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Wagner, ‘On Modulation’, and Tristan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Carolyn Abbate
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Abstract

So says Othello, confronting Iago for the last time in Shakespeare's play. He looks down to seek for the cloven hoof of a demon, for only if lago is satanic can Othello understand what has come to pass. Looking down – the physical gesture – represents an impulse to interpret, to find clues, codes, signs there in the darkness. But Iago is no supernatural being: ‘that's a fable’. What remains is an enigmatic lago more frightening than any demon – the attempt to interpret undermined by the sign not given.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 33 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 Shaw, George Bernard, The Perfect Wagnerite (New York, 1909), 118.Google Scholar

2 Kerman, Joseph, ‘Opera as Symphonic Poem’, in Opera as Drama (New York, 1956), 192–216.Google Scholar

3 See Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Whittall, Mary (Cambridge, 1979), 54–5.Google Scholar

Pierluigi Petrobelli has made the same point about Verdi's dramaturgy; see ‘Music in the Theatre – A Propos of Aida, Act III’, in Redmond, James, ed., Themes in Drama 3: Drama, Dance and Music (Cambridge, 1980), 129.Google Scholar

4 Wagner's Music Dramas (see n. 3), 55.

5 The wandering music was discussed in Westernhagen, Curt von, The Forging of the Ring, trans. Arnold, and Whittall, Mary (Cambridge, 1976), 149Google Scholar; see the critique by Deathridge, John, ‘Wagner's Sketches for the Ring: Some Recent Studies’, The Musical Times (May, 1977), 386–7Google Scholar; and the discussion by Bailey, Robert, ‘The Method of Composition’, in Burbidge, Peter and Sutton, Richard, eds., The Wagner Companion (London, 1979), 317–26.Google Scholar

6 Wagner's own arguments about the ‘symphonic’ properties of his music have, I think it is fair to say, consistently been exaggerated and befogged by his commentators. The point has been made by Carl Dahlhaus; see for example Wagners Konzeption des musikalischen Dramas (Regensburg, 1971), 103–6. The issue is also discussed by Voss, Egon, Richard Wagner und die Instrumentalmusik: Wagners symphonischer Ehrgeiz (Wilhelmshaven, 1977), 154–81Google Scholar, and Steinbeck, Wolfram, ‘Die Idee des Symphonischen bei Richard Wagner: Zur Leitmotivtechnik in “Tristan und Isolde”’, in Mahling, Christoph-Hellmut and Wiesmann, Sigrid, eds., Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981 (Kassel, 1984), 424–36Google Scholar. All three point out that Wagner's notion of symphonic ‘form’ was of a vague, web-like series of loosely related motifs, not some gargantuan and encompassing structure. Such revisionist accounts as these have yet to be taken up by most English language writing; one notable exception is John Deathridge, ‘Wagner's Unfinished Symphonies’ (paper read at the 1986 meeting of the Royal Musical Association, forthcoming).

7 See Grunsky, Karl, ‘Wagner als Symphoniker’, Richard-Wagner Jahrbuch, 1(1906), 227–44Google Scholar; and ‘Das Vorspiel und der erste Akt von Tristan und Isolde’, Richard-Wagner Jahrbuch, 2 (1907), 207–84.Google Scholar

8 Grunsky, ‘Wagner als Symphoniker’ (see n. 7), 231.

9 The citations are taken from: Kinderman, William, ‘“Das Geheimnis der Form” in Wagners Tristan und Isolde’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 40 (1983), 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newcomb, Anthony, ‘The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama’, 19th-Century Music, 5 (1981–1982), 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abbate, Carolyn, ‘The Parisian “Vénus” and the “Paris” Tannhäuser’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 36 (1983), 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bailey, Robert, ‘The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution’, 19th-Century Music, 1 (1977), 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Reti, Rudolph, The Thematic Process in Music (New York 1951), 342.Google Scholar

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12 See Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Wagners “Kunst des Übergangs” – der Zweigesang in “Tristan und Isolde”’, in Schuhmacher, G., ed., Zur musikalischen Analyse (Darmstadt, 1974), 475–86.Google Scholar

13 For more on Wagner's transcendence of ‘coherence’ see my essay, ‘Symphonic Opera, A Wagnerian Myth’, in Abbate, Carolyn and Parker, Roger, eds., Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner (Berkeley, 1989), 92–123.Google Scholar

14 Bayreuth, Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Gesellschaft, B II a 5; discussed in Bailey, Robert, ‘The Genesis of Tristan und Isolde’, Ph.D. diss. (Princeton, 1969), 16–29Google Scholar (the sketchbook is referred to as the ‘Brown Diary’). On dating the sketchbook, see Deathridge, John, Geck, Martin and Voss, Egon, Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen (Mainz, 1986), 431–5.Google Scholar

15 See Deathridge et al. (n. 14), 431–5 for a complete bibliographical listing of transcriptions and discussions.

16 Tristan Sketchbook (see n. 14), 8–9. ‘Erst wenn sich dieses irre, wirre, triviale und selbst boshafte […] Gerede in Bezug auf meine nun bereits vor Jahren der Offentlichkeit übergebenen Kunstanschauungen verstummt sein wird, also erst dann, wenn eine Widerlegung solcher, die einst mir widerlegen nicht aber kennenlernen wollten […] kann ich mich bestimmt fühlen, mich über manches in meinen früheren Schriften unklar gegebenes oder leidenschaftlich aufgefasstes erklärend […] noch einmal vernehmen zu lassen. Bis dahin mögen meine Freunde mich vom Unverstand und der Gemeinheit besiegt und zum Schweigen gebracht ansehen!’

17 Tristan Sketchbook (see n. 14), 55. ‘Ein Traum (Paris). Mit Herwegh. Menschen umringen und singen uns an. H. verwundert. Ich: “hat sich das nicht auch Gessler [sic] im Tell gefallen lassen müssen?” – dann höchst lächerliche Mund- und Zungenarbeit eines Knaben beim singen.’ Wagner was in Paris briefly at the end of February 1855, but the indication ‘Paris’ might mean not that he had the dream in Paris, but that the dream was set in Paris.

18 Tristan Sketchbook (see n. 14), 107. ‘Der Welt wird jede Art von Wohlverhalten gegen Andre gelehrt; nur wie sie sich gegen einen Menschen meiner Art zu verhalten hat, kann ihr nie beigebracht werden, weil es zu selten vorkommt.’

19 Gesammelte Schriften, IV (Leipzig, 1872), 190–2 (my emphasis).

20 Schenker, Heinrich, Harmony, trans. Borgese, Elizabeth Mann (Chicago, 1954), 112.Google Scholar

21 See Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Wagners Begriff der “dichterisch-musikalischen Periode”’, in Salmen, Walter, ed., Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikanschauung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1965), 179–94.Google Scholar

22 See, for example, Bailey (n. 14), 147–61. Other tonal analyses include Josephson, Nors, ‘Tonale Strukturen im musikdramatischen Schaffen Richard Wagners’, Die Musikforschung, 32 (1979), 141–9Google Scholar; for a discussion of the issues raised by this type of tonal analysis, see Newcomb (n. 9), 48–54. Stefan Kunze has made a provocative suggestion that Wagner often plays a game, gestures towards a ‘structural tonic arrival’ that is in many cases illusory, as the key arrived at often has only momentary significance, and is neither adumbrated in the music that precedes it, nor important to that which follows; see ‘Über Melodiebegriff und musikalischen Bau in Wagners Musikdrama’, in Dahlhaus, Carl, ed., Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk (Regensburg, 1970), especially 124–8.Google Scholar

23 This despite the fact that Wagner himself, first among the sceptics, criticised Wolzogen for limiting his analyses to motif-naming, thus ignoring the ways motifs also serve to weave a musical web. ‘‘Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama’, Gesammelte Schriften, X (Leipzig, 1883), 241–2.Google Scholar

24 The locus classicus is Dahlhaus's discussion of Wagner's fluid and open-ended evocations of conventional musical forms, ‘Formprinzipien in Wagners Ring des Nibelungen’, in Becker, Heinz, ed., Beiträge zur Geschichte der Oper (Regensburg, 1969), 95–129.Google Scholar

25 For a modern instance of analysis based on this dualism, see Arnold Whittall's discussion of ‘structure’ versus ‘the dramatic significance of thematic components’ in his chapter for Beckett's, LucyRichard Wagner: Parsifal (Cambridge, 1981), 61–3.Google Scholar

26 See Abbate(n. 13), 96–102.

27 See n. 12. That tension (rather than agreement) can exist between operatic music and the poetry or stage drama it sets is an idea opera criticism would do well to nurture; it is this tension, perhaps, that raises certain operatic works above the ordinary.

28 See n. 12, 477.

29 478; the reference to the ‘art of transition’ is, of course, to Wagner's famous letter to Mathilde Wesendonck about the ‘secret’ of musical form in Tristan. In a letter of 29 October 1859, Wagner called the ‘Kunst des feinsten allmählichen Überganges’ (as evinced in the Tristan Act II love duet, with its transition from frenetic greeting to languorous metaphysics) the ‘Geheimnis meiner musikalischen Form’; see Golther, Wolfgang, ed., Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck (Berlin, 1904), 189.Google Scholar

30 479.

31 481.

32 Dahlhaus (see n. 12), 481, ‘Die Verkiammerung ist ausschlieβlich musikalisch-formal, nicht dichterisch begründet: eine Rechtfertigung durch den Text, wie sie in “Oper und Drama” und in “Zukunftsmusik” postuliert wurde, fehit.’

33 See, for example, ‘Zur Geschichte der Leitmotivtechnik bei Wagner’, in Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk (Regensburg, 1970), 17–22.Google Scholar

34 Cooke, Deryck, I Saw the World End (Oxford, 1979), 48–56.Google Scholar

35 One notable exception, a close reading of poetic devices in the Tristan text, and the text's delicate relationship to Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan poem, is Arthur Groos's ‘Wagner's Tristan: In Defence of the Libretto’, Music and Letters, 69 (1988), 465–81.Google Scholar

36 The notion of ‘conversation’ is indebted to Bakhtin's vision of ‘novelistic’ discourse: how the author's depiction of a character's language sets up an exchange with both language and character; see ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin, 1981), 41–51 and 82–3.Google Scholar

37 For one instance of ‘mere’ detail so dismissed, see McCreless, Patrick, Wagner's ‘Siegfried’: Its Drama, History, and Music (Ann, Arbor 1982), 84Google Scholar, ‘Act III presents a striking contrast to Acts I and II in terms of motivic complexity, harmonic idiom, and formal organization. This startling change of foreground procedure has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the logic and coherence of the background tonal plan; and indeed, many analysts have tended to concentrate on surface differences between the first two acts and the third, and ignore the unifying features of the large-scale tonal structure.’

38 Gesammelte Schriften, X, 247. His remark seems more pointed when we know what lay behind the essay, written hard on the heels of Wagner's first confrontation with Brahms's first two symphonies in February 1879; Cosima later reported in her diary that Wagner said he wrote parts of the essay ‘nur in Bezug auf Brahms’, though this was in part a flanking motion, designed to forestall her father's wrath (who, not unreasonably, might feel himself addressed by Wagner's slighting remarks about programme-symphonists). See Wagner, Cosima, Die Tagebücher (Munich/Zürich, 1977), II, 371Google Scholar [entry of 23 June 1879].

39 Cosima Wagner's Diaries, trans. Skelton, Geoffrey (New York 1977), I, 129Google Scholar [entry of 25 July 1869].