Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

26
Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
future should be seen as a Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work), unifying poetry, music, song, dance, the
visual arts and stagecraft into an indivisible whole that would regain its rightful, pre-eminent place in
society, bringing about the utopian revolution and thus transforming society. He attacked the way in
which the operas of Rossini and Meyerbeer had, in his view, corrupted the ideal of music drama, and
attacked in more general terms the music of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and other Jewish composers
(this repugnant aspect of his opinions was the most controversial even at the time it was written).
Finally, he described the techniques through which he would achieve the unification of the arts. Music
Drama would be continuous, not broken up into separate ‘numbers’, thus imitating the continuity of
real life; its subject matter would be drawn from mythology and legend – archetypal human drama,
universally valid regardless of time or place; the musical argument would be symphonic in nature
(based on the techniques of Beethoven, whom Wagner idolised), with a series of Grundthemen
(nowadays normally called Leitmotifs) to unify the musical argument and to represent characters,
objects, ideas or states of mind that were important to the drama; every aspect of the music would be
governed by the requirements of the drama, not only the thematic content, but also the modulatory
scheme, orchestration and structure, revealing subconscious thought as well as conscious action;
and it would focus primarily on the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters, rather than on the
events of the story (except in so far as these events affect a character’s reactions to them).
Before he left Dresden, Wagner had already written the initial scenario for a drama based on
the medieval German Nibelungenlied and the earlier Icelandic Volsunga Saga, and focusing on
the character of Siegfried (whom Wagner conceived as the ideal man who would emerge as the
successful outcome of the revolution). This scenario, entitled Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death), was
expanded into a complete operatic poem (Wagner did not use the term libretto), and a second poem
was added, Der junge Siegfried, dealing with Siegfried’s early life. By the end of 1851 Wagner had
decided to expand the entire project into a series of four music dramas, and added poems for Die
Walküre (the story of Siegfried’s parents) and Das Rheingold (a prologue to the drama, dealing with
the forging of the magical ring by the Nibelung dwarf, Alberich, and the start of a struggle between
Alberich and Wotan, chief of the gods, to control its powers). The poems were thus written in the
reverse of their order in the finished drama. He then revised the initial poems, re-naming them as
Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). The poems were finished in December 1852
and published privately in 1853 under the title of Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s – i.e.
Alberich’s – Ring); they are written in a consciously archaic style, making extensive use of alliteration
in imitation of the early medieval Stabreim used in some of the sources. Wagner then started to
compose the music, working in the correct order of the drama. Das Rheingold was finished in 1854,
Die Walküre in 1856 and the first two acts of Siegfried in July 1857.
By this time Wagner was living with Minna in Zurich, in a house provided by one of his wealthy
admirers, the silk merchant Otto Wesendonck. He became infatuated by Wesendonck’s wife, Mathilde,
and set aside his work on the Ring to write a new operatic poem inspired by his feelings for her. This
was Tristan und Isolde, based on a thirteenth-century courtly romance by Gottfried von Strassburg.
This tale of two lovers who were prevented from fulfilling their desire for each other in life had an
obvious resonance with Wagner’s own situation, and his version of it reflected his recently discovery
of the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer: Tristan and Isolde could be united only in
death, through the renunciation of life and of the pointless will to live. Schopenhauer placed great
emphasis on the importance of the arts in all human experience, and regarded music (because it
was more purely abstract) as superior to other art forms. Wagner accepted this view, which had a
profound effect on all his work from Tristan onwards.
www.cie.org.uk/cambridgepreu