Preface

Written: January 1, 2013

Chapter 1: Happy New Year’s Day!
And—far more important to me—Happy Wagner Bicentennial Birth Year!

Now, this probably isn’t a momentous occasion for most people—neither Wagner’s bicentennial nor this blog. I’d guess that, in the United States, the vast majority of people know very little about Wagner and virtually nothing about his music—aside from a few cartoonish snippets. (Cue: Kill the wabbit!)

In short, most people couldn’t care less. He’s not their cup of tea, they assume—wrongly, in many cases. Then there are the more aggressive types: those who actively loathe Wagner and would rather see him flushed down the cultural cesspool, usually without knowing much about him or his music. I find that… irritating.

I love Wagner’s music. He is, without question, the musical love of my life—and that realization struck me like a thunderbolt. But I’m not in the “love the music, hate the man” camp. I actually like Wagner the man, warts and all.

How can I say that about someone often described as a monster?

Well, that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this blog. There’s no quick answer that does the question justice—at least none that have ever come to my mind.

I’ve been intending to write about Wagner since 2001. Originally, I imagined it as a book—before blogging was even a thing. But a blog makes more sense anyway. I can include links to music, performances, essays, and other material. My original plan was to start writing upon my retirement in 2007 and finish in 2013 to coincide with Wagner’s 200th birthday.

But life—and, to be honest, laziness—got in the way.  So I decided: I’ll just put out what I can in 2013, and that’ll be that.

My intent in this blog is not to censor myself—much. Christopher Hitchens, paraphrasing Nadine Gordimer, once wrote: “A serious person should try to write posthumously… One should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and especially intellectual opinion—did not operate.” That’s my aim.

Even if it’s embarrassing when I talk about sex and Wagner.  Even if I feel ambivalent about revealing—or maybe even reveling in—felonious behavior.  For the record: I’m not a scholar. (Yes, I worked at a university—but as a maintenance person. I plunged scholars’ toilets.)

I don’t read music. I can’t tell a sharp from a flat. I don’t play an instrument. I can’t sing. And I grew up hating classical music. In other words: I’m exactly the kind of person Wagner was writing for. (I’ll come back to that in a future post.)

Because this blog has no academic pretensions, I’ll be speaking plainly. I don’t plan to mince words. There will be the occasional—okay, maybe regular—vulgarity. Because frankly, so much surrounding Wagner can only be called bullshit. No other word fits.

That said, don’t mistake informality for unreliability. I care deeply about truth and fairness. If you’re going to make a controversial claim, you damn well better back it up. If you can’t—or won’t—then you shouldn’t say it.  I’m not from Missouri, but I should be.

If you ever believe I’ve failed to support something properly, let me know—I’ll track it down like a pig after truffles. Or retract it if I can’t.  I’ll use real footnotes. And links. Sometimes links as footnotes.

So let my little personal celebration—and long, winding reflection—on Wagner begin.

Musical effects, Part 1: Intro and leitmotifs

Need footnotes to things.

To me, music is the language of emotion, and Wagner was the master of that language. Other composers make me feel deeply, of course, but neither to the extent nor the degree that Wagner does. When I am one with his music—that is, really listening and feeling, and not worrying about anything but the moment—I regularly experience the deepest and most intimate and intense emotions that I am capable of feeling, from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of seemingly unbearable pain.

I am certainly not the only one to feel intense emotions when listening to Wagner.

For instance, Baudelaire, in writing a fan letter to Wagner, said his music was "rapt and enthralling, something aspiring to mount higher, something excessive and superlative... the supreme utterance of a soul at its highest paroxysm."  (By the way, open that last link for a head scratcher.  I have no idea what bluegrass music has to do with that letter.  Speaking of links, I don't have some for things I quote here, but I can get you to the source material if anyone ever wants something.)

Galina Gorchavova, a current soprano, says this in Diva, the Next Generation: "I am besotted.... there's something heavenly in that music. When I listen to it I feel as if transformed, uplifted. I fly somewhere with it. And the experience is very difficult for me describe in words." 

Hugo Wolf upon hearing Parsifal said "my whole being reels in the perfect world of this wonderful work, as if some blissful ecstasy, becoming ever more enraptured and blessed."

Thomas Mann describes the effects of Wagner's music as: "delicious, sensual-pernicious, sensual-consuming, heavily intoxicating, hypnotically caressing."

Bryan Magee, in his excellent short book, Aspects of Wagner, has a chapter devoted to why Wagner has such a devoted following (and, equally, why some are repelled by the music). He sums up his thesis this way:

My central contention, then, is that Wagner's music expresses, as does no other art, repressed and highly charged contents of the psyche, and that this is the reason for its uniquely disturbing effect. To make a Freudian pun, it gets past the Censor. Some people are made to feel by it that they are in touch with the depths of their own personalities for the first time. The feeling of a wholeness yet unboundedness—hence, I suppose, its frequent comparison with mystical or religious experience. 

Others think listening to his music is like a drug experience. Susan Sontag in her essay "Wagner's Fluids" writes: “It was observed from the beginning that listening to Wagner had an effect similar to consuming psychotropic drug: opium, said Baudelaire; alcohol said Nietzsche.”

David Bullard, a former columnist for the Sunday Times of South Africa, put it this way: “the incredible power of [his] music to replicate some of the more pleasant effects of drugs or alcohol, but none of the side effects, is only really appreciated by those who have experienced it...Rather as some might pop a mood-enhancing pill, I am now able to select a piece [of Wagner's music knowing it will have the desired effect, which is probably why I appear to be on a permanent high to many people.” [From his column, "Out to Lunch,"May 18, 2003.]

And, according to one well-known acidhead, Christian Rätsch, “Listening to the Der Ring des Niebelungen is the closest thing to being on acid when you are not on acid, but Richard Wagner is the greatest on acid.” 

Magee also notes that it is therapeutic to some:

This music does for some people what psychoanalysis claims to do for others; it releases radioactive material from the depths of the personality and confronts them with it and makes them feel it and live it through. It also relates all this inner feeling harmoniously to an outer reality. It can thus help people be at one with both their inner selves and the external world: so in a sense it the most whole-making, the most therapeutic art. 

So just what is it about Wagner's music?

Normally, operas were written to highlight the singers via their arias and other set-pieces like duets, trios, etc. In between these pieces, in earlier days, a harpsichord accompanied what is called recitative (which is sung, but patterned after every day speech). The set-pieces had the emotion and the beautiful singing; the recitative carried the plot.  By Wagner's day, orchestras had generally replaced the harpsichord, and there was more emphasis on the dramatic content throughout, but the focus on show-stopping "numbers" was still at the heart of opera. Wagner upended this relationship as he felt that the music must be in service to the drama and not that the drama existed for these numbers. To underscore that he was doing something very different, he termed his work "music drama." (Sorry, Richard, but I will refer to them interchangeably as operas or music dramas.)

Of his ten operas that are in the repertoire,  Wagner set all but one in a mythical context. Bryan Magee summarizes what he was attempting to do with his music drama:

It would be about the insides of the characters. It would be concerned with their emotions, not their motives. It would explore and articulate the ultimate reality of experience, what goes on in heart and soul... In this kind of drama the externals of plot and social relationships would be reduced to a minimum... Myth was ideal for this, because it dealt with archetypical situations and because its universal validity, regardless of time and place, meant that the dramatist could almost dispense with the social and political context and present, as it were 'pure', the inner drama. 

To achieve this, instead of music frequently interrupted by time-stopping arias or other set-pieces like duets, trios, and chorus numbers, Wagner generally wrote continuous, ever-changing and developing music with the aim to express the deep emotions of the characters. The voice served as the characters' conscious thoughts; the orchestra provided the deeper emotional underpinnings, the unconscious or the repressed. 

The music has no conventional structure, which made it quite revolutionary in its time. One of the leading critics of the day, Eduard Hanslick, said, “Wagner's most recent reform does not represent an enrichment...it is, on the contrary, a distortion, a perversion... One could say of this tone poetry: there is music in it, but it is not music.” [Quoted from the Wagner Companion, at 199.] To Hector Berlioz, it was “raucous noise, the abolition of melody, arias, duets, simple harmony, singable roles and so forth.”

There was a huge debate during his time, and it remains to this day, about Wagner's musical structure. Now, I don't give a damn about this debate:  If it is bad structure but I love it, then structure be damned. If there truly is a marvelous structure that just hasn't been appreciated by some musicologists, that's fine too. These sorts of academic debates seem very silly to me.

Anyway, Wagner defenders have landed principally on one of the key aspects of his “endless music,” the leitmotif, to explain the structure. This is, in essence, a short phrase of music associated with something. It could be a person, a thing, a concept or a feeling. Audiences from my generation likely know it at its most simple form from Peter and the Wolf, where each animal has a tune on an instrument. But people now know of leitmotifs in the Wagnerian mode principally from movie music, such as the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings soundtracks.

Wagner himself didn't like the term and called them “motifs of memory,” which works well. One of leading expert of Wagner's system, Derek Cooke, called them “melodic moments of feeling,” which also works.  Cooke put together this analysis (originally for the BBC) with musical examples on the principal motifs and their development. It is  both easy to listen to and yet extraordinarily complex if you are interested in Wagner's system. And here is a fun video from the '90s with Hugh Downs as the host that is a simple primer on Wagner's use of leitmotifs.  If you want to explore the motifs of The Ring, this is a good site. While they existed before Wagner, he certainly used them in a unprecedented, and much more thoroughgoing, way than anyone before him.

Generally, I pay no conscious attention to leitmotifs when I listen to his music (or, for that matter, when I watch Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings). I prefer to let the music wash over me and merely feel, and that works just fine. Wagner's intent, in fact, was that the music work on a non-conscious level, and indeed it does. While I now “know” several of his leitmotifs, they were just absorbed via listening in an emotional, not intellectual, way.  In a 1903 essay by Camille Saint-Saëns on Wagner's music, “The Composer as Psychologist,” he describes Wagner's system like this:

Music takes up where speech leaves off, it utters the ineffable, makes us discover in ourselves depths we had not suspected, conveys impressions and states of beings that no words can render. With his ingenious system of leitmotivs (ugly word!), Wagner has extended still farther the reach of musical expressiveness by making clear the secret thoughts of his characters beneath and beyond the words they speak. Take a very simple example, chosen from among a thousand: Tristan asks, “Where are we?” Isolde replies, “Near the goal,” but the music is that which previously accompanied the words, “head destined for death,” which she whispered while gazing at Tristan. The listener understand at once what “goal” she has in mind.

If you read any primer on Wagner's music, you will note that people like Cooke have named his leitmotifs, principally so they can analyze and comment upon them.  Wagner didn't like the leitmotif labeling and refused to do it—his wife Cosima quotes him as saying it was “nonsense” (on 8/1/81). Indeed, labeling does cause a problem. It tends to reify the music in a very unhelpful way. If you are actually trying to recognize them, or even more so trying to figure out why the one called, for example, "sword of manhood" is being played at a particular moment, that process removes your attention from feeling the music.  Since Wagner considered that the essence of drama was “knowing through feeling,” anything that detracted from that was a negative to him. 

It is very true that there is a Pavlovian dog quality to listening to Wagner's music repetitively, which is why people keep coming back for their treat. Listening to the “motifs of memory” that now have deep resonance to both the story and to my life is a short-cut to activating those intense emotions. Talk about mood music! If I want to feel euphoric or have a good cry or feel deep compassion, I know just which pieces would give me those rewards.

Just because a composer writes leitmotifs doesn't mean, of course, that they work as intended. But Wagner was extraordinarily good at writing music that created the emotions that he wanted his audience to feel.  As noted in the Saint-Saëns example above, when that incident happens, the music—whether you remember it consciously or not—does tell you Isolde wants death. The motif itself is dark and ominous. You know immediately the "goal," not through intellect, but through emotional reaction to the music. Whether you consciously recognize it or not, the feeling will be there. The listener might feel more resonance if it—the earlier use of the motif—has already lodged in memory, whether conscious or not. Certainly, if a piece of music is particularly emotional to you and it is later woven into the score, that feeling does reemerge, and often very strongly. The emotional reaction to Wagner's music tends to increase over time as repeated listening reveal ever greater depths of feelings as you relive the musical memories and make seemingly endless connections, both within the story and, reaching out of the story, to your own life.

To continue the Pavlov analogy, here (at 4:48-5:30ish) is one of my favorite musical treats, which always affects me whenever the motif shows up through the rest of the Ring Cycle. It is the initial leitmotif of the music associated with the love of Sieglende (our dog Ziggy's namesake) and Siegmund, from the first act of Die Walküre. 

What is extraordinary to me about Wagner's music is that he really takes you inside a person's head emotionally for an extended length of time. I will write about how he achieves this, with an example from his opera Tristan and Isolde in the next post.

And, finally, just a note for those who have never listened to Wagner. It's an extraordinary gift he has, but it does require putting in the time to really listen to his music with attention and, to really get much out of it, listening several times to the same opera. For many people, this isn't what they want from music. They might want beautiful music to relax to or fun music to sing along with or rhythmic music to dance to, and on and on.  Wagner's operas are not a casual listening experience. (I have tried to put the operas on in the background but I find myself yelling to the CD:  "Would you just shut the hell up, Brunhilde!" Or the like...)  However, he did write beautiful orchestral music, and it is quite possible to listen much more casually to his music. For those people who are interested in hearing Wagner but really don't want the opera experience (at least yet), try an excerpt album, like this one.  For actually getting a feel for the full opera to see if it might be to your taste, there is a series by the Dutch conductor Edo de Waart, who essentially creates orchestra “suites” from four of Wagner's operas: The Ring, Parsifal, Meistersinger and, my favorite of the four "suites," Tristan and Isolde. (You must ignore the cover art on the CDs!) These are ways you can put on some Wagner in the background and get a sense of the music without committing to a four or five hour opera.

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.

---

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.

---

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