Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

198 Joakim Tillman
monotonous exactly because he regularly, every time the ear expects a
concluding triad, presents a dissonant chord.” 7
According to Lindgren, Wagner overlooked the fact that the listener needs
orientation marks in order to comprise and measure a long distance, “for
the same reasons that a wanderer needs breathers on a long road.” If Wagner
had been consistent, the text in his “tendency music” would have been
a “recitation through each act without full stops, commas, or other punctuation
marks – possibly a question mark here and there.”
A mix-up of the vocal and the instrumental
Lindgren’s opinion was that Wagner turned the correct relationship between
singer and orchestra upside-down:
“The true, singable melody – which W erroneously claims to be instrumental,
because song is older than instrumental music – is as a rule
placed in the orchestra (in the leitmotifs), while on the other hand the
singing part often moves in progressions that are anything but natural for
the human voice.” (p. 41)
According to Lindgren, proof of Wagner’s distortion of the vocal parts lay
in the fact that they were shown to have a detrimental effect on the voices
of singers, who had sacrificed the beauty of their voices “on the altar of the
music of the future.” However, his main objection concerned the aesthetic
aspect:
“It is said that Grétry, neglecting the importance of Mozart, once stated
that ‘Cimarosa put the bust on the stage and the pedestal in the orchestra,
but Mozart did the opposite.’ One asks oneself what Grétry might
have said about Wagner’s declamation. Here the singers are not even
‘pedestals’ for the music, but only supplementary parts in the ‘infinite’
symphony, they are ventriloquists, whose true utterances are heard from
another direction, helpless figures in a shadow play, who are not allowed
or able to express their feelings, but have to leave this to the orchestra.”
(p. 41)
In Lindgren’s view, this was the main cause of the lack of musical individuality
that characterised the figures in Wagner’s later dramas. He found it
7 Lindgren does not give the source. It is from Hanslick’s review of the Die Meistersinger
premiere in 1868.