Musical Effects, part 2: Mind-meld

All operas aim to give expression to profound human emotions and feelings. Traditionally, the emotions of opera were primarily contained in the musical set-pieces, such as the aria. Typically, arias expressed just one or, sometimes, two central emotions, as in most popular song. If two emotions were displayed, the singer would generally go from, say, love to anger and back again, with different music for the love and anger portions. If the musical set-piece was multi-part, such as a trio or quintet, then each character would sing their particular point of view and emotion, and in that way conflicting emotions could be overlapped. These set-pieces often seemed to virtually stop time and forward momentum to give a chance for the singer or singers to (emotionally) comment on what was going on.

Wagner, on the other hand, by using completely different dramatic and musical techniques, is able to show human emotion in a more natural and complex way. Essentially, he uses a musical stream of consciousness, via ever forward, developing melody. (The literary stream of consciousness movement came directly from Wagner, but that will be a much later post.) Through both the voice and the orchestra, he is able to really pierce the emotional mind of his characters, and so the listener experiences their thoughts in a way that feels extraordinarily true to life. To create the most compelling and moving effects, he put his characters repeatedly in highly charged emotional situations, often on one of the most pivotal days of that person's life—often a wretched day, sometimes a peak moment, occasionally both. At its best, it can feel like a veritable mind-meld, a kind of super empathy. (This effect is particularly accentuated and strengthen by hallucinogens, as the ego is weakened in this state so the boundaries of me/other are much more fluid.) To me, this aspect of Wagner is just as important, maybe even more so, than the leitmotif technique.

Here is a concrete example from Tristan and Isolde of “King Marke's lament.” (Please ignore the set and costumes; that is what is known as "eurotrash.") Or, for another version but with Spanish subtitles, King Marke is sung by the great Rene Papé: part 1 and part 2.

To set the scene of this example: Tristan has brought Isolde—at Tristan's insistence—from Ireland  to marry his mentor and closest friend, King Marke of Cornwall. But soon after the voyage, Marke, through the machinations of Tristan's "friend," Melot, finds Tristan and Isolde in delicto flagrante. These alternate clips takes up at that point.

Marke is devastated by this betrayal and sings through his torment, expressing why it is so inexplicable to him. The orchestra underpins and emphasizes the emotional truth behind his lyrics, showing the changing tumult of feelings. He begins with utter shock and sadness and a hint of anger. Music of great tenderness plays underneath his words as he questions how this could possibly come about given what he and Tristan have meant to each other. When addressing the issue of the arranged marriage to Isolde, music of yearning and frustration along with woe develops. Eventually, his anguish turns to anger and bitterness and self-pity, even a touch of madness, but soon pulls back to incredulity and sadness. The tender music reemerges, showing the depth of his love for Tristan and, finally, a return to just utter disconsolation.

King Marke has feelings he simply does not know what to do with. Most people have had such feelings of agonized grief. It's that feeling that you just want to die; life feels unbearable at that moment in time. Wagner brings you to a place—for those who give him a chance—where you can actually feel Marke's pain as your own. True empathy.

I picked this example not because it is considered a celebrated excerpt; it is not. Rather, even some Wagnerians consider it fairly dull (particularly compared with the fireworks of most of Tristan and Isolde). I, however, cannot listen to this “boring” piece without crying, as it brings me emotionally back to moments of tormented grief when I was likewise hurt, seemingly inexplicably, by someone I loved.

This piece is Marke's first entry on the stage and it is very easy to understand his emotions but, also, to take the measure of the man. You understand that he is at the darkest moment of his life, and—though he has the power to exact revenge and is encouraged to do so by Melot—the only thing he truly seeks is understanding. Though he is angry, and for a few moments close to crazy, what really comes through is that he is a kind and compassionate man who is simply tormented by trying to make sense of “the deep reason” for Tristan's betrayal.

In those 15 minutes, I learn far more about King Marke than I ever learn about, say, Rodolfo in La Boheme or countless other opera characters. And so it goes for most Wagner characters—his techniques lead to much more complex character development, and much more empathy, than is possible in most of opera.

So why do I like this feeling of super-empathy? I believe the feeling of empathy is the bedrock of morality. An empathic connection to one individual leads directly to both understanding and compassion for all people in similar situations. It isn't quite, to quote Madame de Stael, savoir tout c'est tout pardonner (to know all is to forgive all), but empathy opens one's heart and that leads to compassion, and often, forgiveness. In King Marke's case, if he could have understood what was in Tristan's heart, the empathy would have been healing to him. Instead, he is in torment. 

Okay, so King Marke had a very bad day. What about somebody who has had an extremely good day? That's the subject of the next blog: Wagner and ecstasy.

Wagner's Musical Effects, Part 3: Ecstasy

Below is a picture capturing the moment Phil Mickelson–after a decade of trying–finally broke through and won a major at the 2004 Master's tournament. 

I love this picture as it clearly captures not only the ecstasy Phil felt, but also that of the entire crowd. They were feeling exactly what Phil was feeling at that moment in time—magnificent relief and pure unadulterated joy. It was such a wonderful moment. I'm not even a big golf fan, but I did at home exactly what everyone else did at the tournament—which was to throw up my arms and yell “yes!”—because he had been denied this victory for such a long time.

His moniker, until this defining moment, was “the best golfer to never win a major.”  I am quite sure that everyone in Boston did the exact same thing when the Red Sox finally broke the curse—also in 2004—and won the World Series after 86 years. 

The euphoric payoff is certainly one of the big reasons, if not the key reason, people love to watch sports. The payoff is particularly sweet coming after a long streak of denial, after agony. If Phil had won a major much earlier in his career, he might have looked the same in the photo, but the audience wouldn't have. There would have been disappointed fans of Ernie Els, for instance, whom he defeated by a stroke. Some might have shrugged, or clapped politely, but not everyone would have been united in joy as they were here.

So what does this have to do with Wagner? As I described in my last post, Wagner has a unique ability to create an empathetic connection to his characters. While true of agonized grief (like in my King Marke example last post) and a myriad of other emotions, it is particularly true of ecstasy. He is a master at developing the feeling of bliss. In my initial chapter on Wagner's musical effects, I quoted various people saying they felt “uplifted,” “besotted” and “enraptured” by listening to his music. This effect is the reason; when a character feels euphoria, we Wagnerians do also. While we politely stay in our seats during Wagner's many rapturous moments, in our heads we are throwing up our hands up and soaring into the heavens. This is the crack that makes people come back repeatedly to Wagner.

I will give excerpts, but I must warn you that without the build-up, the release doesn't really work the same, anymore than Mickelson's putt in the 2004 Master's would have worked to create the crowd euphoria without build up of frustration. True ecstasy needs agony or it just doesn't have that feeling of divine relief and release.

Wagner had a masterful ability to slowly build a drama, sustaining and intensifying suspense, towards a rapturous climax, or multiple climaxes, as is evident in Tristan and Isolde—the supreme example of this being the finale of the opera, “The Liebestod.”  (Here with Birgit Nilsson.) This ability to build towards an ecstatic release is striking in all of his mature works.

I don't want to imply that the build-up to the climax is somehow simply in service to this effect, and not extraordinary itself. For instance, at the beginning of Die Walkure, Siegmund meets Sieglinde and they fall in love. A universal story, but the manner in which is is done is “a masterpiece of rhapsodic melody joined to a tight plan of steadily rising tension released in successive climaxes as the two are drawn to each other and reveal their pasts.” (Quoted from here.) Exactly so. The journey to the moment of them proclaiming their love is enthralling in and of itself, the various peaks just making it more so. Here is Sieglinde (sung by Jessye Norman) declaring her love for Siegmund, which comes about an hour after the gorgeous orchestral music has already made us feel what is in her heart.

Of course, one of the reasons he was successful in creating his emotional effects is that he had the ability to write melodies perfect for the emotional moment, and that is particularly true of euphoria. As an example, listen to this music from Die Walküre that begins at 1:25. Build-up or no, it always sends ripples of elation through me. (The subtitles are in German so, without recapitulating too much of the story, the gist is that Brünnhilde, who has just saved Sieglinde from the wrath of Woton, is telling her that she is pregnant with the destined-for-heroic Siegfried. Sieglinde responds by singing of her tremendous veneration of and gratitude to Brünnhilde. This clip is with Hildegard Behrens and Jessye Norman.)

Wagnerians have been trying for over 150 years to explain the whys and the hows, as well as the mere fact of the incredible feelings one can get from listening to Wagner's music. This and the two posts before were my stab at it, and quite inadequate I am sure. Truly, it is ineffable.  But let me summarize by quoting my favorite Wagner author, Bryan Magee, from his outstanding book, The Tristan Chord:

Music of this greatness is a directly felt experience as profound as any that it is possible for us to have.

That's it in a nutshell.

I can guess what some may be thinking at this point: If Wagner is so damn good, how come his reputation is that his music is loud, long and boring? That's the subject of the next post.

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End notes

I always have things to say that are off-point. So I am going to add this section to my posts to round those up.

• I hope Phil Mickelson loses badly from now on. I hate whiny, rich guys.  As a Californian, all I can say is good riddance. 
  
  
• Our dog, Ziggy, is named after Sieglinde from Die Walküre and does respond to her full name. We didn't spell it Siegy because no one would know how to pronounce it.
  
  
• I had found my musical examples for this post by just trolling through Youtube, seeing who had a version I liked. I had never heard Jessye Norman sing any Wagner, but thought she did a great job with these musical moments. While I was working on this post, Leslie was shopping. About an hour after I found those clips, she came home with a VHS collection of a New York Met Der Ring des Nibelungen for $8 from the Goodwill with Jessye Norman as Sieglinde (the same one as the two clips). Cool happenstance.

Wagner's Musical Effects 4: Loud, Long, and Boring?

The title of this post is the reputation of Wagner's music, and if you change the middle phrase to longwinded, of the composer himself. I will leave the latter to the posts about his character, but I will take up the issues of his music here.

His reputation in one graphic by André Gill, 1869:
his music assaults the ear.

Loud

At this point in time, this reputation is a quite silly on the musical front. In the age of rock and roll, his music cannot be considered particularly loud. And, unlike rock, the musical peaks in orchestral music—including Wagner—are relatively short compared to the consistently high decibel levels at a rock concert. I always use ear plugs at rock concerts and have never felt the need at Wagner operas.  (Though for orchestral players, there is a real problem with the decibel level of the modern orchestras, and Wagner is but one who contributes to that problem.)

The most salient fact is that his music has, like most orchestral music, a very wide dynamic range. Anyone who thinks Wagner is just boomingly loud ought to listen to him in a car, where his music is often maddeningly soft and impossible to hear. It's true that compared to many earlier composers, Wagner's orchestra is much bigger, ergo louder, when he writes a forte. That said, it was Beethoven who expanded the orchestra greatly, and Wagner just followed in that path, as did the vast majority of composers after Beethoven. In fact, the modern orchestra has continued to expanded past Wagner's peaks. So, yes, he and many others can, indeed, be fortississimo. To say that he is particularly so is just nonsense if you base your comparison on composers who came after him.

I think a perfect example of Wagner's musical dynamic range is Siegfried's Funeral March. He may have crescendos that go as loud, but surely none louder (from 6:19-6:40 in the excerpt).  The piece—and this pattern is typical for Wagner's music— starts very quietly, builds and creates a small, but booming, peak, then pulls back. This is repeated until he finally builds to a towering climax, and then resolves quietly. You be the judge if it is “too loud.”  Personally, I love it!

All that said, many do feel that Wagner's music, particularly the singing, assaults their ears, even if it isn't related to decibel level. In a truly wonderful Mark Twain essay from 1891 entitled “The Shrine of St. Wagner”—the shrine being Bayreuth, Wagner's summer music festival— he makes that case, with Parsifal as the object of derision:

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, of course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts.

Later Twain goes into some depth on the subject of the singing:

I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of ‘Parsifal’ anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody; one person performed at a time—and a long time, too—often in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out long notes, then some short notes, then another long one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two—and so on and on...If two of them would but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don't do that. The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts.

What Twain doesn't appreciate is that Wagner uses the voice as a part of the orchestra, much as when a jazz singer scats, her voice becomes part of the ensemble. Twain clearly heard and loved the orchestral music underneath the singing, but was not comfortable with this use of the voice on that initial hearing of the opera. However, he changed his tune by the end of the week at Bayreuth:

I have seen my last two operas... I was supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was ‘Parsifal.’

Twain, of course, lived in an era in which their were no subtitles, so much of the drama was lost on him. As well, this sort of opera, with continuous music and without the set-pieces de rigueur in opera to this point, was still quite foreign. The reaction to Wagner's music then is much like the reaction of many—my parents for instance— to rock n' roll: it's just noise, and there is no melody. Clearly, with any musical development, to enjoy it one must have an open mind, and gain an ear. I think it is clear that Twain was well on his way to becoming a Wagnerian.

Long

The reputation of Wagner's operas as being long is but an extension of the belief that operas in general are long. However, since operatic lengths vary widely, this is clearly not always the case. Many operas, including Wagner's two shortest (both about 2 ½ hours), The Flying Dutchman and Das Rhinegold are, in fact, shorter than many theatrical productions, concerts and sporting events and, increasingly, movies. For instance, this year, The Hobbit, Les Misérables and Zero Dark 30 were all longer than many operas, including those two by Wagner.

However, the fact is that, in general, Wagner wrote longer operas than most composers, so they are long relative to the standard opera, and long relative to most events with audiences. His longest opera, which is also the longest in the standard opera repertoire, is Die Meistersinger, which is about 4 ½ hours without intermissions.

So, objectively, I concur that they are long. But the feeling of time is subjective. And, to me, when absorbed by Wagner's music dramas, time seems to stand still as I am completely in the moment, and yet when it is over, hours have gone by and I have barely noticed. The conductor Daniel Barenboim makes the same point here about music:

If you are really able to concentrate totally on it, to grab the sound and hold onto it...and if you stay fully attached to the sounds as they develop, as they unfold, you are basically coming out of time. You must be able to do it with all your faculties, physical and psychic, with total concentration. And suddenly, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony takes 33 minutes, and for those 33 minutes you are out of physical reality. Music gives you the physical and metaphysical possibility of totally detaching yourself from the world.

This is why, in 1986, I happily stood to see Die Meistersinger two times in San Francisco, and then flew across the country to see it—again standing—two more times in New York that season. I was entranced all four times, and my feet didn't even notice. However, I remember going to the Mozart opera, Cosi Fan Tutte (three hours with intermissions), around the same time and feeling it was interminable. I kept busily shifting my feet from side to side to create more physical comfort, and was thrilled when the ordeal was over.

When enthralled by one's passion, it is a common experience for time to seem to fly. Did fans of The Lord of the Rings resist the extended version? No, they did not. They were thrilled by more of it! That's the way I think of Wagner's music. Could I hear the extended version, maestro? That said, I don't think you need to be enthralled to be perfectly content at Wagner's operas. You just need to watch, listen and be open to it as a music drama. And eat a snack and use the restroom between acts. I would suggest a matinée.

Boring

[Parsifal] is an opera that begins at five-thirty. Three hours later you look at your watch. And it's only twenty to six. (Attributed to critic George Jean Nathan here, page 377.)

Of course, time crawls when something is considered a drudge. Like factory work.  Like a hated class. Clearly this is completely subjective, and certainly can be related to the length, but also to expectation. If you are sure you won't like something, then that is much more likely to be the case. And the longer the thing goes on, the more boring you are apt to find it. So if you are dragged to a Wagner opera with such expectations, the chances are your expectations will come true: it will be boring.

There are three sorts of Wagner listeners:

1. Those who think, or assume, he is loud, long and boring and avoid his works. Many of those people, of course, have barely listened, knowing his work only through popular culture. If they are convinced to try an opera of his, trust me, they will not like it.
2. Those who have listened and do appreciate him in limited amounts. Rossini speaks for these people with his famous quote: “Monsieur Wagner a de beaux moments, mais de mauvais quart d'heures.” (English translation: Mister Wagner has some good moments, but some bad quarter of hours.) By the way, it is usually translated as “awful quarter of hours!”, which is the translator inserting editorial content via a word change and added exclamation point.  My French professor confirmed that this isn't a translation that should be made. Those “bad quarter of hours” were in reference to the Wagner monologues—or, occasionally, duologues—that are at the emotional heart of his music dramas, as I described in my three musical effects posts, particularly this one.
3. The folks who love Wagner’s rich and beautiful orchestration—“the good moments”—but also the deep emotions that come only from opening your heart to those “bad quarter of hours.” The conductor James Levine was asked about these monologues: “I'm crazy about them. I can always feel, as the orchestra settles down and Woton begins the monologue in the second act of Walküre, you can hear all the people who were dragged to the performances turning off and all the Wagnerites turning on.”

In sum: for Wagner’s music, whether you consider the music assaultive or enriching, whether time crawls or flies, whether you are enthralled or bored, it’s all about your perspective. Obviously, to me, it is not too loud, not to long and certainly not boring.

Wagner's Musical Effects 5: Erotics

Isolde’s orgasm changed everything. – Sam Able, Opera in the Flesh

Wagner wrote music about sexual desire and fulfillment in an amount and manner that marks him as the supreme musical eroticist of all time. Laurence Dreyfus, who examines this in detail in his book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, begins his book:

To treat eroticism in music might seem an exercise in vain speculation since—tempting as it is to draw connections—most composer leave, at best, only a hazy trace in their music. Not so Richard Wagner (1813-1883), who more than anyone else in the nineteenth century made plain his relentless fixation on sexual desire, a fixation documented in private correspondence, personal diaries, published essays, and, of course, in his operas and music dramas. Wagner’s obsession with sex also sparked a remarkable reaction to his works, which, in its public parade of the issue, changed the course of music history.¹

I would go farther than Dreyfus and add that it changed the course of romantic expression in the arts in general and played a crucial role in early sexual liberation movements, particularly, but not limited to, Germany. I will save this topic, however, for a later post.

Wagner’s central concern in life—philosophically, emotionally and spiritually—was romantic passion and sexual desire. He believed that the Judeo-Christian society had screwed up royally by treating sexual desire as sinful, seeing the body as something shameful, and treating artistic depictions of the the highest expression of love between two human beings, the life-creating sexual act, as offensive and depraved. Instead he thought that art should revolve around human beings—not God—and should celebrate life, the human body and, most centrally, sexual love, harking back to the Greek model.²

That said, Wagner had mixed feelings about casual sex. Every fiber of his being strived for a passionate love with a woman. He truly felt sexual expression in that context was the peak of human existence; the uniting of man and woman was, to him, “the path to salvation.”³ However, he indulged in his twenties in what he called “a cocky inclination toward a wild sexual recklessness,”⁴ which he seemed to have both enjoyed and felt—just like the pious Christians that he abhorred—was, in fact, wrong and, ultimately demeaning to both men and women. These sorts of loose sexual encounters seemed to have ended when he fell passionately in love with Minna, his first wife. From then on, he sought not meaningless sex, but grand romance, erotic passion. And he poured his soul into bringing this need, this yearning, out in his music. Dreyfus contends—and I don’t think there is any one who is familiar with the classical canon who would disagree— “that Wagner was the first to develop a detailed musical language that succeeded in extended representation of erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of love.”⁵

As defined by Dreyfus, an erotic work alludes “to sexual objects and desires but stops short of arousing the spectator’s or reader’s sexual feeling.” He then defines pornography to be those works with “lurid designs and graphic methods of depiction [which] target both explicit sexual arousal and its gratification.” He then puts it another way: “The further we situate an artwork away from sexual organs, the “higher” its form of eroticism. By contrast, the more closely we approach them, the “lower” and more pornographic the effect.”⁶

Music, of course, is nebulous, lacking clear objects of representations. If you see Rodin’s “The Kiss,” you may or may not find it erotic, but what it represents is clear. And the same goes for a painting, novel or, to a lesser extent, a poem.

A kiss is clearly a kiss...

...but that this is one sexy piece of music—not so easy to tell.

This ambiguity of music is what made it possible for Wagner to create very sexual music—and get away with it. No author could have written something as clearly erotic in that era without being banned. Indeed, for example, the poet Charles Baudelaire—who was to become a huge fan of Wagner in 1860—was criminally prosecuted, convicted and fined in 1857 for publishing six of the poems within the Les Fleurs du Mal collection, none of which would raise an eyebrow today.

Even though Wagner was continually representing sexual passion within his music dramas in highly erotic musical language, Dreyfus points out that Wagner’s supporters could play dumb, as “music’s freedom from clear erotic depictions permitted his early advocates to skirt around the issue, at least in their public utterances, and espouse his ‘higher’ ideals and values.” Not that censors didn’t try to stop him, as “outraged critics...disclosed the frank details and named, in a kind of litany, the composer’s transgressions about decency.”⁷

While some critics heaped criticism on the whole of his sensual oeuvre, most of the direct fire was aimed at two works: Act 1 of Walküre and the whole of Tristan und Isolde. In many instances, it wasn’t because critics thought the music wasn’t good; instead, they thought it was too good. Seductive, the work of the devil. In the case of Walküre, Wagner manages—quite extraordinarily and audaciously—to get the audience to identify with, root for, and yes, even get aroused by the emerging sexual love between the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde.

The critic Gustave Stoeckel said of Act 1 of Die Walküre (read his full critique here), 

All the scene seems to tremble under the wild glow of sensual love... It is impossible to criticize while hearing it. All aesthetics, theory and morals, are chased out of one; one’s breath is bated and the beating of the heart seems to stand still, the whole soul bewitched by an irresistible power.... During the performance, all that is sensual in human nature is wrought up to its wildest acting by the alluringly tempting music.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? And it is! It is!

But then Stoeckel surveys the damage done:

...after the intoxicating enjoyment is over, you perceive the ethical anarchy of the whole scene, which upsets all the holy emotions of a pure soul, defies the teachings of morality and is in direct antagonism to established rules and customs. [For] the curtain closes upon a scene which offends Morality and Religion, wakes up the sleeping passions in human nature which a refined and cultivated taste must abhor and detest. The masterly treatment is all the more offensive, because of its influence upon a sensitive nature.

Thus, the reason people find Wagner dangerous is this: He screws with their own morals successfully. He creates a cognitive dissonance that they must resolve. Even the deeply religious were liable to get turned on, or at least completely drawn into Wagner’s world view, by what they considered morally wrong and completely decadent, like the critic Stoeckel.

What can I say? I love that Wagner used this very radical way to make a point that is near and dear to my heart: to decry the subjugation and institutional rape of women within a “marriage” not of their choosing.⁸ In any case, the music is of breath-taking beauty and passionate ecstasy and that works for me, too.

As for Tristan und Isolde, his “monument to this most beautiful of dreams”⁹—that is, passionate love—it is basically from start to finish centered on eros, often at a fevered pitch. Bryan Magee wrote: “I do not think there is a more erotic work in the whole of great art.”¹⁰ I concur. With this work, he threw down the gauntlet to Christian moralists, seeking to overturn centuries of sexual repression with one evening of music drama. What is great—to me at least— is that he really did move the culture forward, in a direction towards a less repressed sexuality.

His opponents did not, of course, take this challenge lightly, creating on onslaught in print that lasts to this day, though as I have pointed out in past blogs, the main charge against him has morphed from moral and sexual outrage to his anti-Semitism. The outrage at the time was real; some people were really disgusted, having never heard anything like it. Wagner’s music —like all erotics depending on your point of view—lives in the zone between eeew and oooh. I will let one speak for all those whose reacted with disgust: the pianist and composer Clara Schuman (and wife of the other composer Schuman, Robert).  After hearing Tristan in 1875 in Munich, she wrote in her diary:

It was the most repulsive thing I have ever seen or heard in my life. To be forced to see and listen to such sexual frenzy the whole evening, in which every feeling of decency is violated and by which not just the public but even musicians seem to be enchanted—that is the saddest thing I have experienced in my entire artistic life.¹¹

But enchanted many were; enchanted many new listeners still are. After first hearing it, there were many reports of people crying, fainting, and losing sleep in the thrall of it. The conductor Walter Bruno was one of them. He first saw it as an adolescent and recounts his feelings:

So there I sat in the uppermost gallery of the Berlin Opera House and from the first entry of the cello my heart contracted in spasms.... Never before had my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never before had my heart been consumed by such suffering and yearning, by such holy bliss, never before had such heavenly transfiguration transported me away from reality.... [A]fterwards I wandered aimlessly in the streets—when I got home, I recounted nothing and asked not to be questioned. My ecstasy sang further within me through half the night, and when I awoke the next morning I knew that my life had changed.¹²

It wasn’t quite that strong with me, but it was pretty close to that to tell you the truth.

Mark Twain, not so swayed but not outraged either, wrote: “I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here.” Here is an article that describes more of the frenzy over Tristan and Isolde. 

Though it is erotic, it is decidedly not a hearts and flowers sort of piece, but instead concentrates on the hell of unquenched desire, which can only be resolved—to tormented Wagner—in death. As a friend who recently saw it wrote to me:  “I gotta say, I don't get that opera. All this longing for death. Longing for the death of longing.” Clearly, not everyone’s cup of tea. But if you can enjoy anguished love, there is no work better in my book.

The music drama ends spectacularly with a full-on, real-time musical representation of orgasm, from the first stirrings of arousal to climax and post-coital recovery. It still blows my mind that he got away with it. It works as high art or, I can testify, like porn.

Here is a description of this remarkable piece from Sam Abel’s survey of musical sexuality, Opera in the Flesh:

Isolde’s death occurs at the moment of her musical climax. Wagner’s highly chromatic music surges in increasingly intense and heavily scored waves, building to a climactic moment of several extremely tense high notes followed by descending scales, then slowly sinking into the complete exhaustion of post-orgasmic death. Wagner’s accompanying text, though secondary to the emotional effect, highlights the musical ecstasy; it resonates with sensual language and ends with the words “hochste Lust,” highest physical pleasure. Wagner carried musical sexual discourse to the edge of literal expression, embodying the sexual act onstage disguised as death. The influence of the “leibestod” on later operatic music is pervasive, both for Wagnerian and non-Wagnerian composers, in the nineteenth century and beyond.¹³

Now, I know for a fact that to those ill-disposed to opera, they can’t hear it. I played it for a highly sexual friend some years back, thinking she would appreciate it, and her only comment was “I don’t enjoy listening to sopranos; they sing too high.” Fine, miss Isolde's orgasm – see if I care. But for those who want to give it a go, here are two versions, one without the singing (in case you, too, hate sopranos) and one with the singing. Close your eyes while listening and don’t think about it; just feel the music. 

The orchestral version:

Or with the singing:

If you didn’t hear it and feel it, to use Dustin Hoffman’s quote in The Graduate, you’re missing a great effect here.

Sexual repression, of course, never stopped men. They just created two categories—virgins and whores—and married the one, and used the other. And, while not the industry it is today, men could find porn in various forms if they wanted it. It was women who were particularly victimized, their lives circumscribed, by the sexual mores of the time. And it was women—and another victimized group, gay people—who particularly responded to Wagner’s erotics. In Joseph Horowitz’s survey of Wagnermania in fin-de-siècle America, Wagner Nights, he puts it this way about the women who flocked to performances: 

The bad effects of husband and bedroom were silenced by a musical-dramatical orgasm as explicit and complete as any mortal intercourse. And Isolde’s second-act duet with Tristan—their clandestine Love-Night, shutting out the world, beckoning dissolution—was a secret pact, a shared conspiracy with Wagner.... For the moment, the parlor spinet, the neurasthenia of the bedroom, were banished and forgotten. The Wagner pilgrims were addicted, body and soul.¹⁴

Wagner was the then-alternative to the chick-flick or the paperback romance. While romance novels were being written in that era, nothing existed that was close to Wagner’s romantic, erotic pull. His music was a revelation to women who were starved for the full sensuality that they had long been denied.

Willa Cather, an enthusiastic Wagnerian, for one wrote of one of these women in her poignant short story, Wagner Matinée. It is written through the eyes of the woman’s dispassionate nephew. You can read it here.

I will be writing more about Wagner’s effects on sexual mores in a later post. For now, if you want to sample some of Wagner’s erotic music, I have put some some examples of my favorites below. They are put in chronological order, but if you are only going to try one, watch—rather, listen—to the Leibestod above.  In any case, I don't recommend listening to them all in one sitting as that would be like eating way too much of a
really rich dessert. 

Here is a clip from Tannhäuser:

  
Now to me, Elizabeth is just bursting with sexual energy; she wants to jump Tannhäuser's bones the second he hits that hall. What is funny to me is that most discussions about eroticism in Tannhäuser center on the Venusberg Bacchanal scene, which is fine but doesn’t feel erotic to my tastes unless the choreography is done particularly well. The fact is, I don’t like orgies. That said, here is a clip that is mildly titillating:

I will take Elizabeth’s ecstatic song of repressed but-ready-to-burst love over Venusberg any day.

The Ring has two long erotic sequences. One is the first act of Walküre (ignoring the music of the brute, Hunding). The music is just gorgeous and, often, ecstatic. You can listen to the whole act here:

Or just a segment of some of that ecstasy here: 

The next erotic sequence in the Ring is the scene of Brünnhilde’s sexual awaking in the last act of Siegfried. It’s a marvelous piece of psychological insight into any woman’s sexual awakening, not just a former goddess. The whole scene goes on for 30 minutes; here is just the end when Siegfried is trying hard to convince Brünnhilde to let her fear go and embrace him as a lover (but no subtitles).  I think you can tell he succeeds.

The morning after their passion (in the first scene of Götterdämmerung), the music is equally good, if taken down just a notch in intensity. It starts with a beautiful orchestral piece in which with the lover’s are intertwined via higher and lower instruments echoing and then overlapping each other, becoming one. Then the singers enter to give a night-after recap about their new-found love: 

As for Tristan und Isolde, the second act “love duet” is about thirty minutes of music, but this clip is the finale.  It is the concert version so it ends with an actual climax. In the opera, there is no such thing—the lovers never consummate their passion—as they are caught at a very inconvenient moment (at timing 7:50 here). This music is very similar to, but different from, the Liebestod. Lyrics aren’t really needed; let’s just say they are confirming that they are one, and they are the entire world:

If you watch these clips and are unmoved, Wagner is not for you, that is for sure. But if you respond as I do, welcome to Wagnerland.

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End Notes

1 Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, 1

2 Magee, Tristan's Chord, 93

3 Millington and Spencer, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, 432

4 as quoted in Dreyfus, 52

5 Ibid., 2

6 Ibid., 9-10 – all quotes in paragraph

7 Ibid., 12 – all quotes in paragraph

8 If you don't know the plot, Siegliende and Siegmund are the siblings.  When Siegliende was young she was forced to marry the brutish Hunding.  She's is escaping this fate with her brother. The principal point Wagner was trying to make was that forced marriage—marriage without the women’s desire—was a worse outrage than consensual love of any stripe could possibly be. Women existed as the property of a man in Europe during his time; yes, they were “free” to say no in most cases, but since there were very few alternatives for women, most had to marry—and families all but forced them into it in many cases—no matter what their own feelings. There were no real choices for women until the modern era. Wagner wasn’t advocating incest; he was advocating that only a freely-chosen marriage of love was legitimate, no matter what the law said. This point still needs to be made, as many women are still not free to make their own choice in much of the world today. Wagner cared about this to, literally, his dying day. The article he was working on at the time of his death is here, in which he reiterates the point he made decades before in this scene (and in others).

9 Selected Letters, 323

10 Magee, 36

11 as quoted in Dreyfus, 37

12 as quote in Dreyfus, 5

13 Abel, Sam, Opera in the Flesh, 94

14 Horowitz, Joseph, Wagner Nights, 214

Wagner's Musical Effects 6: Is Wagner Bad For Us?

In this bicentennial of Wagner’s birth, there are all sorts of Wagner activities, lectures and performances throughout the world. For example, Wagner World Wide is a collaboration between three universities: one in Germany, one in Switzerland, one in South Carolina. You can see all their lectures here. That is the biggest consolidated effort celebrating Wagner’s 200th birthday, but there are efforts throughout the globe, particularly in Europe and America. Thus far, the cream of the crop, lecture-wise, comes via the London Review of Books in a talk by Nicolas Spice entitled, provocatively, “Is Wagner Bad For Us?”

I am very enthusiastic about this lecture; it may be the single best thing ever written—with necessary musical illustrations—on how Wagner creates his musical effects. The title is really just an acknowledgement of how powerful his music can be; the meat of the talk is the “how” of that power. But since he posed the question, I will give my thoughts—and his conclusion—later in this post.

While I think I was able to explain what Wagner made me feel—deeply empathic, compassionate, ecstatic—and some of the techniques he uses to that end in these posts, I felt that my effort was lacking in bringing the subject truly alive. This lecture really fills in where my blog posts left off, and Spice absolutely hits the nail on the head of what is so different about Wagner; his musical excerpts are crucial for this talk. You can read the article and hit his links to the musical examples, but I recommend you listen to the podcast at the link above for a more seamless experience.

In the past, I have read a lot of dreary articles trying to explain Wagner’s musical language. Here’s an example of the type of discussion that seems really unhelpful in understanding why—and how—Wagner is so different from virtually any other composer:

As Alfred Lorenz and his followers have shown, there is considerable evidence that Wagner built his formal units, or periods, from ternary structures—‘bridge’ or ‘arch’ forms (ABA) and ‘bar’ forms (AAB)— but this was never a mechanical process, and other writers have suggested that motivic variation and the use of a refrain or ritornello principle may be no less important.¹

Perhaps this stuff is interesting to musicologists but it’s gobbledygook to me, and far from the heart of what makes his music tick. Wagner also hated this sort of stuff, telling a visitor who had complimented a musicologist favorable to Wagner, “A single bow stroke is worth more than all this useless twaddle.”²  He didn’t want the listener—or anyone—to intellectualized his works; he wanted people to be “knowers through feeling.”³   Wagner said that “the people I like best [as listeners] are those who don’t even know that we write music on five lines.”⁴  In other words, people like me! (I mean, I kinda know that, but not really. If you had asked me how many lines music was written on, I know if I would have guessed somewhere between 4-6.)

But I think even Wagner would like Spice’s lecture, particularly because it, more than most articles, might draw someone into listening to that bow stroke.

Spice emphasizes—and I totally agree—that Wagner’s use of musical time is the key: “Wagner’s music has an effect on our sense of time that is the reverse of the effect most music in the classical canon has on us. Where most classical music expands our sense of temporal duration, Wagner’s contracts it. Most music, though short, seems long; Wagner, though long, seems short.”

I am tempted to quote more from the lecture, but I don’t know where to start or end. There is so much that I found fascinating. Let me say this, if you are a Wagner fan, do listen to it. If you are planning to go to a Wagner opera, do listen to it. And if you are merely interested in knowledge, do listen to it.

Moving to the title of the Spice lecture—“Is Wagner bad for us?”—I don’t think this would be much of a question were it not for the Holocaust.

The biggest ding – apart from his anti-Semitism – on Wagner’s reputation is that Hitler was a fan and claimed Wagner’s music to be an inspiration. But, then again, so did Theodor Herzl, the “father” of Zionism, who claimed he was inspired by Wagner’s music to envision and write his seminal tract, The Jewish State.⁵  Rather a perfect irony, isn’t it? Lots of others were also inspired by Wagner—Baudelaire, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Debussy, Bernard Shaw, Mahler, Albert Schweitzer, Proust, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Anton Bruckner, just to name a few.⁶  Me too, obviously! I am devoting a huge portion of this year to writing about the man and his music.  The music is awesome; it can be really, really inspiring.

Dina Porat, in an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote that “Hitler was not influenced by Wagner's anti-Semitism. He had a generous helping of his own apocalyptic and comprehensive anti-Semitism, and needed no help from Wagner. Indeed, those who read accounts of Hitler's views and words – which he dictated rather than wrote – will not find even one instance in which he linked Wagner to anti-Semitism and racism.”  But then she goes on to argue that Wagner should be boycotted, nonetheless, in Israel solely because of the fact of“the inspiration he gave Hitler. The argument that the composer's music elevates every soul is nullified in the face of this.” I doubt if anyone is actually making the argument that his music “elevates every soul,” but his music has elevated many souls, including many great Jewish musicians, such as Mahler, Barenboim, Bernstein, who were all greatly inspired by his music. The Israeli ban is currently just for Wagner—music written by actual Nazi members, like Carl Orff, is not banned—and just for the concert hall. He is not banned on radio, which reaches a much greater audience. He is not banned in the movies, where his music is often used.

Therefore, its function is primarily symbolic.

Of course Hitler, a struggling artist, was inspired by the story of one of the greatest artists Germany ever knew. Wagner’s personal story, like his music, is also awe-inspiring. As Michael Tanner succinctly puts it, “He succeeded in making real what his contemporaries regarded as ludicrous pipe dreams.”⁷  This, along with his music, is the stuff that was so inspiring to the young dreamer Adolf.

To me, it just seems stupid to deny people who want to hear or to play it the right to do so. The people who are hurt are all Jews—the musicians who want to play him and the audience who wants to hear him in the concert all—giving Hitler a kind of posthumous victory. To paraphrase that abortion bumper sticker: if you don't want to hear it, don't listen.

In any case, Hitler had many artistic enthusiasms, not just Wagner. For instance, Hitler loved Walt Disney. In 1938 he bought a copy from Roy Disney of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He considered it one of the best films ever made. Soon thereafter, in the period of annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, as well as Kristallnacht, (1938-1939), Hitler allegedly took time off from his war and Jewish-persecution planning to draw these:

Hitler's work??⁸  

Whether those drawings are real or not—it's an open question—his fondness for Disney is undisputed. According to Goebbels—who gave Hitler various Disney products over the years—on the presentation of mouse ears as a gift, Hitler “clapped his hands in glee, and immediately ran to his room to change into the mouse ears and Donald Duck footy pajamas.” ⁹  Hitler was known to often whistle “Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf” (his nickname being Wolf), from the 1932 Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs.¹⁰  As he was invading various nations, whistling the tune, was he thinking “I’m going to huff and puff and blow your house down”?  Sure, why not?  Ironically, the original Disney version contained a stereotypical portrayal of the wolf disguised as a Jewish peddler at the last house. I wonder if Hitler actually thought that was funny? Because of complaints from some in the Jewish community, the (clueless) Disney redid the original version and changed the wolf to a “Fuller Brush Man.”

The Jewish Fuller Brush man/ wolf - see here at 6:05

Unsurprisingly, the complaints continued. Bowing to the pressure, he finally dropped—in blatant form—the Jewish schtick in the last version made in the 1940s.¹¹ 

I think this version still has vestiges of the stereotype, but it certainly isn't so blatant. See video here

Sorry to go on in some length on this, but I think it is interesting apart from my central topic. I mean, is Disney bad for us? Obviously, I don’t believe that Hitler was driven by Disney to his acts, even if Disney—unlike Wagner—did have clear anti-Semitic stereotypes in his work. I think the whole blame-game is ridiculous, actually. But if you are going to blame some music, I’m going to blame the damn soundtrack of The Three Little Pigs.

Returning to the central discussion, because of Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner’s music, many people feel that Wagner’s music must be sort of fascistic or militaristic and, generally, all similar to “The Ride of the Valkyries.” This famous quip—see it here—from Woody Allen captures that sentiment:  “I can't listen to that much Wagner, ya know? I start to get the urge to conquer Poland.”

Of course, it is not the case at all that Wagner's music is generally militaristic, much less fascistic. I think Bryan Magee hits it on the head: “I sometimes think there are two Wagners in the culture, almost unrecognizably different from one another: the Wagner possessed by those who know his work, and the Wagner imagined by those who know him only by name and reputation.”¹²  “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the tune he is most known for, is rather singular. It was written—Wagner called it “my vaudeville”—to break-up what had come before and what was to soon to come in Die Walküre. Originally, he tried to ban its separate performance, as it was wrenched out of context, but he later relented.  In any case, it is certainly not a very good representation of Wagner’s music on the whole, even if one feels that this piece is in some way fascistic, which I think is a rather absurd claim. The fact is that only someone ignorant of Wagner’s music and text could seriously make a claim that Wagner’s operas are fascistic when they actually are, in fact, close to the exact opposite, which is particularly true about “The Ring,” which is a condemnation of the quest for power.

I do think that Wagner’s music is incredibly powerful. His subject matter—setting it primarily in the world of myth—is the human condition. As with any great work of art, there are and can be limitless interpretations through the prism of our individuality. Great art works pretty much like a Rorschach test; if you see something dark and ugly and twisted, it's all about you and not about the work. Ultimately, I concur with Spice’s conclusion on the question he posed:

In the question ‘Is Wagner bad for us?’ there’s a hint of tiresome passivity, as though we had no choice in the matter. There are substances and there is substance abuse. It’s surely up to us to manage Wagner’s charisma, up to us to maintain the ‘and’ in our relationship with him. But whether it’s really possible to keep Wagner at a distance without losing something essential in our experience of his work is unclear to me.

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End Notes

1 Millington, ed, The Wagner Compendium, 253 

2 Spencer, Wagner Remembered, 240 

3 Wagner,  Opera and Drama, 109   

4 Op. cit, Spencer, 240

5 See here.
6 Magee, Aspects of Wagner, read the chapter 3 Wagnerolatry  31-44

7 Tanner, Wagner,  22  

8 Here is a link about this. While it cannot be proven that Hitler was the person who drew these, it hasn't been debunked either.  I would tend towards skepticism, but it certainly could be true.

9 For the quote, go here. I can't find a reference to the actual place in the diaries that this quote comes from, so it's a shaky reference—though oft-quoted. However, here is another one that isn't shaky: “In Joseph Goebbels' 1937 diary entry for December 22, he writes excitedly of his giving the Fuhrer ‘18 Mickey Mouse films’ for his Christmas present. He also notes that the Fuhrer ‘is very excited about it. He is completely happy about this treasure.’ ”

10 See here

11 For the story of altering of The Three Little Pigs, see here and here. 

12 Magee, The Tristan Chord, 74