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

The introduction of Richard Wagner’s music dramas in Stockholm
difficult to understand how an artist with Wagner’s keen eye for stagecraft
could make such a mistake.
Leitmotif
199
Lindgren was not against the use of leitmotifs per se. He claimed that they
were an important musical tool for evoking premonitions and memories,
for making a threatening destiny concrete, for repeating a memento. However,
they should not be used as the only means of characterising figures
“whereby they – as Emil Naumann correctly points out – appear similar to
the signs that hang from the mouths of people in naive medieval paintings.”
Furthermore, he felt that over-abundant repetition of the leitmotifs made
one suspect a lack of musical creativity, a suspicion that grew stronger with
each new work Wagner created. It was through the Wagner epigones, however,
that the danger of fabricating music dramas from a false system had
become apparent. Above all, leitmotifs become good for nothing when they
are stacked together in large quantities and with such far-fetched connotations
that a special book has to be published in order to explain them, which
was the case with Wolzogen’s Leitfaden.
According to Lindgren, Wagner applied his theories most consistently in
Tristan, although in Die Meistersinger and the Ring he had “to some small
extent returned to a more traditional melodic style” (p. 50). Lindgren uses
statistics on Wagner stagings in larger German and Austrian cities in the
autumn of 1878 to prove that the earlier works (Tannhäuser and Lohengrin)
were the most popular, and that the decrease in popularity of his later works
correlated with the extent to which Wagner applied his theories. Thus,
Lindgren’s conclusion is: “the popularity of Wagner’s operas is inversely
related to their Wagnerism” (p. 52).
Andreas Hallén and Harald Viking
The Stockholm audience gained its first impressions of Wagner’s later
musico-dramatic style not through one of Wagner’s own works but though
the Swedish composer Andreas Hallén’s Harald Viking. 8 This work is
generally considered the first Swedish opera written under the influence
of Wagner. 9
8 It is worth pointing out that Harald Viking was not a regional Swedish venture. The
German librettist Hans Herrig knew Wagner and Cosima personally. Hallén later