically for that purpose in Bayreuth, Germany. The Ring is monumental in both scope and impact. Most modern performances are spread over a week, and it is not going too far to say many people who attend a cycle feel their lives have been changed forever by the experience.

Wagner wanted the Ring to be given as a whole, rather than broken up, with individual operas given on their own. But soon theaters were presenting the parts of the Ring on their own, and Walküre quickly became the most popular. Before this new production by Robert Lepage opened in April 2011, Walküre had been given at the Met 522 times, considerably ahead of the next most popular part of the Ring, Siegfried (255 times), making it the second most-given of all Wagner’s operas, behind Lohengrin (618 performances.)

There are a number of reasons for Walkure’s enduring popularity. For one thing, after the gods and goddesses, dwarves and giants of Rheingold, Walküre introduces human beings into the story of the Ring. It begins with two very sympathetic people, Siegmund and Sieglinde, and the first act is devoted to them falling in love. “The score of the first act of Walküre will soon be ready; it is wonderfully beautiful. I have done nothing like it or approaching it before,” Wagner told Liszt. He was right. The music of Walküre builds significantly on Das Rheingold, where he had used leitmotifs to construct his music. These short segments of melody, rhythm, or harmony could be associated with a character or a dramatic event, even an emotion or an object. In Walküre Wagner used them to help him suspend time itself while the drama takes place, wordlessly, inside the characters. Thanks to Wagner’s brilliant writing for orchestra — something he had to develop even above what he had done in Rheingold—the audience actually experiences for themselves the inner lives of the characters on stage.

Just moments into Act 1 of Walküre, Sieglinde offers Siegmund some water. The stage directions say: “SIEGMUND: (drinks and hands her back the horn. As he signals his thanks with his head, his glance fastens on her features with growing interest.)” To underline these stage directions, Wagner silences the orchestra entirely, except for a single cello. For nine measures this lone cello plays some of the sweetest, most yearning music imaginable, before being joined by the rest of the cellos and two basses for another eight measures. Listeners need not know what labels commentators have attached to the music to experience for themselves the longing in Siegmund’s soul, the love that is even then starting to blossom. The music bypasses our mind and goes directly to our heart or soul where it seduces us into surrendering to Wagner’s world, to his way of telling his story.

The plot of Die Walküre can be told in a few dozen words. The outer events are relatively simple. But the inner journey the characters go through is almost unbearably rich and complex. It’s the difference between flying between New York and California, and driving there. You fly because you want to get to your destination as quickly as possible. But if you drive, the journey itself becomes the point: day after day spent in your car gives you a sense of the vastness of the U.S., of the gradual changes in the landscape, the shifting speech patterns of the people you meet, the way the light seems different. Your view of the United States is changed forever by the experience, it’s become part of you.

In Walküre, Wagner’s music has a new power to compel us to get in the car with him, to let him be our guide to experiencing quest he is undertaking. That’s how he allows us to experience the growing love between Siegmund and Sieglinde for ourselves, to feel the rightness, the naturalness of it. The compelling nature of their love is well established long before they (and we) discover they are brother and sister, so our emotions accept their love, even if our mind — assuming we can wrench it away from Wagner’s music – might have a few questions.

In addition to Siegmund and Sieglinde, in Walküre we meet Brünnhilde, one of the most important characters in the Ring. (Some would claim, with good reasons, she is the central character.) If we listen carefully to the music Wagner gives her, the dramatic arc she has in Walküre alone is staggering, to say nothing about in the rest of the Ring. She enters the story in Act 2, singing one of the most famous (and shortest) numbers in the whole cycle, Brünnhilde’s “Hojotoho!”

Wagner was extraordinarily careful in noting exactly how it should be sung. The first two syllables (“Ho-jo”) are a single phrase, followed by a sixteenth note (“to”) then the last syllable (“ho”) to be held for five beats, followed by a single beat rest. This gives the music a quick, bouncy quality that is emphasized later when he asks the soprano to sing the final “ho” on two notes, separated by a octave, but connected smoothly, ending on high Bs and then high Cs. He also asks her to trill — nonstop — for almost two measures before launching up to a high B and holding it for two measures. If a soprano can sing this incredibly difficult “Hojotoho” as Wagner intended, the audience cannot help being charmed by the impetuous, cheeky, rambunctious teenage girl who is sassing her father, Wotan — to his delight, and ours. Her character, and her relationship with Wotan are firmly established within a couple of minutes.

It is also one of the few genuinely joyful moments in Walküre, an opera rather short on happiness. To Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein Wagner lamented (while in the thick of composing), “I find the subject of Die Walküre too painful by far: there’s really not one of the world’s sorrows that the work does not express, and in the most painful form; playing artistic games with that pain is taking its revenge on me: it has made me really ill several times already, so that I have had to stop completely.”

Another reason for the popularity of Walküre is that we are likely to find ourselves mirrored it in. If not in the new love enjoyed by Sieglinde and Siegmund in Act 1, then by the dilemma facing Wotan in Act 2 as he realizes that all of his careful planning is for naught and that, despite his best efforts, his life has taken a terrible turn, leaving him no way out. The scene in which Wotan wrestles with this soul-crisis caused Wagner no end of trouble, and he agonized over whether or not people would grasp what Wotan is going through. “For the development of the great tetralogy, this is the most important scene of all,” he insisted.

Wotan’s anguish continues, with a new focus, in Act 3. Its ending is one of the most extraordinary in all of opera, with the sense of loss, of grief, of abandonment, yet overwhelming love, as Wotan is forced to let go of the most precious thing in the world to him, Brünnhilde. It seems like a bitter defeat for Wotan. His cherished son Siegmund is dead. His favorite child, Brünnhilde, is banished forever. His plans – to create a hero who would be able to win back the Ring and return it to the Rhine maidens and thus save the gods – have crumbled to nothingness. He has nowhere to turn. And yet…

And yet it is because of these apparently failures that Siegfried (in the next opera) can turn out to be the very hero the gods need. This glimmer of hope, in the middle of such overwhelming sorrow, is surely another reason Walküre is such a beloved opera.

Bavaria’s King Ludwig II was not willing to wait until Wagner had completed the entire Ring before experiencing Die Walküre in the theater. Against Wagner’s wishes, it was given for the first time on June 26, 1870 in Munich, nine months after the première there of Das Rheingold. To show his displeasure, Wagner refused to be involved in any way, and he asked his friends not to attend. The famous violinist Joachim was there. So were Brahms and Saint-Saëns. Despite his friendship with Wagner Liszt went and sobbed through part of the opera he was so very moved. Even newspapers usually critical to Wagner pronounced Die Walküre an extraordinary work of art.

The fact that opera houses continue to devote considerable time and resources to presenting Die Walküre in new ways — generally to standing room only audiences — proves that Liszt did not exaggerate when he wrote to Wagner, “Your Walküre (score) has arrived, and I should like to reply to you by your Lohengrin chorus, sung by 1,000 voices, and repeated a thousandfold: ‘A wonder! A wonder!’ ”

A slightly different version of these notes appeared in the Metropolitan Opera Playbill, April 2011.

The art at the top of the page is part of Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s production of Die Walküre for the Salzburg Easter Festival 1967 – 72.

Richard Wagner — THE RING, Part I. DAS RHEINGOLD

In all of Western civilization there is nothing quite like Richard Wagner’s stupendous cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring). Based on Wagner’s own retelling of stories from ancient German and Scandinavian mythology, it consists of four separate but intimately related operas — some of them among the longest ever written — usually given over the space of a week.

Das Rheingold is the first chapter in this epic tale, and it is — quite unfairly — sometimes not given the respect accorded other parts of the Ring. For one thing, it is by far the shortest. At two and a half hours it is one of Wagner’s shortest operas, about the same length as The Flying Dutchman. The composer himself (probably inadvertently) contributed to this slighting of Rheingold by calling it a “preliminary evening” to the rest of the Ring.

In 1848 he finished orchestrating Lohengrin and wrote the poem to a new opera, Siegfried’s Death, (known today as Götterdämmerung). Deciding he needed to explain how the events of that opera had come to be, he wrote the poem to Young Siegfried (the opera we now know as Siegfried) in 1851. The following year, feeling further explanation was needed he wrote the poem to Die Walküre.

“In order to given everything completely, these three dramas must be preceded by a grand introductory play: The Rape of the Rheingold,” Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt. “The object is the complete representation of everything in regard to this rape: the origin of the Nibelung treasure, the possession of this treasure by Wotan, and the curse of Alberich….[By writing this separate drama] I gain sufficient space to intensify the wealth of relationship, while in the previous mode of treatment I was compelled to cut down and enfeeble this.”

During the time Wagner was creating the libretto to his stupendous new work he was also writing books and pamphlets – on theatrical reform, on opera and drama, and the art work of the future. As his ideas on the nature of opera changed, so did the nature of his libretti. Götterdämmerung has marvelous arias, a thrilling love duet, a sensational vengeance trio, all of which can be excerpted and performed in on their own (as can some of the orchestral passages). But by the time Wagner wrote the libretto to Rheingold in 1852 his idea was that the drama should not be interrupted by musical set pieces like arias and duets, but ought to continue unfolding seamlessly.

This meant the music for the singers must be different from the way the vocal line had been written in operas before. It also meant that the orchestral music would be different from anything in the history of opera, with the orchestra being as integral a part of conveying the drama as were the singers onstage. “The music shall sound in such a fashion that people shall hear what they cannot see,” he wrote to Liszt. In fact, composition sketches show that as Wagner was in the preliminary stages of compositing the music he was thinking not only of the words, but of the stage directions, as well, writing music that reflected the movement on stage.

To do this, Wagner developed the system of leitmotivs — bits of melody, or rhythm, or harmony that are associated with a character, a dramatic event, an object or an emotion. They are much more than mere “musical sign posts” that whiz past during the opera. Beginning with Rheingold, Wagner’s music springs almost entirely from these building blocks, which he molds or combines to reflect shifts in the drama taking place on stage. This means the music can let the audience know what a character is really thinking, for instance, or why an event is taking place. There was no precedent in all of opera for this new idiom in which Wagner began working for the first time with Rheingold. “I am spinning my cocoon like a silkworm,” he wrote to Liszt as he composed Rheingold’s music, “but I spin it out of myself.”

Wagner had written no music for five years — from the time he finished Lohengrin until he started composing the music to Rheingold in 1853. (Though the libretti to the Ring operas were written in reverse order, the music was composed from the beginning of the cycle to the end.)

One of the most overwhelming tasks Wagner faced was how to start Rheingold. What music could possibly launch not just this opera, but also the Ring as a whole? How do you covey in music the beginning of Creation? As always with Wagner, his reminiscences are to be taken with a grain of salt, but as he later related events, he had gone for a long walk, then returned to take a nap. Falling into a state of half-sleep, he suddenly felt as if he were sinking into a flood of water:

“The rush and roar soon took musical shape within my brain as the chord of E flat major, surging incessantly in broken chords: these declared themselves as melodic figurations of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E flat major never changed….I awake from my half-sleep in terror, feeling as though the waves were now rushing high above my head. I at once recognized that the orchestral prelude to the Rheingold, which for a long time I must have carried about within me, yet had never been able to fix definitely, had at last come into being in me: and I quickly understood the very essence of my own nature: the stream of life was not to flow to me from without, but from within.”

There is nothing in all of opera like this miraculous beginning to Rheingold: the note of low E flat softly played by the doubles basses, then, four measures later, the note of B flat added by the bassoons to that basic E flat. And twelve measure later one French horn (“very sweetly” says the score) intoning the notes of the E flat major triad up the scale for over two octaves, followed by another French horn, and then another, until all eight horns are playing waves of arpeggios, all on the three notes of the E flat major triad. Then the cellos, and eventually the entire orchestra join in. It’s a musical depiction of the creation of life itself, growing from a single cell (that first E flat) until the Rhine maidens suddenly break into the song of joyous, unspoiled Nature itself.

In addition to writing music unlike anything ever heard before, in Rheingold Wagner was making demands for the physical stage that went far beyond what was even possible at the time: the opening scene in the Rhine river with the Rhine maidens swimming around as if in mid-air; the shift from the depths of the Rhine to the airy mountain tops of the gods with Valhalla in this distance; descending to Nibelheim and back again; how could Donner summon the swirling mists on stage, then dissipate them on cue with his hammer, conjuring up the rainbow bridge over which the gods would walk to their new home? What did Rhine maidens look like? The Nibelungen? How should the goddess Erda be portrayed so she was not merely (in the words of comedienne Anna Russell) “a green-faced torso popping out of the ground”?

All of this Wagner had to deal with in Das Rheingold. The fact that he not only got it right, but go it so right than the rest of his stupendous Ring cycle seems to flow effortlessly from Rheingold, means this opening chapter deserves respect as not only the cornerstone on which the rest of the Ring builds, but as a musical and dramatic masterpiece all on its own.

Wagner did not want to give any part of the Ring until the entire cycle could be presented as a whole, something he knew would require its own “great festival, to be arranged perhaps especially for the purpose of this performance,” as he told Franz Liszt before a note of the music had been composed. But against Wagner’s wishes, Das Rheingold had its première in Munich on September 22, 1869, on the express orders of King Ludwig II. It was seven years before Wagner was able to present the Ring in its entirety, in the theater at Bayreuth he had built specifically for the work. Even there, the colossal stage requirements Rheingold made were not met to Wagner’s satisfaction.

The program for the first Met performance of Das Rheingold on January 4, 1889, carried the note: “For this opera the scenery has been ordered from Germany and the costumes and armorare from the designs of Prof. Doepier, who made the original drawings for Richard Wagner.” The one-act opera was presented with an intermission between the second and third scenes. “This is the practice of the Imperial Opera House in Vienna, and though open to objection on artistic grounds will doubtless prove a welcome relief,” noted one New York newspaper the day before the première. In fact, Wagner himself had raised no objections to the intermission when Rheingold was given in Berlin in 1881, and until almost World War Two the Met presented the work both with and without an intermission, sometimes during the same season.

Before this new production by Robert Lepage opened the Met’s 2010-11 season on September 27^th, Das Rheingold had been given 154 times by the company, far few times than Götterdämmerung (224), Siegfried (255), and Die Walküre (522). But along the way this one-act opera has attracted some of the greatest singers, conductors, and stage directors of their time, all engaged in the Herculean task of bringing to life Wagner’s sublime — and immense — vision.

A slightly different version of these notes appeared in the Metropolitan Opera Playbill September 2010.

The art at the top of the page is part of Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s production of Das Rheingold for the Salzburg Easter Festival 1967 – 72.