Lecture 17/10 Wagner 1813-1883

 “Wagner has had a greater influence than any other single

artist on the culture of our age” Bryan Magee’s Aspects of
Wagner, 2nd ed. (1988, p.56)
 “Wagner societies, founded in the composer’s lifetime,
flourished in many parts of the world”
 “The number of books and articles written about him, which
had reached the ten thousand mark before his death”
 Early Career and Works
 Symphony in C major (1832), Die Feen (1833), Das
Liebesverbot (1835), marries Minna Planner (1836)
 A Faust Overture 1839-1840
 Rienzi first performed in 1842 in Dresden
 Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman) 1841

 Appointed director of Opera 1843

 1849: Political involvement with the Dresden uprising. He flees
to Switzerland, he remains in exile from the German lands until
1864
 He begins to conceive the Ring Cycle a series of four extensive
dramas
 Theoretical exegesis
 Between 1848-1853 he composed no music but wrote around
50 essays including: art and revolution, the artwork of the
future, Opera and Drama
 “I had to clear up a whole life behind me to draw into the light
all the things dawning inside me by applying my own
methods……back into the lovely unconsciousness of artistic
creation” Letter to Lizst November
 Intellect and Emotions “In drama we must become aware
through our emotions.
 Gesamptkunstwerk (total work of art) i.e. a combination of all
the arts, in particular the fusion of poetry, music and drama. At
one time, he considered himself to be a philosopher, poet and
composer in that order, inspired by ancient Greek drama
 Music,drama rather than opera. Music used to articulate the
drama, to reflect the internal emotional/psychological state of
the characters
 He wrote his own librettos, based on mythology, to illuminate
the nature of human experience and be of universal relevance
 Subject matter of symbolic significance
 A quasi-religious concept of Art, Humanist not Christian
 His works required new types of voices, instruments,
conductors, theatres and audiences
 Extended time-scale
 “Music of the future”
 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
 His masterpiece, The world as Will and Representation 1819
reprinted 1844 and 1859
 His acquaintance with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
was the great event in Wagners life
 “There has rarely been so productive a relationship between
one great mind and another when the two were in different
fields”
 The distinction between the phenomenal that we can perceive
from the noumenal that which we can’t
 Music above all the other arts gives access to the noumenal
 Unbroken musical continuity through each act. “The art of
transition” Unendliche Melodie
 Symphonic development of leitmotifs to reflect the drama and
also to achieve musical coherence and unity.
 Transformation of leitmotifs occurs mainly in the orchestra
 Large orchestra, much more than accompaniement
 Wide ranging modulations, at time highly chromatic language,
seriously stretched the principles of taonlity (esp. in Tristan
und Isolde)
