The Order of Things

For a later commentator to write in such general terms is to proceed as if such an all-determining practice affecting the smallest details and largest schemes alike could only be the result of Wagner’s own basic understanding of the phenomenon in question – a fully fledged, practice-inspiring theory of how opera had become music drama. From the distance of a century and a half, during which artworks have been notable for their stylistic diversity and expressive disruptiveness, the evolution of the Ring from conception to completion over a period of more than twenty-five years can appear reassuringly linear and logical: a triumph of exceptionally confident and self-assured creative will-power in the face of all the practical, personal challenges that Wagner faced during that turbulent time. Even the regular reminders, from innumerable commentators, that Wagner’s initial plan in 1848 for a single Nibelung drama was radically different from the tetralogy completed in 1874 and first performed two years later, does little to counter the kind of narrative impulse that presumes the steady and overwhelmingly coherent construction of a well-varied yet compellingly integrated work that started out in the shadow of Lohengrin and ended up responding to Tristan and prefiguring Parsifal. In these terms, the Ring is not just Wagner’s largest single work but encapsulates all that is especially significant about him and his genius.

This chapter will play its own encapsulating game, and the first move in that game is to reiterate that the binary notion of “Theory and Practice” can stand for several different processes. Most obviously, it suggests a concern with both the conception and the execution of the work in question; “conception” as an aesthetic “big bang,” concentrated and comprehensive, “execution” as an activity messily spread out over many years, and frequently interrupted by other activities, by no means all to do with the creation of artworks. There is also the more specialized connotation of theory and practice in respect of the type of artwork on which Wagner was engaged: a theory of what opera, or music drama, was and should become – whether its subject-matter was relevant to the Ring or not – and those literary and musical features that would be deployed as theory was put into practice. While the first category of theory and practice can confine itself to the twenty-six-year time span of the Ring’s genesis, the second category inevitably draws into its web the long and elaborate history of the completed work’s reception, in performance as well as in critical response and academic study. But even this apparently neat distinction tends to erode under examination, if only because so much of what is known about that protracted genesis is the result of much later ways of thinking – in other words, an interpretation rather than a description that can be assumed to be a literal and permanently unchallengeable statement of fact.

The endless to-ing and fro-ing around the story of what “really” happened on Wagner’s visit to La Spezia in 1853 is just one instance of this.Footnote ⁴ With both types of “theory and practice” analysis, the need to resist the ever-present tendency to prioritize logic and coherence over irrationality and fragmentation remains. For instance, it is scarcely plausible to argue that the Ring finished up as a “textbook” demonstration of poetic and compositional principles set out in painstaking detail in a preludial manifesto. It is not so much that the composition of the Ring put the theoretical principles and aesthetic aspirations of Opera and Drama and the other Zurich essays into practice, as that the cycle’s composition contextualized and reinterpreted those principles and aspirations, testing their relevance and (it is often argued) implicitly acknowledging their inadequacies. This view now finds favor as a result of the pervasive, evidence-based conviction among recent commentators that by 1850 Wagner had long understood that opera, like society itself, needed to change. But the actual technical details of what form those changes should take were difficult for Wagner to determine in advance – as difficult as determining the cultural and political foundations of a society in which such a new kind of theatrical event might best be performed and appreciated, which seems to mean that theory would take shape as practice proceeded. Not for the first time, the general would advance in tandem with the particular.

Wagner’s Theory and the Ring’s Conception

It is all too easy to assume that it was thinking about music after Beethoven, and opera’s typical formal design in the 1840s, that determined Wagner’s practical proposals concerning the way forward in his Zurich essays and his way of working on the Ring: that his prescriptions would have been relevant to any kind of dramatic theme and any type of libretto. As it happened, however, the interaction of words and music rather than “purely musical” features are of such concern in Opera and Drama that Wagner-skeptics of his time, such as Eduard Hanslick, could pinpoint the dangers of so radically turning away from the traditionally operatic focus on musical matters.Footnote ⁵ Aesthetic and technical discussions of musical matters in the mid nineteenth century were intricately involved not only with developments in post-Enlightenment culture, which historians now associate with the elusive, inescapable notion of Romanticism, but also with an increasing concern to provide manuals of instruction for students of music, whether potential composers, performers, or teachers.

Retrospective accounts of the evolution of nineteenth-century music theory, especially in the interacting spheres of form and harmony, lay satisfyingly rich and multivalent foundations for discussion of Wagnerian practice before, during, and after his composition of the Ring.Footnote ⁶ An understanding of tonality as entailing a “tonal system” of all the major and minor keys was being properly formulated for the first time, and discussions of harmony and tonality often dealt more intensively with contemporary music than with composers who came before Mozart and Beethoven – much less familiar then than they are today. The complex details of this topic and its usefulness as background for Wagner’s – and Wagner’s critics’ – understanding of his compositional practice cannot be rehearsed in depth here. But it can be noted that in theoretical treatises as well separated in time as Gottfried Weber’s Theory of Musical Composition (originally published in German in 1830–2) and Arnold Schoenberg’s Structural Functions of Harmony, published posthumously in 1954, there are discourses on the kind of chromatic harmonic enrichments and elaborately evolutionary thematic processes fundamental to the Wagner style, the kind of compositional practice that began to reach its full maturity and radical intensity with the commencement of work on Das Rheingold in 1853. Historians of music theory can confidently trace the evolution of their topic with reference to the wealth of printed sources that occupy the years between Weber and Schoenberg. It is much more difficult to reconstruct Wagner’s thinking about harmonic and tonal matters in the years leading up to his work on the Ring and to determine with any reasonable degree of plausibility how that thinking produced the results which later commentators so confidently interpret and dissect. The following narrative attempts to exemplify the issues.

That Wagner, thirty-five in 1848, was already an experienced and successful opera composer as well as a restlessly ambitious thinker and writer hugely complicates the role of theoretical speculation in the conception and creation of the Ring, and that is before the further complicating factor of his precipitate flight from Dresden into Swiss exile in May 1849. A sober survey of the available facts indicates that between completing the score of Lohengrin on April 28, 1848 and beginning to draft the music for Das Rheingold on November 1, 1853 he poured out a mass of verbiage which fell into three basic types: first, preparatory materials for what would become the Ring itself – the prose outline called Der Nibelungen-Mythus, the Siegfrieds Tod libretto, the essay Die Wibelungen, and the then-final four-part Ring poem published in February 1853; second, explorations of other possible dramatic topics, like Friedrich I, Jesus von Nazareth and Wieland der Schmied: third, more general aesthetic and cultural writings, of which Opera and Drama was the largest and Jewishness in Music (Das Judentum in der Musik) the most controversial.

Since virtually all this literary activity preceded the prose sketches and verse drafts for the four Ring poems begun in the Autumn of 1851, it would be difficult to argue that Wagner could only proceed to the specifics of dramatic construction and libretto writing by forgetting each and every aspect of the grand theoretical and aesthetic suggestions made in those writings: most obviously, the Ring poems replace the rhyming structures and metric regularities of his earlier librettos with the sort of persistent, alliterative repetitions (“Weia, Wage, Woge … Welle”) which could be thought to invite the musical parallelism of motivic, thematic reiteration – a musical means for displacing the regular, usually four-bar phraseology of his earlier music. Near the beginning of Das Rheingold, where all but the third of those four words are alliteratively set to the same interval – a descending whole tone – phrase structure is still straightforwardly “quadratic,” as fits the initially song-like character of the Rhinedaughters’ music. But the Ring as a whole seems designed to challenge as much as to retain such regularity, where challenge is dramatically and textually appropriate. In this way, the transformation from “poetry” into “prose” which defines the transformation from Romantic opera into music drama is outlined as theory in Opera and Drama to prepare the practice of those Ring dramas as they were gradually brought to completion.

Such direct connections between theoretical writing and compositional practice cannot be denied. But it is scarcely to be wondered at that Wagner’s Zurich writings provide a less-than-convincing indication of how his predominantly poetic and cultural beliefs about the ways in which opera should be transformed into a new kind of musico-dramatic experience. Promulgating a theory of the “poetic-musical period” – that is, the general rules whereby specific melodic and harmonic material could respond alertly to the moods of the verbal structures – risked seemingly to endorse what in the era of the cinema would be called “mickey mousing,” reducing music to the subordinate or incidental role of illustrating action or simply reinforcing sentiments expressed in words, and not only abandoning the kind of canary-fancying coloratura of so much then-contemporary opera but reducing if not eliminating music’s ability to provide a distinctive formal as well as emotional context for the dramatic events shown on the stage.

Although Wagner boldly attempted to seize the aesthetic high ground by presenting his apparent change of emphasis as inspired by the great Beethovenian transformation – in the Ninth Symphony – of frustratingly inchoate instrumental abstraction into vocal declarations of social and spiritual harmony raised to a higher spiritual level by musical rather than merely verbal means, he wisely made no effort in 1850 to offer a music-theoretical prescription for how music dramas as entireties would occupy the metaphysical high ground by displacing such “absolute” symphonic thinking. The musical thinness of the sketches for Siegfrieds Tod which Wagner roughed out in the summer of 1850 could well have lain behind the strictly limited technical specifications for the new kind of dramatic music found in Opera and Drama, written a few months later. He would need much more time to explore the compositional possibilities of theoretical ideas generated as much if not more by visceral dislike (mixed in with a certain envy) of Rossini, Meyerbeer, Bellini, and other successful, wealthy practitioners of grand opera or bel canto: and after 1853, once fully committed to composing and staging music dramas rather than theorizing about them, he would never get round to providing – or considering it useful to provide – more than a brief indication of how this nonoperatic, symphonic kind of music drama might work in musical practice.

That brief indication, in an essay called “On the Application of Music to the Drama” (Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama, 1879) coming three years after the Ring’s first performance, and with Parsifal moving steadily to completion, could have been intended to set forth all that Wagner thought needed to be said about something that was much more about listening and being affected by music in the theater than about rationalizing specialized compositional matters of tonal structure and thematic process – the musical means to the very particular dramatic end. The Zurich writings theorize in various ways while understandably not giving more than occasional, rather perfunctory hints as to how theory might be converted into practice. By contrast, the 1879 essay – which quotes music from Lohengrin as well as the Ring – has given later theorists and musicologists some useful cues for interpreting Wagner’s understanding of his own musico-dramatic practice in light of those remarkable technical and aesthetic transformations that can be shown to contribute vitally to the theory and practice of an emergent modernism. In particular, the emphasis he had once placed on the originality and theatrical power of the “art of transition” is now complemented by the frankly unsymphonic, equally dramatic spontaneity of “rhetorical dialectics.” Later, I will look at the 1879 discussion in more detail; first, however, the essays written some thirty years earlier require further scrutiny.

From Feuerbach to Schopenhauer

For musicologists, the close study of Wagner’s Zurich writings can easily seem a necessary penance to offset their eager indulgence in the musical riches of his operas and music dramas. The dilemma those writings represent has been well characterized in recent times by James Treadwell. On the one hand, “there is no doubt that the Ring project, as it was conceived in those early stages, is the point of reference for everything he has to say”; on the other hand, there are strong reasons “for not reading them simply as theoretical accounts of how music drama is to be made.” Yet the longest and latest of those essays, Opera and Drama, “is certainly the closest Wagner comes to writing a theoretical prescription for his own mature compositional style”; a marginal note about Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony on the manuscript of the first Zurich essay, Art and Revolution – “the word stands higher than the tone” – is, “in its most simplified, germinal form … the single idea which links the Zurich writings with Wagner’s mature style. Here he begins to imagine a genuinely new way of organizing an operatic work.”Footnote ⁷

As Treadwell implies here, it was one thing for Wagner to “imagine” a collective artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which text “stands higher” than music, but which nevertheless brings word, music, dance, and settings into an ideal unity as the perfect parallel to a new, fully integrated, postrevolutionary social order;Footnote ⁸ it was something else to work out the details of how such a work would be designed in practice. For Treadwell, as for Grey, Opera and Drama “tells us much more about how the Ring was imagined than how it was put together,” and although the Zurich writings emphasize “that his new ideas about opera relate fundamentally to its power to communicate itself meaningfully and unmistakably” we might read those writings “not as (‘theoretical’) descriptions of how this aim is to be achieved, but as manifestations of this explicitness in action: polemical addresses to an audience which themselves adopt the kind of stance towards the public the subsequent drama will be supposed to achieve.” Treadwell then concludes with a properly challenging and extreme idea: “the writings themselves seem above all an effort to imagine music having the very thing it most conspicuously lacks, the power of speech.”Footnote ⁹ This might indeed be the conclusion to be drawn from what happens in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Yet, by way of such thinking, Wagner seems to have come to realize that the best way to suggest music’s “power of speech” was, after all, to allow “the tone” to stand significantly higher than “the word.”

In those regions of Wagner criticism that are purely verbal, one word often serves to suggest how this change came about: Schopenhauer. In a useful formula, Barry Millington has noted “the ideological shift in the Ring from revolutionary utopianism to a Schopenhauerian acceptance of inevitable suffering and loss.”Footnote ¹⁰ That “shift” began in December 1854, when Wagner “read and immediately re-read” Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818), “experiencing something like a religious conversion.”Footnote ¹¹ As Julian Young summarizes the effect, whereas “in his pre-Schopenhauerian Oper und Drama (1851) Wagner asserted the priority of words … [a]fter 1854 Wagner reverses himself and accepts Schopenhauer’s thesis of the primacy of music over words.” That thesis centered on the claim that “music is the highest of the arts: whereas the others represent the physical surface of things, music discloses the metaphysical: it is ‘an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.’”Footnote ¹²

Wagner’s relatively sudden and apparently unreserved acceptance, from 1855 onwards, of this new association between musical primacy and subjects underlining “inevitable suffering and loss” was surely encouraged by his enthusiasm for the kind of subject found in Lohengrin, and the conviction that musical and textual material less conventionally operatic even than that of Lohengrin would do such subjects much greater justice. The “problem” with traditional opera therefore becomes not the preeminence of music as such, but the kind of music (showy vocal writing, subordinate instrumental accompaniment) that was treated as preeminent. Some such perception helps to explain how, although by the time of his “conversion” to Schopenhauer at the end of 1854 Wagner had already completed Das Rheingold and much if not all of Die Walküre (the fair copy of the full score of this was finished on March 23, 1856), it is possible to suggest certain affinities between Schopenhauerian thinking and those earlier dramas. It is even more important, however, to resist the simplistic argument that Wagner somehow managed a complete shift of emphasis from physical to metaphysical, as well as from utopian to pessimistic, under the philosopher’s hypnotic influence. While Tristan und Isolde is clearly more Schopenhauerian in this sense than any of his other stage works, Wagner was never able to dispense with words, or with physicality.Footnote ¹³ Had he composed some purely instrumental symphonies or string quartets in later life, these might have brought him closer to the apparent Schopenhauerian ideal than any of his music dramas. As for the four dramas comprising the Ring, even without the so called “Schopenhauer-inspired” conclusion about the end of the world whose text he drafted in the summer of 1856 but never used, it makes as little sense to interpret the work’s dramatic content exclusively in terms of “revolutionary utopianism” as it does its music in terms of recitativo secco, da capo arias, and Bellinian coloratura.

Poetic-Musical Periods: Putting the Ring Together

In his judicious account of Opera and Drama, which probably goes as far as a present-day musicologist dares to outline the kind of practical template for musico-dramatic construction that Wagner himself could have provided had he found the time and felt the need to do so, Thomas S. Grey suggests that Part 3 of that thesis, “Poetry and Music in the Drama of the Future,” is of particular interest for the insight it gives us into Wagner’s ideas about the composition of the Ring cycle while the project was in gestation. Nevertheless, “precisely because he had not advanced beyond a few abortive musical sketches and ideas for a handful of eventual Leitmotive … the theoretical blueprint set forth in Part 3 cannot be applied in any literal way to the finished works.”Footnote ¹⁴ Elsewhere, Grey states that the “fundamental building block” of the new artwork would be “the poetic-musical period,” consisting of “a speech or series of verses (presumably the utterance of a single character), the musical setting of which begins and ends in a particular (‘tonic’) key, while it may traverse any number of intermediate tonal areas in between, reflecting the shifting affective contours of the overall text.”Footnote ¹⁵

The nearest Wagner himself gets to a concrete illustration of what such a period might be like comes in his comments on the highly alliterative phrase “Die Liebe gibt Lust zum Leben.” As Grey paraphrases Wagner’s comments:

In the absence of any more specific compositional elucidation from Wagner himself, it was left to Louis Köhler (1820–86), in a book called Die Melodie der Sprache (1853), to offer something intended as an appropriate musical setting of Wagner’s alliterative couplet. As Grey points out alongside his quotation of this example,Footnote ¹⁷ the sorry ineptitude of Köhler’s effort, coupled as it is with comically parodic settings of the same text to demonstrate the vices of traditionally florid operatic writing, strongly suggests that (irrespective of theory and the desire for innovation) a degree of musico-dramatic genius would be needed to transform the distinctly rudimentary theoretical principle of the poetic-musical period – the Opera and Drama “blueprint” – into viable large-scale structures. As such, it is less a “theory” requiring practical exemplification, more an undeveloped, instinctive insight that would virtually disappear as the exigencies of working out texts doing justice to the Ring’s themes and personalities and finding suitable music materials and designs for their musico-dramatic representation were confronted over the next quarter-century.

Even if the Ring dramas can ultimately be considered to consist – literally – of extended sequences of relatively brief poetic-musical periods, and even if the principles on which such periods are built are not completely absent from (in particular) Lohengrin, the work that came immediately before the Ring, the special, essentially new stylistic qualities of those periods are more important to the innovative character of the Ring dramas than their purely formal, musical constituents. The wholehearted shift to “musical prose” that Wagner embraced in 1853 brought with it – perhaps because of the potent mix of the mythic and the national-historical in the basic textual materials he was using for the Ring – a compositional idiom.Footnote ¹⁸ Its most distinctive aspect emerged from the contrast between very simple, even “artless” elements to be found in the generic and expressive components of the music and the processes, contrasting transitional connectedness and dialectical disjunction, that were brought to bear on their assembly into the cycle’s scenes and acts. All in all, this amounted to a reinforcement and refinement of what I have been referring to as the “early modernism” of Wagner’s historical and aesthetic situation.Footnote ¹⁹ In which case, that “larger tonal unity” that Grey suggests might provide a governing compositional impulse for period construction as the Ring dramas were put together itself becomes subject to questioning, even as it invites affirmation. And, although Wagner may never have got round to formulating an appropriately multilayered theoretical formulation of how such an early-modernist view of music and drama might be written down, the response of later commentators to his work does much to confirm that only some such formulation can do justice to the Ring’s remarkable originality, and help to explain its no less remarkable durability.

From Opera and Drama to Das Rheingold

Before we finally abandon the theoretical abstractions of Opera and Drama and Wagner’s other writings for the specific practices of the Ring, we should acknowledge Grey’s timely reminder that, even in the midst of those “abstractions,” Wagner himself commented on the possible consequences of what might happen when his “two-line example” (text only) “was ‘expanded to a larger scale’ where, between the departure from the initial key (and affect) and its eventual return, ‘a long series of lines’ might intervene, ‘expressing the most varied intensification and admixture of intermediate emotional stages.’”Footnote ²⁰

As an initial, exemplary illustration of practice interpreting theory, Grey chooses a sixteen-bar passage from scene 4 of Das Rheingold (bars 3240–55). Here, Froh’s music

This is only a part of Grey’s analysis, but it is enough to show that the Opera and Drama prescriptions do have some practical relevance to the way Das Rheingold was put together. Even more importantly, the musical style here, involving what Warren Darcy calls “a beautiful cantilena based upon the Apples motif,”Footnote ²² exemplifies the very direct, song-like idiom which, even when devoid of much in the way of quasi-symphonic motivic development and transformation, as here, powerfully projects the very direct kind of musical simplicity which Wagner devises to suggest the elemental resonance of his dramatic theme. His ability to do this, creating an equally direct kind of intensity without lapsing into banality, is remarkable. And it is never more starkly set out than in Das Rheingold where, well before coming under the influence of Schopenhauerian and other ideas about the primacy of the purely musical, the contribution of the orchestra is more often that of the scene-setter and deferential accompanist than that of the chorus-like commentator on the vocal action that it would become in the later Ring dramas. The greater importance of this orchestral dimension probably helps to ensure that the return of more traditionally operatic attributes which some commentators detect in the later Ring dramas after the ne plus ultra of Tristan und Isolde had a less obviously “regressive” effect on Wagner’s musico-dramatic style than it might otherwise have done.

Grey’s second example from Das Rheingold comes from Fafner’s music in scene 2 (bars 1111–26),Footnote ²³ another sixteen-bar period whose D major tonality is chromatically inflected in its later stages as the textual imagery (not strongly alliterative, as it happens) shifts from descriptions of youthful vitality to aging weakness. As with the first example, this is almost artlessly song-like, fixing Fafner’s guileless yet sensitive personality – as with Froh, the music brings a degree of refinement to counter the brutal qualities more usually on display. With their strongly cadential elements, neither of these periods is literally open-ended, yet both very obviously function as part of larger wholes, not as separate or separable “numbers” in the old operatic sense.

Having at an early stage decided that the initial prose draft for a three-act opera called Siegfrieds Tod needed a preliminary two-part Prologue, Wagner first called what became Das Rheingold “Der Raub: Vorspiel” (later Der Raub des Rheingoldes: Vorspiel). The implication was that, generically, a Prologue – however extended – would comprise continuous “parts” or “scenes” rather than separate acts, and, simply because this made possible such a high degree of sustained continuity, determining the nature and extent of contrasting elements was a no less vital part of the creative process. Fundamental intrusions and transformations – Alberich’s appearance in scene 1, the change from the bed of the Rhine to Valhalla’s mountain top between scenes 1 and 2 – could be effected through a combination of harmonic evolution tied to a basic change of mood, and, with such fundamentals in mind, the precise details of any single poetic-musical period become less important for the music analyst and critical interpreter than the broader cumulative effects resulting from the competing claims of – as mentioned above – those factors Wagner eventually came to think of as the “art of transition” on the one hand, and (according to the 1879 essay) “rhetorical dialectics” on the other.Footnote ²⁴ While the art of transition involved working with change through connectedness, “rhetorical dialectics” required the harnessing of unmediated contrast and even opposition, and seeming to fracture rather than to reinforce continuity. With such thinking, the archetypal social and political images associated with revolution and conservation resurface within the Wagnerian lexicon. The evolution of the Ring from conception to completion, theory to practice, is the core narrative of these images as they progress over more than two decades.

Motifs for Analysis

Wagner’s own comments on his creative practice in the Ring, as they appear in the 1879 essay, might even be interpreted – admittedly at the risk of assuming connections where none can actually be proven – as a direct response and implied critique of the main way of interpreting his practice for the benefit of audiences confronting a new and challenging work for the first time. With the grand title of Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik zu Richard Wagners Festspiel Der Ring des Nibelungen, Hans von Wolzogen identified a tally of ninety Motive – some subdivided – and gave titles associating them with either individual characters, objects, or states of mind.Footnote ²⁵ Such motifs appear in vocal lines and orchestral fabric alike. Martin Geck notes Wagner’s concern that

Yet Geck is never more convincing than in arguing his own case that “anyone wanting to see the Ring as a work underpinned by a coherent philosophy will have realized by now that this is impossible,” not just because of “the numerous inconsistencies and contradictions that the work contains,” but because of the unclassical, unsymphonic centrifugalism of the musico-dramatic structure, as defined in this chapter. For Geck,

Also from the perspective of the present-day, Christian Thorau has made the reasonable point that

Even so, such “musical Baedekers” evidently met a genuine need, and still do, not least because, like styles of stage production, they can move beyond the conventions of Wagner’s own time to propose stimulating if controversial connections with quite different belief-systems, as with Robert Donington’s labeling of the Ring’s thematic elements according to the precepts of Jungian psychology.Footnote ²⁸

Responding to the Ring by way of recognizing its multifarious thematic materials is not just a matter of hearing what you see but of hearing what you sense by way of mood and atmosphere. Of course, at first hearing most audience members would have relied primarily on visible recurrences, visible means of characterization, only gradually becoming aware that similar music was sounding when such similarities were dramatically appropriate, even though the “object” that inspires the relationship is not actually visible, as with Valhalla during Waltraute’s exchanges with Brünnhilde in act 1 of Götterdämmerung. As remains the case today, relatively few audience members could be expected to absorb the more subtle scholarly discussions built around a fair familiarity with at least some of Wagner’s other works and geared to an understanding of opera and music drama as something more than a loose sequence of events in which text, music, and staging move forward with unambiguous unanimity. But such discussions began to multiply in number as Wagner’s works and the ideas behind them became permanent features of the evolving cultural landscape. Apart from Wagner’s own essay, 1879 – no fewer than fourteen years after the Munich premiere of Tristan und Isolde – was the year in which “the first practical harmony book which assumes the Wagnerian style as a norm” was published: Cyrill Kistler’s Harmonielehre für Lehrer und Lernende. This, together with Karl Mayrberger’s Die Harmonik Richard Wagner’s an den Leitmotiv aus “Tristan und Isolde” erläutert, first published in full in 1882, just before Wagner’s death, underlined the fact that it was this boldest of Wagner’s works, and its very first chord in particular, that offered music theorists the richest opportunities for scholarly technical interpretation. Since any understanding of something called “tonality” had only begun to be established in Germany during the 1860s, with Helmholtz, it was not until the turn of the century that theorists from Hugo Riemann to Ernst Kurth began as a matter of course to reference Wagner’s complete works in their theoretical explorations of tonal harmony, diatonic and chromatic.Footnote ²⁹

Trials and Errors

The kind of interpretative analyses by Thomas Grey and John Daverio from the 1990s that seek to pin down Wagner’s “theory and practice” in the creation of the Ring respond in differing degrees to other analyses that can appear to over-commit to theoretical constraints at odds with the flexibility and even imprecision of Wagner’s actual work. The use of Schenker’s theory of tonal design, most notably in Warren Darcy’s study of Das Rheingold, shows an inevitable underlining of connecting rather than separating elements in the musical fabric just as, from an earlier time, Alfred Lorenz’s use of two very basic kinds of ternary periodic structure – ABA, AAB – to reveal Wagner’s alleged “secret” formal principle still provokes mixed responses.Footnote ³⁰ Neither of these totalizing exercises is utterly implausible, though the tendency of both to retreat from significant surface details in the interests of the bigger picture illustrates the risks of allowing possible similarities to override probable differences. Though neither Daverio nor Grey would be likely to have consciously aimed to do this, their own theory and practice can be seen to place a view of Wagner’s early-modernist aesthetics of structure within their own particular world of late-modernist musical culture, something especially sensitive to the anachronisms that arise when basic “classical” values are brought to bear – as is difficult to avoid with applications of totalizing theories – on nonclassical works of art. For Wagner himself, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that it was particularly satisfying to be able to rediscover existing materials in his second main phase of work on the Ring and to bring his past and present into alignment without needing to resist or reject anything useful that had worked its way into his thinking as time had passed.

Martin Geck is one recent writer who formulates a persuasive theory about Wagner’s basic generative idea for the Ring. According to Geck, three

and Geck further contends that,

Geck reinforces the strength of this broad dramatic notion for Wagner in citing some little-known notes for a three-act drama about Achilles in which “the theme of love in conflict with power, which dominates the Ring, is already clearly adumbrated.”Footnote ³¹

Whether we regard this as amounting to a theory about what Wagner – in Geck’s interpretation – was deciding the Ring should be or as a conclusion about the Wagnerian practice that made the completed cycle possible, it offers an effective way of thinking through the work from initial generalities to concluding particulars. Geck also contends, with perhaps pardonable hyperbole:

Is Geck making unreasonable demands on dedicated students of musicology, not to mention ordinary opera-goers? The sheer persistence of the Ring in performance and scholarly study alike some 150 years after the tetralogy’s completion suggests rather that he is telling the sober truth.

Formal Properties of Scenes and Acts

(b) Sentences

The periodic phrase structure that was an essential feature of earlier music was not, however, the only premade phrase structure available to Wagner. The main alternative phrase structure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one that Schoenberg called the “sentence.”Footnote ⁷ In this, a basic idea of around two bars’ duration is immediately followed by some kind of repetition (e.g., literal or on the dominant), after which there is a continuation containing two essential elements: “liquidation,” a breaking up of the idea into smaller constituent parts, and finally a cadence. The effect of the sentence is to state an idea, fix it in the mind through immediate repetition, develop it (which often involves a fragmentation of the basic motif), and build anticipation of a cadential punctuation to terminate the idea: a very rough similarity obtains with the syntactic structure of a linguistic clause, although there is no sense in which a musical sentence communicates anything definite beyond itself. And there is another approximate relation between this idea and the Bar form that Alfred Lorenz famously identified in Walther’s Prize Songs in Die Meistersinger and then applied as a general principle across Wagner’s entire operatic output.Footnote ⁸ Lorenz’s “Bar” is a notoriously vague term, and derives such explanatory power as it has from that vagueness (it is, in the disparaging sense used by Karl Popper, more or less “unfalsifiable”), but the greater precision of the concept of the sentence makes that a more useful tool for examining Wagner’s “musical prose.”Footnote ⁹

In Wagner’s sentences, the basic move is to create a loose form with the proportion short–short–long (corresponding to the classical sentence’s basic idea–repetition–continuation). Wagner may insert additional repetitions of the basic idea, and the close might be attenuated (the cadence might not be a perfect cadence, for instance) or absent altogether, but the shape can still be discerned. The first meaningful vocal statement of the cycle (see Example 4.1), Flosshilde’s criticism of her sisters’ careless watch over the gold, offers a simple illustration. The opening two-bar basic idea (bb. 158–9) is given an immediate, lightly varied repeat (bb. 160–1), and is followed by four bars of continuation (bb. 162–5) which lead to a perfect cadence into B♭ at the start of the next phrase (b. 166).

Example 4.1 Das Rheingold, scene 1

In pursuit of the ideal of “endless melody,” whose most elementary principle is the suppression of cadences at the end of phrases (or the effect of a cadence in the vocal part which is not matched by cadential harmonies in the orchestra), Wagner very frequently loosens this relatively tight sentence structure. And yet, in a manner that is so often a feature of his style, Wagner’s break with convention often retains that convention as a kind of necessary negation, a means of drawing attention to the break he is simultaneously making. The opening of Götterdämmerung gives an example of such a sentence (see Example 4.2).Footnote ¹⁰ As at the opening of Rheingold, Matthew BaileyShea notes that the traditional elements of sentence structure are present: a basic idea (in the orchestra, bb. 27–8), a repetition (bb. 29–30), and a continuation (bb. 31–5). But the traditional sentence’s built-in expectation of some kind of closure at the end of the continuation section would be inapt in this dramatic context. All onward drive is absent here: the slow tempo, subdued dynamics, and queries from the Norns (“What light is that there?” “Is the day already dawning?” etc.), all contribute to a sense of stasis. Time does not press here: It must wait. The sentence form in this case is therefore used not to generate motion towards a close, a clearly bounded temporal unit, but a more gradual progress of development and rumination, a musical phrase hovering almost outside of time: hence the continuation’s failure to reach a cadence. In the repetition of the basic idea, too, Wagner dramatizes the moment. Instead of the simply varied repetition of the Rhinemaiden’s line in Example 4.1, “the upper part [of the idea] rises up a third while the harmony is shifted down a third (E♭ minor to C♭ minor). Thus, the basic idea is not just repeated, it is developed.”Footnote ¹¹ The audience’s subconscious awareness of the classical model of the sentence, with its drive towards closure, can thus be summoned up by Wagner only to be negated: as he pours the musical object (the phrase) into its concept (the sentence), we press up against a certain remainder – a sense, perhaps unnoticed at first, but gradually building, and often becoming intense, of desire for a resolution. As BaileyShea observes, “what is most important with regard to Wagner’s sentences is that they generally point toward a specific cadence, even if that cadence itself is ultimately denied.”Footnote ¹² Or, to put it another way, what is important about Wagner’s phrase structure is the way that even on its own, without reference to the harmonic structures which inflame its effect, it can seem to arrest the passage of time in an appreciable and effective way, and make the audience will the drama to continue.

Example 4.2 Götterdämmerung, Vorspiel

Harmonic and Motivic Structures

The interlace structure found echoes in literary modernism in the work of writers who much admired Wagner. These included James Joyce, who used it to create depth in Ulysses (sometimes also making connections with Dubliners), and Marcel Proust, who populated a vastly rich fin de siècle world with the technique in A la recherche du temps perdu. But arguably Wagner’s greatest contribution to early modernism in music was his chromatic distension of tonal space. The most readily graspable aspect of Wagner’s chromaticism, familiar to many music lovers, is the saturation of his post-Tristan harmony with what is generally simply called chromaticism. As interesting, and as expressive, as his individual chords or their sequence often are, an increase in the spectrum of harmonic colors does not on its own constitute a musical revolution. The fact that almost all of the harmonies Wagner used can be described in terms of traditional harmony, and that the great majority of his chords are actually triadic (i.e., simple three-note chords such as E minor and G major) indicates that, in principle, what is interesting about his chromaticism is not the chords he chooses but the structures he forms with them. Specifically, what makes Wagner’s achievement so impressive is the development of a new chromatic technique that restructures the classical relations between the normal diatonic chords in “tonality,” the name given to the system of harmonic organization that took on a definite form around the time of Bach and still persists in popular and film music today.

Wagner’s exploitation of the potential of a radically reordered tonal landscape links abstract musical shapes to arresting dramatic gestures. Although the details are sometimes complex, in principle the relation between the one and the other is normally easy to apprehend. In the same way that the close reading of aspects of a poem such as rhyme and imagery can deepen the appreciation of, and the pleasure taken in, a poem, so does the examination of musical detail enrich one’s intellectual and emotional response to Wagner’s Ring. But more than this, music analysis also enables us to see why radical thinkers, from the modernist artists of the early twentieth century through to leftist critical theorists of the early twenty-first, such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, have found Wagner’s music as compelling a vision of a revolutionary new world as any created in the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁴

The Effect of “Failed” Resolutions

A brief diversion into two of Wagner’s non-Ring operas will establish a broader context for his harmonic practice in that cycle. One of the most familiar and over-examined examples of Wagner’s chromatic revolution is so engrossing in its instrumental voicing, its inversion, and its immediate harmonic context that it has come to stand as the quintessence of nineteenth-century experiments in harmony. Example 4.3 shows the opening three bars of Tristan und Isolde in short score. Famously, the “Tristan chord” of b. 2 (F-B-D♯-G♯), resolves onto a dominant seventh chord in b. 3 (E-G♯-D-B), itself a dissonant chord which seems to require a resolution onto the A minor that is implied by the first three, unharmonized, melodic notes of the opera. The question of how the Tristan chord should be parsed in terms of traditional tonal harmony has been the subject of lengthy and ultimately inconclusive discussion.

Example 4.3 Tristan und Isolde, opening

I do not propose to take a view on what this chord “is,” or how it does or does not function in its context. Whatever the answer to such questions, the chord certainly lends the opening of the opera its immediately gripping effect of representing, and evincing from the audience, a state of unresolved desire. What I find a more interesting question is why a desire that is frustrated throughout the Prelude is felt to be “satisfied” in some sense by the final bars of the opera, in which the Tristan chord resolves through an E minor chord (E-G-B, as opposed to the E-G♯-B-D dominant seventh of b. 3 of the Prelude) to a tonic chord of B major (see Example 4.4). Wagner seems to slip an experiential paradox into these two musical moments: In the first moment, a nonresolution to A minor makes the audience partake of the frustrated desire of the tragic lovers; in the second moment, a nonresolution to A minor makes the audience join the lovers in the “night’s wonder-world” in which, finally, their desire is transfigured and fulfilled. How is it possible that the failure of the Tristan chord to resolve to A minor can result in irreconcilable expressive outcomes? It cannot simply be that the opera ends with a radiantly scored B major chord. (That was a resolution that, in act 2, the lovers had achieved vocally just at the moment that King Marke arrives to interrupt their tryst, but which the orchestra flatly rejects.) Surely, for a “happy” resolution, the correct chord for Wagner to have chosen would have been A major, not B major. There has to be some reason why, in Wagner’s chromatic structuring of tonality, a resolution from the Tristan chord to B major “is,” paradoxically, as satisfying as a resolution from the Tristan chord to A major. Like his lovers, tonality itself seems to have been transfigured here, and turned into something it was not before this moment.

Example 4.4 Tristan und Isolde, conclusion

Revolutionizing Tonality

In gestures like this, which crop up throughout the Ring and Parsifal, Wagner effects a dialectical reconstruction of the basic principle of tonality, which might be expressed as a maxim: However far it strays, the harmony in a piece of music should return to the tonic. In failing to resolve from the Tristan chord to A major, it appears that Wagner has violated this principle, but I would argue that he has instead reformulated it thus: However far it strays, the harmony in a piece of music should return to a transformed tonic. In the music of Wagner and his followers, tonality remains in place as the ideology of music, but its inner construction is distorted, as I will exemplify in an examination of the Valhalla motif from the Ring, which evinces an extraordinary range of chromatic transformations. In preparation for that analysis it is useful to consider Steven Rings’s analysis of the transformations of the grail motif from Parsifal. Here the essential parameters of Wagner’s technique show up very clearly.

Example 4.5 shows the grail motif at its first appearance in bb. 39–41 of the Prelude. The harmony could not be more purely diatonic: Descending by thirds, the bass supports a conventional motion from I. It reaches a predominant chord ii in the middle of b. 40, and cadences via a second-inversion dominant seventh onto the tonic in b. 41. The A♭ chord I at the start of the phrase resolves, classically, to A♭I at the end of the phrase. Example 4.6 shows a transformation of this motif from act 3, during the orchestral music accompanying the uncovering of the grail. Now the diatonic music has become structurally chromatic – but note that, as usual, the chords are still triads: E♭ major, B minor, G major, E♭ minor, A♭ major, and D♭ major. The curved arrows below the stave are a shorthand which indicate how Wagner transforms the chords into each other. E♭ major becomes B minor by means of a chromatic transformation known to modern music theory as a “hexatonic pole” (“H” for short). Richard Cohn has defined this as “a progression (in either direction) between a major and a minor triad that features semitonal motion in each of the three upper voices” (here, E♭→D, G→F♯, and B♭→B♮).Footnote ²⁵ After converting B minor into G major by changing just one note – the F♯ leading note (“L” for short) rises a semitone to become a G – there is another H shift to E♭ minor. In Cohn’s view, hexatonic poles frequently create an uncanny effect (the Freudian unheimlich), which is here dramatically apt, since the uncovering of the grail is a moment of other-worldly, transcendent encounter for the knights of Monsalvat. What this analysis reveals is how Wagner moves from chord to chord (a feature of the surface of the music), but it does not shed much light on the working of his tonality (a feature lying below the surface, to use the normal metaphor).

Example 4.5 Grail motif, original version, from Parsifal, act 1

Example 4.6 Grail motif, transformed version, from Parsifal, act 3

Rings insightfully notes that Wagner actually retains the I–vi–IV–ii–V⁷–I chord progression from the motif’s opening presentation but adds that those chords are not all in the same key. In order, E♭ is chord I of E♭ (I/E♭); B minor and G major are, respectively, vi/D and IV/D; and E♭ minor, A♭⁷, and D♭ are ii/D♭, V⁷/D♭, and I/D♭. Ring’s theoretical explanation of how Wagner transforms this theme is that he retains the chord function but changes the actual sounding pitches. This is quite an extraordinary transgression of the rules of tonality, and yet listeners generally recognize that the music is still tonal, in the same way that when Scrabble players play by their own rules (say, awarding five bonus points to a player who places a musical word), the game, however much it flouts the rules, is still recognizably Scrabble. Abstractly, what was previously considered formless has become form: An impossibility has been made actual.Footnote ²⁶

Normally, every scale degree in a key has a specific and unbreakable association with a particular pitch class, and this allows tonality to impose a rigorous functional order on musical reality. So, in the key of C major, the first scale degree ($\hat{1}$ ) will always be a C in some octave, the second scale degree ($\hat{2}$ ) will always be a D, and so on. Similarly, the triads built on those scale degrees will always be associated with a chord function: So the G-B-D triad (built on $\hat{5}$ ) will always be V in C major. Thanks to this cinching together of scale degree and pitch class – which we normally do not think of as a significant matter – tonality is able to work like a well-ordered traditional society, where every chord knows its function in the whole, and the preeminence of the tonic (the hegemonic element) cannot be called into question. For every function, there is a single name: With the function “dominant” goes the name “G major.” Similarly, in society, with the function “ruler” goes “monarch.” Wagner’s chromatic transformations effect their revolutionary change by breaking the link between scale degree and pitch, between function and material reality. It is a musical correlate of his political ideas, a handing over of tonal power to “the wrong pitches,” which has the effect of breaking the hegemonic control of the old pitch rulers. Such musical gestures never have a single meaning, but the radicalism of this particular composer invites the speculation that it is as if the function “ruler” in some society were retained, but now the name that goes with it is “General Secretary of the Communist Party.”

Rings’s theory is much more abstract than this. He observes that Wagner performs a kind of transformation in which the scale degrees retain their “qualia,” their character within the key (what I have been calling “function”), while the actual pitches have been changed. In this transformation of the grail motif, the pitches in chord vi have been pulled down one semitone from what they should have been in a traditional tonal space: a chord of C-E♭-G has become B-D-F♯, and yet both “are” chord vi. For short, we can write this transposition in the following way: (vi, C minor) has transformed into (vi, B minor). The pitches in chord vi have therefore dropped down one semitone, which we can write for short as (vi, −1).Footnote ²⁷ In the same way, the chord of G major which ends b. 1098 is a chord (IV, −1). By the middle of b. 1099, with the arrival of the chord of E♭ minor, there is an additional slip of a semitone, so that we hear the famous Dresden Amen cadence, ii–V⁷–I, in the transformed form (ii, −2)–(V7, −2)–(I, −2), i.e., the same chords, but down two semitones. Wagner therefore has his cake and eats it: Tonality strongly orders the entire progression, but the “unbreakable” link between scale degree and pitch class has been broken. The D♭ at the end “is,” in some uncannily transfigured sense, the same as the E♭ which opened the phrase. The uncovering of the grail might indeed have such a disorientating effect on the believers who behold it, but this musical effect, not unique to Wagner but one which he makes extraordinary use of, need not be tied so specifically to any particular meaning. Indeed, as is this case with his treatment of leitmotif, Wagner’s harmonic structures can mean many things at once.

Transformations of the Valhalla Motif

Example 4.7 shows the Valhalla motif in its first presentation, at the opening of scene 2 of Das Rheingold. The fortress is newly built, its gleaming crenellations (blinkenen Zinnen) imbued with a nobility and power that is as yet uncorrupted. The musical presentation encapsulates these qualities: chorale-style chords are “sung” by a brass choir of Wagner horns, tubas, and trombones, all playing in a very soft (sehr weich) tone, while harps pick out chords I and IV in a stolid processional sequence that strongly establishes D♭: I–IV–I–V–I.

Example 4.7 Valhalla motif, “prime form,” from Das Rheingold, scene 2

Compare this presentation to a later version of the motif in the Ring (Example 4.8). It comes from the scene in Götterdämmerung in which the Valkyrie Waltraute futilely petitions her sister Brünnhilde to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens, to lift the curse from the gods.Footnote ²⁸ In the latter, we can see how greatly Wagner can disfigure his motifs without them becoming completely unrecognizable and so achieve very different dramatic effects. By this point in the cycle, the bright major-key feel of the original has been darkened. In place of D♭ major, the motif opens with a diminished chord, A♮-C-E♭-G♭, but the falling melodic third, and the rhythmic profile (strong emphasis on the first and second beats of the bar), as well as the text (Waltraute sings that Wotan is in Valhalla with the splinters of his spear), are enough to indicate the connection with the old motif – and an invitation to reflect, both in the moment of hearing and afterwards, on the state of the corruption of that world’s old certainties.

Example 4.8 Valhalla motif, “Tarnhelm form,” from Götterdämmerung, act 1, scene 3

There is a delay before we hear the second part of the motif, originally the proud melodic rise B♭–D♭–E♭–F. When it comes, the final melodic step is denied, and the final cadence is no longer the reassuringly final perfect cadence of Das Rheingold: now it is an expectant imperfect cadence, I–V, in the key of F♭ minor (F♭–C♭). What has happened, in fact, is that the Valhalla motif has been fused with the Tarnhelm motif. As is clear from Examples 4.8 and 4.9, the harmonies of the last two bars of the Tarnhelm motif and the new form of the Valhalla motif are identical, albeit with different spellings for the two last chords: f♭/e–c♭/b.Footnote ²⁹

The motif has become mysteriously hybridized, with the head of Valhalla and the body and tail of the Tarnhelm. As Wotan himself notes in Die Walküre, act 2 scene 2, the owners of these two objects – Wotan and Alberich – are each other’s obverse, and in music such as this we can hear and feel that quality. But this distorted form of the motif also catches the sense, from the gods’ perspective, of the “bad transformation” that has occurred, the destabilizing of the divine order by the Proteus-figure, Alberich, whose shape-shifting, represented by the Tarnhelm motif, had led to his capture and the curse which Waltraute now desperately wants to be revoked by Brünnhilde. In Keith Warner’s staging for the Royal Opera House in London in 2009 and 2012, the dramatic point was underlined by the setting of this scene inside a gigantic Tarnhelm: in this production, the Tarnhelm in Das Rheingold was a windowed cube worn on the head, and here it was simply magnified to fill the entire stage.Footnote ³⁰

Example 4.9 Tarnhelm motif, from Das Rheingold, act 1, scene 2

By Götterdämmerung, it has become clear to everyone (apart, it seems, from Waltraute) that the preeminence of Valhalla and its gods is over. There can no longer be a resolution into that old lynchpin tonic, in a V–I cadence, because the world’s corruption – symbolized by Alberich’s Tarnhelm but initiated by Wotan himself – has reached a stage that leaves no possibility for restoration. In Die Walküre, though, the corruption is not yet complete; Wotan knows that his supremacy is imperiled, but it still hangs together – just. For as long as he remains the god who can influence mortals such as Hunding and Siegmund, and command the fearful respect of the Valkyries, he can extract dark humor from his current predicament. This is how we find him at the center of his monologue, in Die Walküre act 2 scene 2, as he mordantly bequeaths to Alberich’s son, Hagen, the void splendor of godhead (der Gottheit nichtigen Glanz; see Example 10).

Example 4.10 Valhalla motif, “cursed form,” from Die Walküre, act 2, scene 2

Immediately before this “cursed form” of the Valhalla motif, Wotan bewails his inability to father a free human being, which he finds ironic given the ease with which Alberich achieved it. An orchestral fanfare on a keening diminished seventh chord on F♯ (F♯-A-C-E♭) is resolved at b. 981 onto a chord with a root one semitone down: an f⁷ chord.Footnote ³¹ Here, as in the grail motif from Parsifal, Wagner’s chromatic harmony opens up a rift between the scale-degree “function” and the pitch-class “name.” In the middle of b. 981 the tonic of this phrase, which had been an F, slips a semitone to become an E ($\hat{1}$ , –1). The brightening of the mode to the major (E) is perhaps an ironic correspondence to Wotan’s blessing to Hagen (it coincides with him singing “Segen”). In any case, the remainder of the phrase reverts to the minor, still retaining the one-semitone-down transposition. The phrase concludes on the tonic, E minor, with a similar melodic rise to its original form in Das Rheingold, but now the final “cadence” is II–I, not V–I: We hear the tonic at the end of the phrase (in contrast to the doubtful close of the Götterdämmerung version discussed above), but its status is a little hazy. The music thus reflects Wotan’s new, deflated vision of the world order: Valhalla’s position is weakened, but not yet terminally, and Hagen’s power, should he attain it by winning the Ring, will not be of the same kind, or same potency, as Wotan’s. Hence there is a poetic elegance to Wagner’s tweaking of the point of cadence: The leap and fall that characterizes the fifth gap in the perfect cadence of the original has now shrunk to a major second: Hagen, the son of a dwarf, lacks both the stature and the majesty of Wotan. In the Boulez/Chéreau centenary Ring at Bayreuth the ironic effect was beautifully enhanced by Wotan’s act of kneeling, holding his cloak – swiftly made to resemble a diminutive human form – by the scruff of the neck as he grants his sour blessing.

Conclusion

In these moments from Götterdämmerung and Walküre we see a motivic transformation which does a particular form of dramatic work, which is to say it has a dramatic function in its own particular moment. But at the same time, it interacts with a harmonic transformation that has a more general, or universal, quality, as its use in Tristan and Parsifal instantiates. This is why it is wrong to pin this revolutionary sundering of the scale degree/pitch class (or function/name) unity too tightly to a particular dramatic symbol such as the transformative power of the Tarnhelm. What is common to all the occasions in which Wagner uses chromaticism to form a revolutionized tonal space is the dialectical shape of his musical argument. On the one hand is the declaration, as it were the founding principle of diatonic tonality, that however far it strays, the harmony in a piece of music should return to the tonic. On the other is chromaticism’s emancipatory declaration that no pitch, no name, should be assigned any particular place in the whole; each element should be free to exist on its own terms, without being subjected to a purpose that fixes power in a predictable place. These declarations are irreconcilable, and Wagner does not – as Schoenberg and his followers did – decide in favor of the second over the first. Instead, his harmonic language effects a mediation: By moving dialectically between the conformity of one system and the relative anarchy of the other, he retains tonality’s sense of order – its loading of tonicity with a sense of “home” or “security” – but allows new actors to occupy roles that were formerly closed to them. The great expansion of his forms through the poetic-musical period and “symphonic movements” contributes to this new possibility by freeing up space in the moment – where clear resolution is no longer required – for a fracturing of tonality to take place. So, in Walküre or Parsifal a drop of a semitone can create a “flat-side” rupture of the old ideology, to allow Hagen briefly to sit on Wotan’s throne or to reflect the Monsalvat knights’ uncanny encounter with the divine. And in Tristan a “sharp-side” rupture, rising two semitones, can transform what might seem like a loss – a failure to resolve to the “tonic” A major – into a victory: B major now “is” A major, and the couple have been emancipated from the repressive Day of A minor into the freedom of Night’s B major. In all these cases, whatever their particular concerns, there is something universalizable in the brief, transcendent views opened up by Wagner’s harmonic structures, something which has had, and may very well retain, a strong appeal to radical thinkers. At points such as these, his harmony is a coup d’œil of a transfigured world.

Leading Motifs of the Concept

Understanding the use of leitmotifs in both the composer’s and listeners’ practice means, in part, to examine the uses (and the limits) of the word itself. The career of the word is astonishing. After referring to something specific for Wagner’s operas it entered the general lexicon of European languages where it stands for an important theme that is invoked again and again, whether it be in literature or in the other arts, in philosophy or politics. Tracking such diluted meaning down to the Wagnerian origin of the word “leitmotif” also clarifies the story behind the convenient guidebooks and apps that promote the concept to an eager audience (a story that they themselves usually do not tell). Ironically, exploring a name that promises guidance and orientation leads us into a maze-like history.

Contrary to popular belief, Wagner neither invented the word nor promoted it. The historic identification of Wagner with the term “leitmotif” was so strong that it took more than a century to clarify this misconception. It seems that August Wilhelm Ambros, an Austrian music historian, used the term for the first time as early as 1860.Footnote ⁵ Ambros did not intend for the term to be used especially for Wagner; he highlighted how both Liszt and Wagner (at the time known for Tannhäuser and Lohengrin) retain characteristic motifs or melodies throughout individual works, and that these appeal to the memory of listeners, functioning for them like a “red thread” that leads them through the work. Significantly he coins the word in opposition to traditional forms that the listeners might otherwise miss: Liszt and Wagner would “scorn traditional formal structures (Andante, Scherzo etc. in the symphony and aria, duets etc. in the opera) or apply them in ways hard to discern. Both try to preserve greater unity by continuous use of leitmotifs.”Footnote ⁶ Ambros emphasized that the idea of repeating themes for dramatic use was by no means new. Many composers before Wagner did so. Ambros points to Giacomo Meyerbeer (the recurring Lutheran chorale melody in Les Huguenots) and Carl Maria von Weber (in Oberon and Der Freischütz) and, of course, to Mozart, who in his Don Giovanni used the opening chords of the Overture as a symbol for the Commendatore and his violent death. The impetus for Ambros to coin his new term seems predicated on his observation that Wagner used the preexisting tool more often and more consistently than before; but Ambros does not describe this as a new quality and does not anticipate how Wagner would elaborate on the technique in his following operas, especially in the Ring. Nevertheless, this hint towards a “greater unity” preserved by more consistent recurring motifs shows Ambros’ awareness that leitmotifs perform a formal function that in some way makes up for the loss of structural orientation which resulted from Wagner’s removal of traditional operatic numbers.

In this sense, the word was used by many critics in the years leading up to the Bayreuth premiere. Yet, it did not become part of common parlance until Wolzogen practically connected the “leading thread” and the “leading motifs” in his analysis of 1876. But why was Wolzogen’s text so successful? Why was the word only spread, discussed, and popularized after 1876, given that it had been around for more than a decade, during which Tristan and Die Meistersinger (as well as Das Rheingold and Die Walküre) were published and premiered? It is clear that a major factor in the promotion of the leitmotif concept was the four-evening tetralogy’s world premiere in its entirety, with its associated publicity as both a long-awaited event of international importance and a national achievement. The premiere made visible and audible the full extent of Wagner’s ability to explore and even exhaust the potential of leitmotifs and to make the method his own before a broad audience, not just the experts or Wagnerian adepts. Another factor was the timing: Wolzogen’s extensive analysis had been published just a few weeks before the August 1876 opening night of the Ring, sparking the impression to critics and to Wagnerians alike that the booklet was a kind of officially sanctioned guide, written on the composer’s behalf. It is no overestimation to say that the Ring (like Parsifal after it) never had a chance for a pure “first hearing”; before it was born, it had already been analyzed for the public.

The case of Wolzogen and his Leitfaden shows, however, that the impression and reception of the Ring was also thoroughly mediated. The rise of the leitmotif concept is a perfect example of how musical discourse defines how we hear and judge music. Today we have a clear picture of how Wagner himself acted as a virtuous agent of self-promotion throughout his life.Footnote ⁷ In the case of Wagner’s most important compositional trademark, though, his adepts did all the work, and Wagner was not always happy with the level and content of the result.

Wagner used the word only once, in his essay Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama (On the Application of Music to Drama) in 1879. Reacting to Wolzogen’s guide, Wagner states that the musical and structural function of the motifs is as important as the hermeneutic approach suggested by his disciple: that the semantics constitute only one (or a one-sided) way to consider the tool. But by that point, a mere three years after the Bayreuth opening, the discourse surrounding leitmotifs had already taken on a momentum of its own. In the coming decades, Wolzogen’s labels were disseminated through a flood of guidebooks and via motif tables in librettos and piano scores. The analytical commentary the Wagner disciple had prepared for the premiere was integrated more and more with the work of the composer. That was done to the point where a reader of a libretto with leitmotif labels could get the impression that the composer himself had published the analysis along with the music (see Figure 5.1).

Wagner was not amused to find the names printed right into the music in a four-hand piano score of the Ring he received in 1881. Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary: “Unfortunately in this edition there are many hints like Wanderlust-Motiv, Unheils-Motiv etc. R. says: ‘In the end the people believe that such nonsense happens by my suggestion!’”Footnote ⁸ Wagner knew what potential of misunderstanding came with the motif labeling. He never commissioned guidebooks providing such semantic definition of the leitmotifs, nor did he encourage their use. The composer had tolerated Wolzogen’s efforts but never really welcomed them. And he had seen how the anti-Wagnerian camp exploited the existence of such commentary in their reviews and turned it against him.Footnote ⁹ The new musico-dramatic art of the Ring was critiqued as both overly intellectual yet musically shallow. The need for verbal instructions in order to understand and follow it was a damning aesthetic verdict, given the dominant idea at the time that music should be understood either intuitively through emotionally sensitive listening, or – per Hanslick’s position – through its “purely” musical qualities. The notion that good art should speak for itself and not require lengthy explanations remains an influential popular belief even now.

It is difficult to determine the extent to which this campaign represented a deliberate misreading of Wolzogen’s method, or something the method had fostered. The way Wolzogen presented the leitmotifs exacerbated their inherent ambivalence. On the one hand, he affirmed their initial orientational and recollective function by labeling every motif to signify its preliminary dramatic function. With such labeling he wove the leading thread through all four dramas and thus made the gargantuan work comprehensible for lay listeners. On the other hand, the grand-scale manifestation of the thread was fragmented by dozens of verbal distinctions that the score suggested. Thus, the labeling endeavor precipitated a kind of semiotic tension between the verbal and musical dimensions of the work. On the one hand, the content correlated with a musical phrase by the help of a label turns the motif into a graspable musical metaphor. On the other, the specific name may also narrow and reduce both the sounding features that are exemplified and the sometimes kaleidoscopic array of subtle changes in meaning a motif can potentially represent. So, fixing a name creates a sense of security and predictability for the listener, but at the same time deprives that listener of the potential richness of the motif’s flexibility as an open and floating sign, which can adapt to the corresponding dramatic context by its expressive, sensuous features. Wagner might have had this objection in mind when he called the naming of motifs in the score “nonsense.”Footnote ¹⁰

The title of the booklet had an impact as well. Using the term “leading thread” not only tied it to Ambros’s first use of the leitmotif concept. “Leitfaden” was (and is) a common technical term that stands for a didactic “manual” or “guidebook,” while also alluding to the mythical thread of Ariadne that leads out of the minotaur’s maze.Footnote ¹¹ At its most polemic, the metaphor of the leading thread could thus be misread as a desperately needed orientational tool in order to survive a complete performance of Wagner’s Ring. What Ambros had observed already in 1860, therefore, turned into a widespread prejudice about Wagner’s music. Because his works did not follow traditional operatic forms of aria-like units or graspable melodies they were considered “formless.”Footnote ¹² Already in 1846 after the Tannhäuser premiere, the young and not yet anti-Wagnerian Eduard Hanslick had already refined the common expectation into the ironic phrase: “The big audience … does not like music from which, after the first performance, one cannot take off for home, humming, some eight-bar march melodies, in order to teach them to the fortepiano right away.”Footnote ¹³ Both the extremely complex and long Tristan, considered unperformable for almost a decade, and Meistersinger played their part in confirming the belief that Wagner’s works were hard to understand, demanded too much, or even seemed wholly incomprehensible. How could this apply any less to his new, gigantic tetralogy?

The triumphant success Wagner’s works eventually had in the fin de siècle was by no means a given in 1876 when the Ring was premiered. Against this background, Wolzogen’s promotion of a motivic approach in the run-up to the Bayreuth Festival can be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to mediate Wagner’s new and possibly confusing or even overwhelming art. Yet, while it added fuel to the polemics against Wagner, the Leitfaden (and its descendants, whatever their medium) provided a catalog of named motifs, which for an eager, pro-Wagnerian audience fulfilled exactly the function of something “to take home, humming.” Admittedly, the leitmotifs were not aria-like, operatic melodies. But they became something comparable and equally powerful. The short tunes (and even themes, e.g., the Siegfried motif) were as recognizable and catchy for nonmusicians (verbally and musically, some with earworm qualities) as they were eminently symbolic musical “things” that could spark and embellish discussions among Wagnerian followers.

Motifs, in Wagner’s Theory

How did Wagner talk about leitmotifs? Although he did not come up with the term, the composer had, of course, a firm vision about how such motifs ought to function in a music drama. Part of the maze surrounding the concept is that he developed the idea in his earlier theoretical writings in Zurich, especially Opera and Drama (1850–1), which preceded compositional work on the score of the Ring.

When Wagner spoke of “motifs” he used “primary” or “fundamental motifs” (Hauptmotiv/Grundmotiv) to signify the core motifs of the plot, in the sense of things that drive or motivate the characters.Footnote ¹⁴ To avoid confusion Wagner rarely uses “motifs” when he talks about the music in and of itself. Instead, he would employ phrases such as “foreboding and reminiscent melodic moments,”Footnote ¹⁵ or “fundamental themes,”Footnote ¹⁶ but also occasionally “malleable emotional moments,” and, more closely related to the notion of leitmotifs proper, “signposts for the emotions” (Gefühlswegweiser).Footnote ¹⁷ These phrases indicate that the music corresponds with the drama in quite a direct manner. The musical motifs stand in for the motifs of the dramatic plot, as part of a symbolic relationship: they sensualize the “poetic intent” (whether signifying characters, events, or emotions). The “malleable emotional moments” are audible signs that correlate to the elements of the plot “which the poet … designed as the pillars of his dramatic building.”Footnote ¹⁸ Using this definition, promoters of the leitmotif as a concept might have found their license to align individual leitmotifs with names to produce something akin to a dramatic vocabulary.

Wagner’s explanations also indicate that the new role of musical motifs stemmed from a few salient ideas about what, in his view, the artwork of the future should accomplish. Firstly, it should be drama rather than opera (which I explain in the next paragraph); secondly, the cooperation of the arts should enable the composition of flexible temporal structures that unfold in an organic way, and so allow allusions to both the past and the future; finally, as a core Romantic idea, that the rational (or, in the modern sense, conceptual) parts of the drama (i.e. language and poetic intent) ought to be rendered instead through the emotions: Wagner called it the “emotionalizing of the intellect” (Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes).Footnote ¹⁹ Wagner thus retained music as the romantic medium of choice. He furthermore derived a wholly new poetic Gestalt for his work and, consequently, the need for and reliance on musical motifs in lieu of traditional musical forms to render a sense of structure.

Wagner’s theory was a campaign against the opera of his time and towards a new form he would refer to as “drama.” The “and” in the famous title Opera and Drama was rather more a “versus,” a plea for “Drama instead of Opera.” Wagner developed an outright aversion to the conventions of aria, duet, and ensemble as well as their typical song-like syntax. In his view, it was precisely through those closed forms following predefined musical rules that music had come to dominate the operatic genre, and at the expense of the drama (not to mention his damning views on vocal virtuosity and contemporary theatrical effects). Just as he believed that all the arts must come together to form the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) in order to achieve and serve the drama, so must the music for such works operate at the level of small-scale and even micro-motifs, to guarantee structural coherence while simultaneously allowing for a flexible, organically developing, and dramatic flow of time.

In the third part of Opera and Drama, Wagner unfurls nothing less than a theory for rendering the temporal structure of a drama. In opera, the music swings between extremes. On the one hand it undermines dramatic time during the arias and set pieces, stopping the action entirely for the extended presence of an expressive musical form. On the other hand, music’s influence retreats to mere sung speech (Sprechgesang) in its function as part of the recitativo passages where time and action move forward quickly, and where words refer equally to the past and the future. In Wagner’s opinion, this imbalance meant a disadvantageous use of all the constituent arts, but especially music, as it could not live up to the dramatic potential that he believed Beethoven realized in his motivically organized symphonic scores. If motivic and thematic units (and not self-contained musical pieces [Tonstücke]) were established as the basic currency of operatic composition, so his reasoning goes, then music could also mediate between different layers in time. Musical motifs could prefigure the main dramatic strands, and these could then be presented onstage, sung with words, and expressed through gestures by the protagonist as a dramatic presence that, in turn, could be referred to later repeatedly by the orchestra, remembering and representing past emotions or events. So, in Wagner’s conception, “melodic moments” would do much more than symbolize an aspect of the drama. They would constantly create overlapping triads of foreboding, realization, and memory, in a continuous process of transition and development. The most explicit concept of leitmotif denotes exactly this “leading through time” which in so doing creates and motivates the drama.

What fascinated Wagner about the potential of his new method was that, with the ability to anticipate and reflect, music would not only match what language could do in literature and theater but would even render those temporal relationship. And it would render it less through apprehension by the intellect but more through the intuition of emotions. As the musical motifs make aspects of the drama sensuously perceptible and operate in an expressive, nonverbal, and gestural mode, they became a central tool in enabling emotional understanding. The potential of such a tool was exploited further by the cinema of the twentieth century. It is not surprising that enabling emotional understanding via musical motifs became a sought-after technique when the motion picture was invented and film composers appropriated for the screen what they learned from Wagner’s dramas.Footnote ²⁰

So, at this point it might be legitimate to ask what all this meant for the practical composition of the Ring and whether Wagner the composer lived up to what Wagner the theorist envisioned.

Motifs, in Wagner’s Practice

Given Wagner’s idea of an emotional understanding of the drama through the musical motifs (recall Wagner’s angry reaction to the labeled themes he found in that four-hand piano score), we can deduce that, in his view, we should not have to memorize a hundred short musical phrases before attending a performance. The nonverbal mode in which the sounds from the orchestra pit operate teaches us the motifs simply by repetition and variation, and we should apprehend their meaning effectively along the way, as the drama unfolds before our eyes and ears. To illustrate this point, I will discuss a few examples that show how the method works in Wagner’s practice.

This idea of intuitively learning the musical shapes is introduced at the very start of Rheingold, which proceeds from the simple to the complex in an almost didactic but at the same time deeply symbolic way. We hear a metaphor of musical beginning and creation when the natural overtones of the octave and the fifth ascend from the deep E♭, subsequently creating, quasi naturally, the E♭ major triad and scale (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 1 and 2). Later, when the Rhinemaidens and Alberich interact, the full scope of Romantic harmony is brought to bear to express feelings and passions. The same is true for the melodic level, in which the motifs usually materialize (we will see below that harmonic and even timbral aspects become motivic in the Ring). Wagner demonstrates what it means that the leitmotifs correlate with the “pillars of [the poet’s] dramatic building.”Footnote ²¹

One such “pillar” that translates into two central musical motifs is the idea of “the renunciation of love.” It also provides an example of Wagner’s work process, from the drafting of the poem to the eventual musical setting.Footnote ²² In the November 1851 prose sketch for Rheingold, the idea is first set to the phrase “the gold glistens. ‘How is it to be won?’ ‘One who renounces love.’ – Alberich steals the gold.”Footnote ²³ This, in turn, is developed into one of the founding dramatic motifs for the Ring’s plot. It is first sung by the Rhinemaiden Woglinde when she gives away the secret of the Rhinegold: “Only he who renounces love’s power, only he who banishes love’s delight, only he attains the magic to forge a ring from the gold.”Footnote ²⁴ (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 10). Woglinde’s words are set in a theme-like melody that is staged like an oracle, embedded into the mystical dark timbre of lower brass harmonies including the Wagner tuba, a new tenor tuba that the composer requested and that was named after him. It is in this moment of coming together of the scene, the words, the singing, and the orchestral sounds that Wagner derives specificity for the motif’s initial semantic reference. This is true not only for the “renunciation” theme but also for the musical symbol that refers to the Ring, the central theatrical prop of the whole drama. Wellgunde had introduced the Ring motif just prior to the renunciation theme, where it occurs again at the end, exactly to the cue of Woglinde’s words “to forge a ring from the gold” (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 9a). From now on, these two melodies are charged with meaning that grows in connotation with every recurrence. The first notes of the renunciation motif return a few minutes later when Alberich translates into action what the Rhinemaiden revealed: He curses love and “with terrible force he tears the gold from the rock” (as Wagner’s stage directions read).

What we see and hear in the first exposition of the renunciation and the Ring motifs, and in Alberich’s curse, are textbook examples for what Wagner had in mind in Opera and Drama when envisioning a new form of drama. In such sequences of theatrical exposition, the motifs and themes become part of a “realization” (Verwirklichung) on stage and thus become integrated with the scenic action, bodily gesture, and affect. They acquire an expressive meaning and a reference to persons, things, and emotions that can be recalled and reexpressed when the motifs return later in the orchestral melody, or they may function as agents of symbolic transfer when the motifs are sung by other protagonists in different contexts with new words.

Wagner demonstrates this potential right after Alberich’s curse when the transition to the second scene begins. While on stage the scene changes from the Rhine riverbed to the heights of Valhalla, the orchestra presents the theme of renunciation in a grand symphonic fashion and in the full phrasing we heard from Woglinde. The Ring motif (see Figure 5.1, motifs no. 9a and 9b) that had been the last part of the theme is then repeated four times but with every recurrence altered slightly so that in its fifth repetition it has morphed into an entirely new motif, also a central one, another pillar of the drama, yet presented in the orchestra for the first time: the motif of Valhalla (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 11).

Such musical morphing looks (or sounds) like a magic trick. What Wagner uses here is called the technique of motivic transformation. Roughly speaking, it means retaining the intervallic structure of the motif (here the thirds moving down and up) but changing the scales and chords in which it is embedded together with varying rhythm and tempo. This can completely transform the character of a motif. Here it is the metamorphosis from the eerie, nervous ambiguity of the Ring thirds into the majestic, solid, bright, and hymnal chords of Valhalla. All this happens in the orchestra without any use of words, and no scenic action besides the transformation of the stage. In Wagner’s total work of art, though, the technology of the stage and the activity it presents should not be underestimated, as Gundula Kreuzer has recently shown.Footnote ²⁵ Wagner, the stage director, requests a gradual clearing of the foggy Rhine scenery so that we see the castle of Valhalla at the end of the change. A lot of interpretive energy has been put into explaining why the Ring and Valhalla are, musically, such close relatives. For example, it might foretell that Valhalla will be paid by the gold and the power of the stolen Ring, or, more plainly, that the Ring and Valhalla are symbols (and instruments) of power.

Yet, whatever we read into it (and Wagner invites us to do so), we should not forget that what we hear (or want to hear) in a passage like the metamorphosis of these two motifs depends on what we see on stage. Wagner had no idea of how stage directors could and eventually would put their own personal stamp on a production and thus deviate from the composer’s printed stage directions. In the 1994 Bayreuth Ring-production (directed by Alfred Kirchner), for example, the most radical solution to this transition was presented by drawing a curtain between the scenes. Such a decision counteracted Wagner’s intention of an open scene change and relegates (or degrades) the accompanying musical passage to an orchestral intermezzo. The dialogue between the score and what is presented on stage in historical or current opera productions is a difficult one and is still in its infancy, not least because it also involves performance and media analysis.Footnote ²⁶ If we describe the morphing themes in this passage, we should base that description on the observation that we are watching a visual and spatial transformation while hearing a musical one. At heart, this is a gradual process that connects stage and orchestra into the single whole that Wagner considered to be drama.

From this point on in the Ring, the composer often presents a motif first as an orchestral voice and not in the vocal line. This is his central art of creating dramatic time that points forward, hearkens backwards, and expresses what we see and hear in the moment. Wagner was aware that with the Ring he created a web of musical motifs that constitutes a system of structurally related (or contrasting) expressive figures which, over the course of the work, form a musico-dramatic universe. In retrospect, Wagner described this organizational system as follows: “With Rheingold I forged a new path immediately, where first I found the malleable [plastic] motifs for nature [like the ones for the Rhine, the Ring and Valhalla], which in increasingly individual development became carriers of the emotionally laden tendencies of the vast action and the characters found therein.”Footnote ²⁷ Wagner intended for such a system to manage the musical processes to a degree of structural coherence comparable to that of a symphony.

To round off this crash course on Wagner’s practice, it is worth looking at the poles of the motivic universe in terms of length and frequency. One of the shortest and most often used motifs throughout the four operas consists of only two notes: a suspended note descending stepwise; in terms of meter, a stressed-unstressed figure. “Rheingold! Rheingold!” (see Figure 5.1, motif no. 7b), the Rhinemaidens exclaim at the moment when the sun touches the gold and makes it shimmer. The motif opens the bright C major trio of the maidens. Yet the same musical idea had been introduced earlier in a dark way, as a semitone and as an expression of sorrow and frustration when Alberich screeches, “Woe’s me! Ah Woe’s me!” (Wehe! Ach wehe!, see Figure 5.1, motif no. 4) after having been fooled by all three maidens. The two-note motif retains this dark and sorrowful meaning in most recurrences and for that reason has been called the motif of grief or woe. Wolzogen named it “the motif of drudgery” as Wagner connects it in the third scene with Alberich demonstrating how he reigns over the Nibelungs by means of the Ring, melodically sharpened again by the semitone and a diminished seventh chord on the first note. The words he sings with the motif say everything about his leadership style: “Tremble in terror, downtrodden host! Quick obey the Ring’s great lord!”

Following the woe motif through the Ring is a task that was once suggested by Wagner himself.Footnote ²⁸ The above-mentioned essay “On the Application of Music to Drama” is also the only occasion in his writings where he offers some explanation of leitmotifs himself. He writes, “Much might be learned from a closer examination of the repeated appearances of the simple Rhinemaidens’ motif … so long as it is traced through all the fluctuations of passion throughout the four-part drama, up to Hagen’s Watch in the first act of Götterdämmerung.”Footnote ²⁹ In fact, as Millington emphasizes, “the entire score of Götterdämmerung is suffused with this two-note falling-semitone motif; it appears in all kinds of combinations and always casts a baleful shadow, so sinister and unambiguous as its sound.”Footnote ³⁰

Probably, keeping the idea of emotional understanding in mind, it is not as important whether we are aware of all these occurrences or whether we understand them intuitively together with the scene. What we can “take home” is a kind of musical allegory similar to the motivic link between the Ring and Valhalla.Footnote ³¹ The two opposing sides of the Ring’s shortest leitmotif – the bright, childish C major “Rheingold”-call and the woeful semitone suspension – open an interpretative space that the Wagnerian listener may be eager to fill. Such interpretations correlate the logic of the drama to that of the motifs and might read like this: The Rhinegold as part of a pure and innocent nature is transformed, after the mighty Ring has been forged from it, into an instrument of suppression that causes pain, harm, and injustice. (George Bernard Shaw read the whole of Rheingold as a parable of capitalism.) The shift from nature to political and economic power results from Alberich’s curse on love and, later, from the curse he places on the Ring when Wotan violently seizes it from him. As the gold and the Ring are from the same material, so are the musical expressions for the maiden’s “Rheingold” call and Alberich’s “Wehe” as they are both made from the falling tone step. Yet the maidens falling whole tone from the major scale (a dominant ninth) is joyful and shiny while the woe is a painful semitone, a sigh figure that has been one of the most intense expressions of emotion in music since Monteverdi. This is what fascinates the connoisseurs about these little musical-symbolic things called leitmotifs. The dramatic conflict of an entire mythical plot can be condensed into the transformation of two notes.

The other pole of the Ring’s motivic universe might be represented by a theme that is one of the longest and least used, occurring only twice. It actually comes quite close to being a grand operatic melody when first sung by Sieglinde at the end of act three, scene one of Walküre when she addresses Brünnhilde: “Oh, mightiest of miracles, most glorious of women!” (O hehrstes Wunder! Herrliche Maid!), also known as the “redemption through love” motif. Her line is the most elevated, enthusiastic and desperate expression at her disposal to the news Brünnhilde just revealed to her: Not only is she pregnant, but she is given the broken shards of her brother and husband Siegmund’s sword destined for her son, the new hero Siegfried. Wagner applies an Italianate orchestration to the melody by doubling at unison the singer in octaves in the strings and creates an overwhelming affective moment that makes the climax of the scene and marks the exit of Sieglinde from the drama. Motivically, the moment is as loaded as it is dramatically pointed; we also hear the Siegfried theme for the first time, two of the longest motifs of the Ring in a row, interrupted by the sword motif.

But unlike the Siegfried theme, which Wagner then uses extensively, he lets the melody of Sieglinde disappear only to have it resurface at the very end of the tetralogy, in the last five minutes of Götterdammerung. When composing the end of the tetralogy in 1872, Wagner, as Cosima’s diaries tell us, expressed happiness about having allocated “Sieglinde’s theme of praising Brünnhilde” to the finale, and being able to use it “as the quasi choral singing to the heroes.”Footnote ³² He alludes to his idea that the orchestra equipped with meaningful motifs can take a similar role as the Chorus does in Greek tragedy, where it comments and reflects on the drama and its story. Yet here we also get hold of Wagner as a musico-dramatic rhetorician who strategically positions his arguments, who subverts his own method in favor of positioning the best and most meaningful keystone to his huge musico-dramatic edifice. It is remarkable that this beautiful and effective melody is the least like a leitmotif in the sense Wagner had established. The difficulty critics have had naming it reflects its special status.

Figure 5.2 Final scene of Götterdämmerung from Patrice Chéreau’s Bayreuth production, taken from Pierre Boulez, et al., Der “Ring” Bayreuth 1976−1980 (Kristall Verlag: Berlin and Hamburg, 1980), book jacket,

by courtesy of Bayreuther Festspiele

How does one determine the meaning of a motif that appears once at an ecstatic climax in Walküre and then again as the concluding thought of the drama? The notion of repetition is central to the concept of the leitmotif: the fact that it accumulates references, changes, and extensions of meaning with every recurrence. Listening for leitmotifs is a continuous process of learning throughout the drama. Note that Wagner himself did not label it in the typical manner but rather calls it “Sieglinde’s theme of praising Brünnhilde.” Again, it was Wolzogen who set the name that stuck: “motif of love redemption.” He named it by looking at it from the very end. It thus entered English discourse as the “redemption motif” and, truly, the end is about redemption on all levels: Love is redeemed (from the curse) and that redemption is achieved through love (Brünnhilde’s self-sacrifice); moreover, nature is redeemed from the Ring’s curse as the Rhinemaidens take back the Ring and the circle closes. However, to decide upon a single, fixed name might be too hastily to delimit the interpretative space opened up by the musico-dramatic ending Wagner composed. It might deny the potential in Wagner’s decision to voice an almost-new motif at the end of seventeen hours of musical drama. Wagner leaves us with a riddle. In his centennial Ring of 1976–80, Patrice Chéreau staged this final gesture by having extras on stage with their backs to the audience watch the burning doom of Valhalla. They gaze in the same direction as we, the audience, do. But when the motif sounds from the orchestra pit for the last time, the crowd on the stage turns around and faces the audience, looking into their eyes as if handing something over to us: the question of responsibility, of “why?”, of the future. There are no words sung with the motif, the orchestra holds its voice like a wordless Chorus. We do not need an ultimate explication of the allegory. It is the music that has the last word in the Ring.

The turbulent age in which Wagner initially conceived the Ring and later brought it to its ultimate realization at the first Bayreuth Festival was one of potent political myths and shifting historical paradigms.Footnote ² In order to understand the origins of the festival idea and the significance of the associated act of performance, it is necessary to go back beyond the formulation of the poem in the early 1850s to the heady days of revolutionary political agitation, which swept Europe in 1848 and finally engulfed Wagner in Dresden in May 1849. The period between the French Revolution of 1830 and the outbreak of unrest across Europe in 1848 is known historically as the Vormärz: a time of political and intellectual unrest culminating in the March Revolution of 1848. In these years, the growing influence of the Young German movement, together with those Young Hegelians inspired by a leftward leaning reading of Hegel’s political philosophy, had promulgated the idea of art as a motor of political change in the democratized culture that would emerge in the wake of the expected revolution. Such was the ferment of ideas from which emerged the first stirrings of what was ultimately to become Der Ring des Nibelungen and with it the conceptualization of the festival idea of performance that was eventually to be realized in very different social, political, and economic circumstances nearly three decades later.

The festival idea was from its inception part of Wagner’s ongoing protest against existing political, social, and artistic conditions. In an impassioned speech to the Dresden Vaterlandsverein on June 14, 1848, he had called for “one great class of free folk,” a Volk free not so much from the restrictions imposed by the monarchy but rather from the interference of the philistine aristocracy.Footnote ³ In his equally forthright, detailed and essentially practical Plan of Organization for a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony (1848) Wagner states that the organization of the theater should include the “full, free partnership of the intellectual and moral forces of the nation, so that he [the Minister of State] makes the nation responsible for itself” (Wagner’s emphasis).Footnote ⁴ The outright rejection of these proposals, which mostly consisted of suggestions for the improvement of performance standards as well as a means for following Emperor Joseph II’s exhortation that “The Theatre should have no other purpose, than to work for the ennobling of taste and manners” (Wagner’s emphasis),Footnote ⁵ quickly brought Wagner to the conclusion that his artistic ideals could only be realized through social reform brought about by political revolution. The festival idea was thus initially born out of Wagner’s frustration with the theatrical status quo and fired in the crucible of his imagination by a revolutionary idealism driven first and foremost by a powerful artistic rather than political force. These were the romantically inspired political ideas of the composer of the recently completed Lohengrin rather than the revolutionary pragmatist of the Vaterlandsverein.

There was nothing new about the idea of a “festival.” The notion of Greek antiquity as a model for the democratization of art was already part of Vormärz aesthetic discourse. In 1831, the poet Heinrich Heine elevated the artists of Greek antiquity and the Renaissance as counter to the aesthetic isolation of Weimar classicism: “They [the Greeks] neither cut themselves off from the politics of the day nor worked with paltry private inspiration, with the result that their works offer a visionary reflection of their age.”Footnote ⁶ The coming together of ancient Greece and contemporaneous German culture in the canonization of individual genius was also apparent in a more monumental form in Ludwig I of Bavaria’s Walhalla (1842), where past heroes of German life were immortalized in a nineteenth-century reimagination of the Acropolis. “Here the greatest Germans are being inducted into a fellowship with the Ancient Greeks.”Footnote ⁷ As the festival idea developed in the aftermath of the failed revolution alongside the dramatization of the Ring material, Wagner was therefore drawing on ideas current in aesthetic and cultural discourse. He also had established models not only in the flourishing music festivals of the Vormärz, with their emphasis on the collective participation of the Volk, but also in commemorative festivals honoring individual composers.Footnote ⁸ The Beethoven Festival held in Bonn in 1845 provides a particularly telling example where “crowned heads were mere spectators to the composer’s posthumous enthronement,”Footnote ⁹ an event that anticipated the happenings in Bayreuth some thirty years later when crowned heads gathered at the enthronement of a composer who was still very much alive.

The impetus thus given to the growth of the festival idea is evident in two major theoretical essays penned by Wagner in the immediate aftermath of his flight from the Dresden uprising of 1849: Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution, 1849) and Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future, 1849, dedicated to Feuerbach).Footnote ¹⁰ In Art and Revolution Wagner dwells at length on the nature of Greek tragedy, comparing the shallow characters of the theater of his day unfavorably with the nobility of Greek tragedy. “To the Greeks the production of a tragedy was a religious celebration where the gods stirred themselves on stage and bestowed on men their wisdom … Thus the Greek was his own actor, singer and dancer; his share of the performance of a tragedy was to him the highest pleasure in the work of Art itself.”Footnote ¹¹ Later in the same essay, Wagner calls in Messianic language for the theater to be given enhanced status: “In the first place it would be the business of the State and the Community to adjust their means to this end: that the theatre be placed in a position to obey alone its higher and true calling.”Footnote ¹²

Spurred on by his postrevolutionary imagination, Wagner demands that the ideal of communal enhancement through art should not be compromised by commercial considerations. He stipulates that “the public must have free admission to the theatrical performances.”Footnote ¹³ The Artwork of the Future pursues this utopian dream in a lengthy discourse on the “Outlines of ‘The Artwork of the Future’” where Wagner considers the nature of performance and the practical characteristics of the theatrical edifice in which it is to be presented:

In a lengthy footnote, Wagner laments that “The problem of the theatrical edifice of the future [Theatergeländes der Zukunft] cannot be considered as solved by our modern theatres. Where speculation for gain joins forces with luxurious ostentation, the absolute interests of Art must be affected.”Footnote ¹⁵

Although at this point still speculative theorizing driven by Wagner’s disappointment in the failure of the revolutionary uprisings, it is clear that by the end of 1849 the ideas eventually realized in Bayreuth were firmly embedded within the Wagnerian artistic agenda. This was all part of the process through which the nascent drama that was to give form to these ideas and eventually become the Ring was taking shape within his creative imagination. He had first given the mass of mythological material dramatic shape in a prose draft of October 4, 1848, The Nibelungen Myth as a Sketch for Drama, which in spite of significant differences from the final version, contains in broad outline the narrative of the entire Ring from the theft of the gold to the apotheosis of Brünnhilde.Footnote ¹⁶ The synchronous growth of the festival as a means to performance of the evolving drama is apparent in correspondence with close associates. The idea is first mentioned in Wagner’s letter written from Zurich on September 14, 1850 to Ernst Benedikt Kietz in Paris:

The concept took an increasingly firm hold in Wagner’s mind: In a letter written shortly afterwards (September 20, 1850) to Theodor Uhlig, he warms to his theme and adds “After the third performance the theatre would be pulled down, and my score burnt.”Footnote ¹⁸ It is clear that Wagner’s revolutionary fervor still drove the artistic genesis of the developing Ring drama. The failure of the Dresden uprising of May 1849 and his subsequent exile in Zurich had intensified the driving force behind his dramatic project, of which performance was an integral part of the conception:

In a long letter to Liszt written on September 20, 1851 Wagner outlines in detail the dramatic scheme of the four operas of the cycle, introducing the important motif of the foreswearing of love by Alberich as a prerequisite for the forging of the Ring. Moreover, the idea of the performance of the entire drama is essential to the conception and message:

There was never any question in Wagner’s mind that the festival performances should be under his direct personal supervision.

That the concept of ideal performance continued to grow in Wagner’s mind concurrently with the realization of the dramatic idea as integral to the overall conception is again evident in a long letter to Uhlig where he describes how it gradually became clear that what existed so far of the poem of The Death of Siegfried needed a good deal of back narrative explanation in order to make dramatic sense:

Early in 1852, Wagner extends the idea to include the important element of location; the locus in quo is essential to the festival idea and the performance of the Nibelung drama. In a letter to Liszt of January 30, 1852 Wagner describes his vision of “an assembly of friends in some beautiful solitude far from the smoke and pestilential business odor of our town civilization,” although he makes it clear in the same letter that this is all speculation as he does “not expect a performance, not at least during my lifetime.”Footnote ²² Lastly, in a letter to Hans von Bulow (February 15, 1852) Wagner speaks of the Greek temple as a “real, religious necessity to the Hellene; no less in their way were the churches of the Middle Ages etc. These sprang from an almost artistic need.”

Thus, by the early months of 1852, the principles from which the festival idea would eventually be realized were formed in Wagner’s mind: the four dramas of the Ring should be given in their entirety after the model of ancient Greek tragedy in a specially designed theater in a location free from distraction and free of any admission charge; singers and orchestral players should only be recruited who were sympathetic to Wagner’s utopian artistic purpose; performances were to be prepared under the composer’s personal supervision. These performances were to be born out of revolution and revolutionary ideals: an expression of the revolutionary spirit of das Volk.

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In February 1853 Wagner printed at his own expense fifty copies of the completed Ring poem for distribution to his friends and supporters. Although not yet in its final form, the text was set down before the composition of the music was even begun. In his introduction to this private printing, Wagner again stresses the importance of favorable circumstances of performance, particularly the scenic and musical representation, if his intentions are to be fully realized.Footnote ²³ According to Ernest Newman, Wagner soon realized that this initial publication of the poem was “one of the greatest mistakes of his life. […] It was beyond the capacity of anyone in 1853 to see how musical shape and continuity and inner organic life could be given to the short lines and quick interchange of dialogue in the new poem.”Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, it represents a crucial stage in the evolution of the Ring for although the individual dramas were yet to receive their final titles and the ending was still to undergo some changes, the drama was essentially complete. During the course of the next ten years, the festival idea continued to embed itself in Wagner’s imagination as he composed the music; the complexity of the score made it ever more certain in his mind that the completed work would be quite unsuitable for performance in regular repertory theaters. By the time Wagner came to publish the final version of the poem in 1863, he had completed the music of not only Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried Acts 1 and 2, but also Tristan und Isolde (1859). This latter work was initially intended as suitable for repertory theaters with limited resources; Wagner’s well-documented struggles in bringing Tristan to performance must have further convinced him of the impossibility of bringing the scenically more complex Nibelungen dramas to performance in the repertory theaters of the day. Even in a house with the resources of the Vienna opera, Tristan was abandoned as unperformable after no less than seventy-seven rehearsals.

The Preface to the Public Issue of the Poem of the Bühnenfestspiel “Der Ring des Nibelungen” clearly demonstrates that by 1862 the festival idea had taken on even more definite form in Wagner’s mind.Footnote ²⁵ He repeats his earlier call “that such a representation should be free from all the influences of the daily repertory of our standing theatres.”Footnote ²⁶ As in the earlier letters to Uhlig and Kietz, a provisional theater is to be erected, as simple as possible, perchance of mere timber, and calculated solely for the artistic fitness of its interior; a plan for this, with an amphitheatric auditorium and the great advantage of an invisible orchestra, I had discussed earlier with an eminent architect.”Footnote ²⁷ The idea of the invisible orchestra introduced here is to enhance the dramatic illusion by removing the distraction caused by the mechanical movements of the musicians. “So, with all his [Wagner’s ideal audience member] powers refreshed and readily responsive, the first mystic sound of the unseen orchestra will attune him to that devotional feeling without which no genuine art impression is so much as possible.”Footnote ²⁸ This statement of 1863 is striking, because it reflects the growing importance of the redefined Greek theater not so much as an artistic expression of “one free classless society” but as a temple of art that would define the worth of German identity and German genius. “The German nation prides itself on being so deep, original and earnest, that on this one side of Music and Poetry – where it really has placed itself at the head of all the European nations – it only seems necessary to finish it with a form-giving institution [formgebende Institution], to discover if it really deserves that praise.”Footnote ²⁹ It is the deed of performance enabled by the form-giving institution that will bring the artwork into existence. Wagner invokes no less an authority than Goethe’s Faust in support of his claim. “Just as Faust ultimately proposes to replace the Evangelist’s ‘In the beginning was the word’ by ‘In the beginning was the deed,’ so the valid solution of an artistic problem seems feasible upon no other path than this Deed.”Footnote ³⁰ But how was this “deed” to be financed? At this point in the development of his grand scheme, Wagner’s seemingly insurmountable problem was to procure the necessary funds. “As I possess experience and aptitude enough to carry to success the executive side of such a performance, it would merely be a question of providing the material means.”Footnote ³¹ Wagner ends with an exhortation to a German prince to bankroll the project:

Among the readers of this impassioned plea was the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria; a romantically inclined, ardent admirer of Wagner who had recently ascended the Bavarian throne. On May 3, 1864, while in Stuttgart, Wagner received a visit from Cabinet Secretary to the King, Hofrat von Pfistermeister.

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The late 1860s was the period in which Otto von Bismarck moved inexorably towards the creation of a united Germany under Prussian leadership. The decisive victory of Prussia over Austria in the war of 1866 caused the loose confederation of German states to disintegrate and enhanced Bismarck’s position as the prime mover behind the emerging nation state of a united Germany, with what many hoped and believed would be increased democratic participation in a more liberal administration. Wagner’s ambivalent attitude towards Bismarck did not prevent him from considering the statesman as a potential sponsor and at one point even prompted him to consider writing to Johanna Bismarck seeking her help in persuading the Minister President to concern himself with German art.Footnote ³³ Cosima noted in her diary that “he had been thinking, since yesterday, of writing to Countess Bismarck and sending her a copy of German Art and German Politics.Footnote ³⁴ Perhaps she can influence her husband to take an interest in German art. I advise him against it, because I anticipate only misunderstanding from such a step.”Footnote ³⁵ (Cosima may, and with good reason, have been worried about what effect such a step might have on the relations with possessive King Ludwig.) On Wednesday May 3, 1871, Wagner met Bismarck in Berlin. “R is utterly enchanted with the genuine charm of his character, not a trace of reticence, an easy tone, the most cordial communicativeneness, all of it arousing trust and sympathy.”Footnote ³⁶

Two years later, when exploring every possibility of raising funds for his Bayreuth venture, Wagner wrote an obsequious letter to Bismarck (June 24, 1873) in which “he attempts to persuade you to take cognizance of my essay” and in roundabout terms he suggests support for the Ring project is the patriotic duty of the architect of the Reich.Footnote ³⁷ There is no evidence that the Iron Chancellor reciprocated Wagner’s professed regard or responded to his suggestion.

Wagner’s attempts to curry favor with Bismarck, together with his growing admiration for Prussia and sense of federal nationalism evident in the late 1860s, may have been a factor in his choice of Bayreuth as the location for his festival. Bayreuth was situated in the German heartlands, in Franconia (part of Bavaria) but some distance from Munich, and thus remote from possible interference by King Ludwig. Moreover, Bayreuth had briefly been within the borders of Prussia (1791–1806). The conclusion that one strand in the web of Wagner’s thinking was to exploit the mutual wariness between Ludwig and Bismarck for his own ends is inescapable. For his part, Bismarck had more important political questions to negotiate with King Ludwig and his ministers. He did not want what was to him the relatively insignificant issue of Wagner to intrude.Footnote ³⁸

These considerations aside, it is not difficult to understand Wagner’s attraction to the little Franconian town. In Mein Leben he describes how during the course of a journey made in 1832, “the trip through Eger, over the Fichtel mountains, and the entry into Bayreuth, gloriously illuminated by the setting sun, have remained happy memories to this day.”Footnote ³⁹ In April 1871 Wagner and Cosima made their first visit to the town to inspect the Margrave’s Opera House (built 1748), an ornate baroque theater reputed to possess the largest stage in Germany, in the hope that it may serve as a suitable venue for the planned Ring performances. In the event, this survivor of Bayreuth’s former Hohenzollern grandeur proved quite unsuitable for purpose; but Wagner was nevertheless enthusiastically received by the town authorities, in particular the mayor, Theodor Muncker, and local banker Friedrich Feustel, who doubtless sensed the opportunity to restore to Bayreuth some of the prestige it had once enjoyed in the days of the eighteenth-century Margraves.Footnote ⁴⁰ These two local grandees were principally responsible for providing Wagner with the site on which to build his theater and establish his festival.

The laying of the foundation stone of the Festival Theater on May 22, 1872 (Wagner’s fifty-ninth birthday) was the beginning of the final stages of the process through which his artistic vision became a reality. In his account of the event in the fourth of his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche cites Wagner’s speech of thanks to his patrons: “it was only from you that I could expect assistance in presenting this work in pure and undisfigured form to those who had demonstrated a serious interest in my art even though it had hitherto been presented to them only in impure and disfigured form.”Footnote ⁴¹ Nietzsche goes on to report that:

The ceremony was followed by a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Wagner himself in the Margrave’s Opera House. In his Final Report on the Fate and Circumstances that attended the Execution of the Stage-Festival Play “Der Ring des Nibelungen” until the Founding of the Wagner Societies (1873) Wagner expressed the hope that the festival would “match the national body politic now evolving in the re-arisen German Reich since its operative forces would continue to belong to the single parts of the whole.”Footnote ⁴³

Wagner still intended that the theater should be a temporary building to be replaced by a more permanent structure at a later date when his enterprise was established on a firm financial basis. In a letter to Feustel (April 12, 1872), he wrote that:

By this point, as Wagner’s ideas moved from utopian fantasy to concrete reality, the pyrotechnics were thankfully to be confined to the closing scenes of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung: there is no mention of the theater being burned to the ground following the performances as in earlier formulations of the festival idea! As is evident from his essay on the construction of the Bayreuth theater, Wagner involved himself in every detail of the planning.Footnote ⁴⁵ The design itself, ultimately brought into being by the Leipzig architect Otto Brückwald, drew in part on Gottfried Semper’s ideas for the theater Ludwig II intended to build for the Wagner festival in Munich that never materialized. However, the features such as the sunken orchestra pit and amphitheater-style seating were Wagner’s own and may have been influenced by his early experience of the steeply raked auditorium and invisible orchestra of the wooden theater in Riga, where he worked for two years starting August 1837. The governing principle was to be the creation of illusion: the double proscenium arch would give a sense of visual distance and perspective while, in a passage of purple prose in which even Wagner surpasses himself, the music from the sunken orchestra would “rise from the mystic gulf like the vapors rising from the womb of Gaia beneath Pythia’s tripod, inspiring the spectator with that clairvoyance in which the scenic picture melts into the truest effigy of life itself.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The overall effect is intended to create a theater of illusions as a fitting habitation for the German spirit.

Figure 6.1 Cross section of the Festival Theater

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The first Bayreuth Festival took place in August 1876: Three complete cycles of the Ring were given between August 13 and 30. The event, described by the critic Eduard Hanslick as a “remarkable development in cultural history,”Footnote ⁴⁷ attracted inter alia crowned heads, representatives of the aristocracy, and composers as diverse as Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, and Grieg.Footnote ⁴⁸ Bismarck stayed away, but Kaiser Wilhelm I attended the first cycle and was met by Wagner and suitable entourage on arrival at the railway station, when he is reported to have remarked, “I never thought you would bring it off.”Footnote ⁴⁹ As is well known and well documented, from the outset of rehearsals in the summer of 1875, Wagner involved himself directly in all aspects of the production. The desire, first outlined in The Artwork of the Future and developed in subsequent writings, for a democratic art uniting artist and audience governed every detail of the festival. Wagner’s intention was to “generate an environment that removed spectators from the quotidian world and elevated them into the universe of his dramatic invention,”Footnote ⁵⁰ although the practicality of bringing the four huge works to performance was inevitably governed by the problems of realizing the mythical essence of the Ring within the limitations of nineteenth-century theater technology and stagecraft.Footnote ⁵¹ The festival would not have happened at all had it not been for the support of King Ludwig, who in February 1874 had come to the rescue with a substantial loan just at the point when the entire enterprise was on the point of financial collapse. The king, anxious not to be part of the general spectacle, attended the final dress rehearsal and later returned for the third cycle on the condition that he would be isolated as far as possible from the public gaze. Nietzsche, who had already expressed growing misgivings about Wagner and his Bayreuth enterprise, left early after hearing only part of the complete Ring.

The irony of the festival in its ultimate form is that, although Wagner remained a democrat in theory, free admission to performances, the “democratic” design of the theater, etc., the “utopian thrust” of the Ring project as originally conceived were all deflected by the tectonic shift in political and social reality that took place between the failed revolutions and shattered ideals of 1848–9 and the proclamation of the German Reich under Prussian hegemony on January 18, 1871.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, Bayreuth was a hugely expensive undertaking. Wagner’s utopian vision could not be brought to reality without large capital sums pledged in support of his enterprise; in dystopian terms, he needed hard cash. His revolutionary idealism, if not extinguished altogether, was therefore tempered by harsh economic reality. Wagner’s “ideal performances” were driven by the tensions arising between the two “colliding worlds” of social idealism and political realism.Footnote ⁵³ Although Wagner was virtually ignored by Bismarck, the reality of the first festival was that it was seen not so much as a democratic art born of revolution but as a cultural aggrandizement of Bismarck’s authoritarian Reich and its growing imperial ambition. An idea born out of revolutionary aspiration became a symbol of the hardening authoritarian hegemony of the German empire. It was this perceived disingenuousness that fueled Nietzsche’s growing doubts about the phenomenon of Bayreuth expressed in his Untimely Meditations.Footnote ⁵⁴

It was not only in the fractured spaces between social intention and harsh economic reality that the Bayreuth Festival of 1876 took a different form to that of its original conception: the entire enterprise was energized from the outset by the creative will of its originator, Richard Wagner, who, with his wife Cosima, established at his newly constructed Villa Wahnfried a princely court and lived in princely fashion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Inevitably, as it gathered momentum, the nascent festival became imbued with a strong element of the cult of genius. In this case, it was not centered around the canonization of a dead composer, such as took place at the unveiling of the statue of Beethoven at the 1845 commemorative festival held in Bonn, but the glorification of an artist who was very much alive. This was hardly in accord with the idea of art as the expression of a free society democratically governed by the will of the Volk. The difficulty of accommodating the cult of genius (enthusiastically promulgated by those around Wagner) and a strong authoritarian direction within the concept of a democratic art of the Volk was another way in which the reality of Bayreuth fell short of Wagner’s utopian vision.

Thus the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876 was not a gathering of a classless society brought together by art. As the historian Golo Mann notes:

In its final form, Wagner’s festival idea was as far removed from his initial aims as was Bismarck’s Reich from the ideas and democratic ambitions of the men of 1848. In more practical respects, too, it fell short of Wagner’s intentions: one his own admission it did not achieve the highest standards of performance,Footnote ⁵⁷ and the substantial deficit incurred was to cast a long shadow over his final years. There were to be no further cycles of the Ring given in Bayreuth during Wagner’s lifetime. It would be six years before the Festival Theater once again opened its doors for the premiere of Parsifal (July 26, 1882) followed by a series of performances of Wagner’s last opera, which by all accounts came much closer to his ideals than those of the Ring in 1876. Yet for all the problems both before and after the event, the first Bayreuth Festival was probably the most significant European cultural landmark event of the later nineteenth century: its artistic, cultural and, what proved to be a highly potent, political legacy was to resonate far beyond the historical parameters of the age in which it came about.