Mad Gods

A couple of years ago I worked my way through Das Rheingold, the first of Wagner’s four Ring operas. It wasn’t much fun, but I got the gist of the complicated story about the gold in the river, the magic ring, and the two giants who built a castle for the gods.

I have to say, once again, that this Young Adult / Fantasy genre is not my style. If your plot revolves around magic, superhumans, and gods with unclear motives who are making absurd decisions, then your story is well off the track of my daily concerns, and the bigger concerns of my life in general, and even the concerns of anyone on earth that I have ever heard of.

I simply don’t deal regularly in gold, magic helmets, offering one’s sister-in-law as payment for a construction project, or all-powerful gods who are incapable of building their own house. So, that is a stupendous story, but I didn’t gain any satisfying emotional impact, or any new perspective on interacting with people (or gods).

I remember the music as being huge and heavy, low and brassy, grandiose and triumphant. There were no melodies in Das Rheingold that I liked, or remembered, but I grant that these strident chords matched up pretty well with the contrived tale playing out on the stage.

Fair enough, Richard Wagner, but that does not motivate me to strap in for the rest of the famous Ring story. I’d prefer to go see what Lucile Grétry came up with, or even Heinrich Marschner. Who were those uncharted composers, and what did they write? Seems a better gamble than four hours of Die Walküre.

Act 1

But here I am. Like an abdominal surgeon, or a reader of classic literature, or a person who willingly attends concerts featuring modern electronic music, I can be curious about things that are, at their core, unpalatable.

So far, this story makes sense, in its broad strokes. Siegmund is a fighter and a swordsman, so he steps in to rescue a woman who is being forced to marry against her will. But the angry crowd disarms and defeats him. Escaping, he stumbles into a forest mansion and finds a different woman, who also was forced to marry against her will. It is his long-lost sister, Sieglinde, but they don’t know their relationship yet, so they start to fall in love.

Alright, yes, that is one too many forced marriages in the first 10 minutes, followed by a coincidence that is staggeringly fortuitous. But hang in there. The story is mostly okay, and no less realistic than many opera narratives. Also, we have to give big credit to Richard Wagner for (a) turning to Norse mythology for his subject – quite unusual – and (b) writing his own libretti. Only a handful of opera composers in history have written out the words as well as the music.

Intrigued with her new houseguest, Sieglinde drugs her nasty husband, and stays up late getting to know Siegmund. He’s a catch! They are in love, on track to a better life, familial bonding, and abundant happiness, but first Siegmund will have to get up in the morning and fight the husband to the death.

But the siblings don’t worry about that at all, because their mystical, magical unseen father has promised to provide “a sturdy sword” when Siegmund needs one, and he does. (Turns out Dad was Wotan, the king of the gods. Impressive.) His special sword is guaranteed to win any fight.

Okay. There’s a twist. Catchy. But if the plot’s conflicts can be easily solved with the introduction of mystical magical beings and weapons, why would I ever again pay attention to the challenges of these people? Richard: I said I wasn’t the YA/Fantasy type, but here we go again.

So I don’t care about the plot any more, and I’m only one hour in, with three more to go. Time to make more popcorn and focus on the music.

How is This Music Different?

This kind of opera music is new and interesting to me. There are a few short solo songs, one each by Siegmund and his sister, in the first act, but they aren’t pretty or poignant or singable -- quite unlike the opera music of Mozart, Rossini, and Verdi.  These Wagner songs are brief narrative statements set to meandering music, which have no particular ending (the orchestra simply rolls ahead into the next set of lines, sung by someone else). The musical notes are consistent with the tone and the emotion of the statement, but that’s all those notes do.

A good portion of the music here is background, mood-setting music, with no one singing. When Siegmund is presented with a worrisome problem, the music builds and strains as he walks across the room, chin in hand. When the angry husband enters, there’s a blast of explosive sound. I’m embarrassed to draw a line between the program music of TV cartoons, and this masterpiece from Richard Wagner, but the two have something in common, and it is not bad.

All of the dialog among the three characters is stated with vocal modulation – they are following a musical score, with appropriate pitches, volume, and emphasis. The sounds track with the content of their scripted message, and that is what Wagner committed to when he wrote out his principles in 1851 (“Opera and Drama”, a book club favorite, no doubt).

Very little of this singing stands as a “song” or “aria”, though. Their voices work through sentences and paragraphs, with music to match, but there is absolutely no refrain, no rhythm, no verse or chorus. They are just talking, via music.

Is this type of music an improvement on simple spoken lines (as in a conventional stage play)? To me, it is indeed an improvement. Musical intonation, in this case, is no more enjoyable than spoken lines, but in Wagner’s hands, at least, the orchestra and singers more clearly express their fear, their sadness, their joy, and their love, through the music. Even I can see that -- even in Die Walküre, Act 1.

I can see where this is going. Wagner was working up his new style already in the 1840’s, eventually publishing his theses which assailed Rossini and Meyerbeer for their showy, crowd-pleasing operas. By the end of the century, almost everyone from Ponchielli to Puccini and Strauss, was composing tuneless productions like Wagner’s. Even Verdi’s late entrant, the moderately-enjoyable Falstaff, parts with the tuneful, song-based format of the early 1800’s.

Fine. Styles and preferences evolve and mature. That’s natural, but personally, I sorely miss the touching “arias and choruses” template that ramped up 100 years before Die Walküre. Maybe Dvorak or Leoncavallo will get me through to the end of the century.

Act 2

Guess what? Fricka, the queen of the gods, agrees with me.

In just eight to ten minutes of elaborate, forceful singing, she makes my point: Siegmund cannot be an everyday, regular guy if he relies on his father / her husband (Wotan) in every tight squeeze. She tells him to take back the magic sword, or at least disable its reliable lethality.

This is a hard charge for poor Wotan. The backstory is complex, but in a nutshell, Wotan has committed to stay out of certain frays, in his lifelong quest to regain the all-powerful gold from the Rhein. His strategy had been to create a standard-issue non-god human by impregnating some woman he’d met, and let the new son do the dirty work. But Fricka points out that if Wotan intervenes all the time, that will discredit the son Siegmund, and defeat the whole purpose of Wotan fathering a mortal.

Her other argument is, to me, more relatable – and she’s astute and convincing. It is that she and Wotan know that Siegmund and Sieglinde are twins, and she dislikes the notion of someone marrying their sister/brother. (She’s also the goddess of marriage, or something like that, so, as part of her job, she advocates for the woman to remain with her abusive husband. Duty calls, I guess.)

Wotan gives in, and promises to let Siegmund fend for himself in the death battle tomorrow morning.

Here comes Brünnhilde. This is the famous and timeless icon of opera: the busty Norse warrior with Viking horns on her helmet, battle armor, and a sword. Intrepid and confident, she nevertheless seems pretty funny when she repeatedly enters the room singing at the top of her voice, regardless of who is talking just then. She and her army of eight sisters are the Walküre, or Valkyries. It seems that they, too, are Wotan’s kids, from yet another sexual entanglement (or nine).

Defeated by his wife’s sharp debating points, Wotan tells singing Brünnhilde that Siegmund has to lose the swordfight, and that under no circumstances should she intervene – Wotan is pretty firm and fierce about this.

But she does intervene. She finds the young couple in the forest, chatting (quite kinkily) about how they are simultaneously siblings and lovers, and she is so touched by their mutual commitment that she goes back on her word, and decrees that Siegmund will survive the swordfight, with her help. Partly, it appears, this is for the sake of the couple’s unborn child, a revelation which was so weird that I had to replay that part to check, and to regain my composure. Good Lord.

But it is not to be. Wotan shows up, and he is serious about his promise to Fricka, so he makes sure that Siegmund is killed, and somehow disables the jealous husband. Is that terrible guy still going to be married to his unloved, unfaithful wife Sieglinde? Maybe we’ll find out in Act 3.

Now, since feisty Brünnhilde broke her promise to her dad, there’s going to be hell to pay, or heaven, or wherever all these people are. Curtain.

How Does This Music Help?

So here’s what I think about the musical elements of Act 2.

There’s a place where Siegmund begins to sing something like a song (just before his impalement), and I perked up: does Wagner want to offer a traditional, memorable aria here? He does not, as it turns out. The “song” lasts about two lines, and then it is over. This opera has too few traditional songs for my taste.

Yet I maintain that the music does, for sure, add to the drama, to my engagement with the story. Particularly in between spoken (sung) lines, the music draws us along, and we can tell that the event is portentous, or the argument contentious, or the transition momentous, because of how Wagner is using the orchestra.

I say: this is effective; I do not say it is pleasant.

And as before, when the characters sing, the significance of their words, and the emotions behind their meaning, are measurably heightened by the cadence and pitch of their voice. In some passages, I noticed that they are not really “singing” as normally defined. These words sounded more like the 18th-century recitative, where they kind of speak their lines with a lilt and a modulation of their voice, while the orchestra rages on, behind their statements. But still, this conveys more to the listener than if they had just spoken out their choppy, consonant-laden German phrases.

Can Wagner’s musical techniques endure, through the start of the 21st century? Will composers still know how to add emotion to the words, with this kind of music augmenting the spoken lines?

No, and no.

Me, I’d rather go backwards, sorry to say. Come on, Gaetano Donizetti – let’s get the good times rolling again. Alas.

Act 3

As predicted, Wotan is furious beyond all reason at Brünnhilde’s disobedience, and Brünnhilde is terrified, and hiding. Plus, she’s brought poor Sieglinde home with her, so she sends Sieglinde off to the mountains to have her baby. (Foreshadowing Alert: The baby will be a boy named Siegfried. Watch this space.)

First, though, we have a magnificent scene where the other Valkyries triumphantly ride their horses to the famous music named after their ride. It is an excellent, exciting interlude, and it’s worth checking every production you can find, to see exactly how they stage “eight heroic women riding horses” in front of the audience. (In the one I saw, on video from Zurich, the women all wore horses’ heads. That does the job, I guess.)

Wotan doesn’t watch the horse show; he walks in later, still so enraged that he sentences Brünnhilde to sleep on a mountain until a man finds her and saves her. Humiliating enough, but on top of that, she’s not god-like anymore; Wotan points out that she must hereafter live a normal life, cooking that guy’s dinner and cleaning and whatnot.

Wotan feels terrible about what he has done, but he couldn’t think of any other way to deal with his rebellious daughter. Sad, heavy music, and curtain.

What Has Wagner Done to Opera Music?

Well, had you asked Richard Wagner this question, he might have said “I trashed it, and good riddance”. In his essays, and by example in pieces like Die Walküre, he showed his distaste for lovely and appealing musical numbers. Walküre has no long solo arias, no love duets between Sigmund and Siglinde, and no powerful choruses -- not even when you’d expect the nine Valkyries to stand and deliver. Except for the famous “Ride”, there’s not much here that you would want to play on the radio, or compile into “The Best of Wagner”.

Wagner publicized and promoted the distinction he was making, and stated clearly at one point that he planned no more operas, only “musical dramas”, and that is what he called all of them, starting with Das Rheingold. It appears that Wagner knew he had some stories to tell, and he could augment the telling by composing music to emphasize, inflect, or nuance, the words. But he refused to showcase the music by itself.

To me, this work qualifies as an opera, though “musical drama” is fine with me too. I define an opera as a performance where music is used to enhance the emotional impact of a story, and Wagner has done that.

What's different here is that Wagner is using music to enhance the impact of words and sentences, and the pauses between them as well. This brings a very different result, as compared to composers that preceded Wagner. 

I offer the notion that Mozart, Beethoven, Bellini, and the others have introduced their stories with overtures, clarified the attitudes and hopes of their characters through solos and duets, and positioned their scenes and the stance of groups with song-like choruses. When this is done throughout the performance, it is these extended pieces, with their distinctive sounds and character that add the delicious flavors to the story.

In these cases, the composers are presenting substantial musical works to communicate the feel of the story arc. Most of these pieces can be presented alone, because they are structured like songs, hymns, laments, and serenades that are heard outside the opera house.

It's a big change for Wagner to remove the music from the center of the stage, and bring the focus so completely onto the story. Sure, the music is present throughout, but again, it is doing a series of micro-tasks, acting on words and phrases, not on the work itself.

It’s Way Better than Young Adult / Fantasy Stuff

I liked Die Walküre, and I was always eager to see what was in store, in the next scene, the next act. Well done, Richard Wagner – that’s a remarkable, compelling story, and it strikes me as intended, I believe, because of the music that goes along with the words.

Yet, personally, I’m missing something when I watch and listen to this opera.

I want to go home more invigorated, or more introspective, or more sensitive to love and loss, with the force of the orchestra and the singing still echoing strongly in my being. A well-told story is a wonderful thing, but an operatic composition that offers a good story, with strong and prominent music, maybe even with dance or poetry, carries me further than the story alone.

And now, I’ll go find a recording or a stage, and see what young Siegfried will say, and will do. I’ll follow his story closely, and I have every expectation that Wagner’s music will make Siegfried’s words, and phrases, and sentences as emotionally impactful as possible. I expect a great story. But I don’t expect to remember any of the music.