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CHAPTER 23
1. Describe Wagner’s views on art, as expressed in The Artwork of the Future and Opera
and Drama. How did these views inform his music?
Wagner believed that the ancient Greeks had only one concept for art that united all artistic
media (drama, poetry, music, visual arts, etc.). During the cultural decline that followed, the arts
were divided into separate, isolated forms. The great task of the artist, Wagner claimed—
reflecting the influence of a range of philosophers (Feuerbach, Schopenhauer) and radical
political theorists (Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon)—is bringing these disparate, alienated artistic
media back into union with one another. The unification of the arts is also a political goal, since
music serves a social purpose. These views informed his music profoundly: Operas were set to
epic, mythological stories; individual musical numbers (e.g., aria and recitative) were done away
with in favor of a continuous musical texture (“unending melody,” or unendliche Melodie); the
orchestra was employed as a storyteller equal to the singers (as opposed to accompaniment);
sung texts were alliteratively unified using the technique of Stabreim; and the composer
coordinated all aspects of operatic production himself, from writing the libretto to designing the
staging (and, with Bayreuth, even the whole theater).
2. What is a Gesamtkunstwerk, and how is it reflected in Wagner’s music dramas?
The Gesamtkunstwerk is a Wagnerian “total work of art” that merges music with drama, poetry,
set design, costumes, and more. Wagner conceived of this union as a complete aesthetic
experience where all aspects of the production work together in perfect accord. The chief goal of
the Gesamtkunstwerk concept was unity, and this was accomplished through the characteristics
listed in Question 1, in addition to the all-important motivic principle of the leitmotif. Wagner
associated all the important elements of an opera (including characters, things, places, emotions,
and abstract concepts) with very short “leading motives” (or leitmotifs) that undergo constant
juxtaposition and metamorphosis over the course of the story.
3. How do Wagner’s leitmotifs work to support the development of the drama? How do
they affect the way one listens to his scores?
Leitmotifs support the development of Wagner’s operas both musically and dramatically.
Musically, the device works in a manner similar to the idée fixe of Berlioz or the thematic
transformation of Liszt; it unifies the work by functioning as an associative pattern that repeats in
different forms throughout the work. For example, the leitmotif for “Valhalla” in The Ring
occurs repeatedly in different contexts throughout the fifteen hours of the opera, adding musical
coherence to a vast and potentially stupefying temporal canvas. They also serve a dramatic
function, as this example indicates: By linking sonic material to important aspects of the story
(people, objects, places, etc.), leitmotifs allow the music to tell a story in the absence of words.
This affects the way one listens to Wagner by blending the musical characteristics that unify the
score with the dramatic elements that unify the libretto.
4. Describe Wagner’s innovations in extended harmony, especially in Tristan und Isolde.
How do they support the unfolding of the drama?
Wagner employed extensive chromaticism in his harmonic language to toy with the listener’s
expectations for tonal resolution. Keenly aware of tonality’s psychological powers, he subverted
standard harmonic procedure to build tension and channel desire. This practice is seen most
vividly in Tristan and Isolde, an opera that deals with themes of longing, delayed gratification,
and thwarted passion. To capture this predicament musically, Wagner exploited the rules of
functional harmony by summoning the listener’s desire for resolution—through the use of
dominant-seventh chords—without offering release (closure to the associated tonic). This
dynamic of unfulfilled tension maps neatly onto the psychological, emotional, and sexual
experience of the audience; it thus tells through music the tragic story of the title characters by
engaging a shared set of affective responses. This harmonic language of continual frustration
supports the unfolding drama by creating the expectation for ultimate closure; just as Tristan and
Isolde yearn to be together, the listener yearns for harmonic resolution, a resolution that occurs
only at the very end of the long opera.
5. Compare and contrast Wagner’s and Verdi’s operas in terms of their libretti and their
dramatic features. What were the dramatic goals behind the works of each composer, and
how were they realized in their choices of sources and in their libretti?
Wagner looked to the ancients and to Germanic lore for source materials, emphasizing the epic,
mythological, and philosophical. In contrast, Verdi revered Shakespeare, whose works tended
toward the tragicomic, contrastive, and human-sized. This difference in source materials
reflected the composers’ different dramatic goals. Wagner tended toward supernatural scenarios
and dramatic stasis, with corresponding source material for libretti (e.g., The Ring, Parsifal).
Verdi, however, preferred realism and dramatic action, drawing many of his libretti from the
great playwrights Victor Hugo (Rigoletto) and Shakespeare (Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff).
6. Describe the Risorgimento and its relationship to the popular style of Verdi’s early
operas.
The Risorgimento was a revolutionary movement among Italian aristocrats that aimed to
overthrow foreign rulers and unify the peninsula under one government. Artists associated with
this movement embraced a socially minded Romanticism (as opposed to the hyperindividualistic form practiced elsewhere) that aspired to bolster political engagement through the
arts. In Verdi’s early operas, this popular style took the form of simple, rousing unison numbers
for full chorus. While integrated into the plot of the opera, they also functioned as political
allegory, with themes that connected to the pressing issues of the day. The superb example of
Verdi’s Risorgimento-influenced style can be found in “Va, pensiero,” from the opera Nabucco.
7. Describe the mixture of the tragic and comic in Verdi’s operas, especially in Rigoletto.
What musical means does Verdi use to express irony in the quartet of the final act?
Following Shakespeare, Verdi felt that the most lifelike, realistic portrayal of the human
experience came in placing the tragic and the comic side by side. His operas—especially
Rigoletto—blended tragic scenarios (murder, humiliation, death, etc.) with ribald humor and
ridiculousness. The final quartet of Rigoletto exhibits this ironic quality in full force. The Duke, a
tenore di forza role, belies the heroic quality of his singing with tunes that reveal him to be cruel
and vapid, most notably in the merry ditty “La donna è mobile.” All of this gay music
accompanies a scene in which the Duke is supposed to be murdered, adding to the morose irony.
The tune reappears throughout the rest of the act to function as a reminiscence motif. Further, the
four characters are a study in contrasts and mutual isolation: With a divided stage, Rigoletto’s
murderous plot is put in direct dramatic conversation with the dastardly doings of the Duke.
8. How did Verdi’s Falstaff differ from his earlier operas?
Verdi wrote Falstaff in his retirement, “for his own amusement”; the composer was fantastically
wealthy already, so he was not looking for a hit. Rather, he treated this comedy as a summation
of his career, a swan song that looks back on his life in opera. The work is full of quotations
(including many self-quotations), parodies of operatic convention, and comedic irony (especially
the dead-pan character Ford). It also features a melodic seamlessness reminiscent of Verdi’s
great rival Wagner, though he was quick to reject the comparison.