WAGNER'S AESTHETIC AND THE ADELAIDE RING

 

Claudio Veliz's article "Moustached Ring" (Quadrant, March 2005) raises some important questions in relation to the contemporary staging of opera. Such a discussion might well have waged a blow against the barrage of recent productions, particularly in Germany (though not exclusively), which display a contempt for the work staged, attempting to ridicule both music and text and the staging conventions which have been historically associated with it. The inanities of the Stuttgart Ring offer a multitude of examples of this. So too do the recent productions by the Hanover State Opera seen at last year's Edinburgh Festival. Here, contempt for the work was given full play: In Pelleas et Melisande, Little Yniold, played as a precocious brat, loudly banged the wall during the quiet passages of music linking scenes; in another scene where Melisande’s words describe the darkness of the enclosed garden, the characters bring out deck chairs and put on sun screen before sunbathing; text and music are duly ridiculed. Even worse, in Hanover's Il Trovatore, Manrico is gang-raped by the gypsy men (the "setting" is a construction site), and Azucena is raped with a bottle and urinated upon when caught by the Count's men, one of whom masturbates on stage during the degradation of Azucena. 

 

But Elke Neidhardt's Adelaide Ring certainly does not deserve to be lumped with such productions. Many reviews have pointed to its virtues and I do not wish to elaborate on these further.  What disturbs me in Mr. Veliz's article is the last section where he uses one of Wagner’s early prose works, reinforced by the comments of Ernest Newman, to suggest the basis of a "correct" production. Admitting that simply enumerating instances of what he feels are betrayals of the composer's intentions is not sufficient, he proposes to get to the "core of the problem" which he suggests is the betrayal of the Gesamtkunstwerk as elaborated in Wagner's prose work Opera and Drama; this, he claims, is "the undisputed foundation for the great tetralogy". This, however, is far from true; indeed, it is quite untrue. The problem lies in regarding Wagner's aesthetic as monolithic and unchanging.

 

Opera and Drama was written in 1850-1851 and is an expression of his thinking at that time. Das Rheingold, completed in 1854 is a good example of Wagner's adherence to the principles set out in that prose work. But very few would suggest that Das Rheingold, while of great interest, is the equal of the three operas which follow and which form the major part of the tetralogy. The reason is not simply the greater length and complexity of these three; it is the composer's realisation that music is not simply the EQUAL of the other arts which combine in the gesamtkunstwerk, as Wagner suggests in 1850-1, but that it is their superior. This is already clear in his 1857 article "On Franz Liszt's Symphonic poems", where he writes

 

Music can never, regardless of what it is combined with, cease being the highest,

The redemptive art (1)

 

It was, of course, Schopenhauer who changed Wagner's thinking about the democratic fusion of the arts in music-drama.  From 1854 onwards, Wagner read and re-read The World as Will and Idea; if we are to believe the composer, he read the book 4 times in one year. Schopenhauer's argument that music, as the one non-representational art, was the sole art which could express the metaphysical will had a profound effect on Wagner. His reading of the philosopher coincides with the composition of Die Walkure (completed in 1856), the music of which soars with a new freedom. This is true also of the first two acts of Siegfried where, in the first act at any rate, the new dominance of the orchestra tests all but the hardiest of heldentenors.

As Jack Stein points out:

It is in the orchestra that the transformation has taken place….The total mass of orchestral effect is so great and so complex that it is no longer felt as a

harmonic support only but frequently assumes a position of equal importance

with the vocal melody…..The orchestral brilliance must therefore be attributed to an impulse, whether intuitive or conscious, to augment the proportionate role of the music in the drama. (2)

 

But the fullest statement of  Wagner's re-thinking of his 1851 position comes in his 1870 article on Beethoven, the year after he returned to the composition of Siegfried.

 He writes:

 

It was Schopenhauer who first defined the position of music among the fine

arts with philosophic clearness, ascribing to it a totally different nature from

that of either plastic or poetic art. (3)

 

This leads Wagner to proclaim for the musician a state of "clairvoyant ecstasy" which, he suggests:

might make us hold the musician in higher reverence than other artists, nay,

well-nigh give him claim to rank as holy. For his art, in truth, compares with the

communion of all the other arts as religion  with the Church. (4 )

 

This is a far cry from the notion of the democratic interaction of all the contributing arts in the music drama of the 1850-1 prose work. The ideas of this are reinforced, perhaps less directly, in the 1871 essay, "The Destiny of Opera". The concepts were a theoretical reflection of the practice of the two operas which he had composed after interrupting Siegfried.  Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger are superb examples of the post-Opera and Drama Wagner: the music of Walter's dream (the rehearsal of the "Prize Song") was even composed before the words, something unthinkable for the 1851 Wagner. The results are clear, too, in the third act of Siegfried, and in Gotterdammerung (1869-1874), works whose poems had been written around the time of Opera and Drama: there are choruses, large sections of purely orchestral music, and characters sing together; furthermore, the complexity and multitude of the interweaving motives are such that many are almost impossible to identify in performance as opposed to the analysis at leisure of the written score.

 

So, had Opera and Drama been "the undisputed foundation of the great tetralogy", we might have had a different Ring, one which all the operas sounded rather like the Prologue. Clearly that 1850-1 work cannot be held up as a possible blue-print even for Wagner's own intentions in the Ring (if, indeed, that is what a producer should be seeking to reflect in some form or another) since these changed in the subsequent 20 years of his life. The question of our opposition to those productions which seek to spite the operatic work and bring it down a peg or two, ridicule both text and music, and elevate the personality of the director over the work itself is far too important  to be grounded in incorrect theoretical underpinnings; nor can that prose work form a basis for a critique of productions like Neidhardt's which do indeed seek to discover the essential spirit of the Ring,  albeit diverging from some of the composer's instructions. 

 

References

1. quoted in Bryan Magee(2000). The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.

                                                        New York: Henry Holt, p.187.

2. Stein, Jack (1960). Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts.

                                    Detroit:  Wayne State University Press, pp. 126-7.

3. Goldman, A. and Sprinchorn, E. (1977). Wagner on Music and Drama: a Selection from Richard Wagner's Prose Works.     London: Gollancz, p. 179.

4. ibid. p.185.

                                                                                                                                         Dr. Graham Bruce