Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Review

Report
Program
Keynote speakers
Speakers
Panel Discussion
Final Comments

Notes and Personal Highlights - accounts of other papers

As the Program suggests, there were many interesting subjects being offered by the presenters, most of whom kept their promise. Since I have no musical training I found the technical analytical papers somewhat beyond me, although they made me realise how much I was missing out on. My summary is split into KeyNote speakers, Keynote Speakers and Speakers (see below), and a final summary.

David Roberts

Roberts pointed out that Wagner faced an ontological problem in working on the Ring: How can a single artist create a redemptive mythos when it usually arises from the spirit of the community or people (ie a Gesamptkunstwerk). Wagner rejected the 19C novel and historical dramas of, for example, Schiller, because of their dependence on a relationship with science and commerce. Wagner also claimed to find this a problem with Shakespeare, despite Shakespeare’s reputation as an artist in touch with nature.

Wagner, therefore, found the work of the Greeks, the Oedipus and Antigone stories for example, inspiring in the way they represent the human condition. This confirmed Wagner’s developing concept that "myth alone can form the basis of the artwork of the future, the music drama".

Anno Mungen

Mungen brought together a fascinating range of points covering the development of stage technology, Wagner’s continuing use of gestural effects inherited from French Opera, English melodrama, the increasing use of tempi markings and stage directions to dictate performance style, and the Panorama (Diorama) – that is the techological representation of a large scene through painting or photography.

He concluded that the Ring is a panorama of the world in time, in place, in character and in meaning and that Wagner used aspects of all the above to achieve the vast scope of the operas. Munno noted that the architecture of the Festspielhaus is very close to the contemporary (19C) panorama as much as to the Greek amphitheatre to which it is usually compared. Imagine what Wagner could have done with the Imax screen! A major impact of the panorama was the removal of social distance between spectator and spectacle. The diaorama extended this effect with the introduction of the "Lichtspiele" (light show) and music which heightened the spectator’s illusion of being in the scene.

Robert Gibson

Gibson took issue with the conventional view of Parsifal as the gospel of Nazi Socialism because it was interpreted as being about racial miscegenation, especially in view of its withdrawal from performance in Nazi Europe in 1939.

Gibson instead suggests that other sensitivities were aroused by different views of what Parsifal was "really" about. Gibson lists Parsifal’s pacifist sentiments, a hero at odds with the preferred Siegfried model, and glorifies the enclose male Christian community. This latter point, Gibson argues gained its sensitivity from the "Cloister Trials" which began in 1934 and featured revelations about the alleged homosexual activities in German monasteries and other Catholic religious institutions.

Gibson points to Rosenberg, a major spokesman for the Nazis as citing Parsilal as a "church influenced weakening of the German masculine ideal". Parsifal, as a young foolish man enticed into the Grail community, came rather too close to the stereotype of homosexual seduction to let pass.

Deathridge provided the interesting insight that Hitler and the Nazi administration came to realise that the pacifist nature of Parsifal sat uncomfortably with a country at war. Professor Bauer commented that Hitler deliberately used Parsifal after the putsch to re-emphasise the Nazi’s pacifist policies. The first international press conference after the putsch was in Bayreuth where the original manuscripts of the opera were shown off.

Howard Meltzer

Weltzer suggested that, as an artist, Wagner was full of contradictions: "neither wholly revolutionary not wholly bourgeois", "the great genius and -selfless artist…vies with Wagner the egomaniacal, self-agrandising monster" "whose works are neither polemical nor wholly theatrical".

Meltzer suggests that The Ring Cycle "presents a world despoiled by grandiouse schemes and ambitions…it bears witnes to the results of lust for money and power". Meltzer posits that Wagner resolves this conflict between his philosophical viewpoint and his unremitting desire to be comfortable and surrounded by the finest things of life by claiming that comfort and possessions were important for his special artistic nature. It remains for us to decide whether Wagner was justified or a hypocrite.

Richard Laing

Laing put forward an interpretation (which was new to me) of Alberich’s curse motif as a variant to the "redemption" or "glorification of Brünnhilde" motif, rather than a variant of the Rhinedaughter’s "renunciation of love" motif. He also suggests that all of these motifs are erroneously named. He suggests that

Laing suggests that the name put forward by Owen M Lee, "the moment of choice" creates a more satisfactory explanation of the motivic relatioships since Alberich, Siegfrien and Brünnhilde make crucial choices, accompanied by these motivic variants, a climactic moments of the operas.

Laing also suggests that "the redemption by love" is more accurately called "redemption of love". He notes that each time Brünnhilde sings what was originally Sieglinde’s "glorification of Brünnhilde" motif, she is singing about Siegfried. So the motif is perhaps better called "love between man and woman".

One could query this broad brush analysis since there are many other choices between power and love in The Ring Cycle which, to my ears, are not accompanied by this "moment of choice" motif. Similarly, we need to listen more closely to the love motif between Sieglinde and Siegmund in Act 1 of Die Walküre.

Susan Sharkey

Sharkey took a quite different and challenging approach to the identification of motifs in The Ring Cycle. She noted that while Wagner was pleased by the attention given to this process by his contemporaries such as Hans von Wolzogen and Gottlieb Federlein, there were inconsistencies between descriptions and a later ignoring of Wagner’s own descriptions.

This, Sharkey contends, has led to an assumption that the "plethora of published motivic guides are accurate". Quite rightly, she suggests that it is time for us to return to all the original sources – the manuscripts, Wagner’s descriptions, the text and music of the operas, the "psychological and situational context" – to try and establish a more coherent and self-evident set of descriptions – preferably as a concept or emotion.

Roger Hillman

Hillman considered Syberberg’s film Hitler: A Film from Germany (or Our Hitler) as an example of a artwork which represented an extension of Wagner’s concept of the Gesamptkunstwerk in its integration of storyline (a critique of the quest for nationhood and its perversion by the Nazis) with historical film footage and the use of music (lengthy quotations from Parsifal, Das Rheingold and Mozart and shorter quotations of Nazified songs).

Hillman argues that the use of Wagner’s music creates a dialectic between Wagner’s theories about the artwork of the future, the "Nazification of Wagner" and the reaction of artists of the 20thC to Wagner’s theories.

Hillman also suggests that because music can speak the unspeakable and can be associated with gestures or images, for example, it can become even more meaningful. This helps to account for the success of the translation of program music – or tone poems – as it developed in the 19thC into a major component of Hollywood film.

I guess one can say that there is already a component of association with ideas, emotions, stories or paintings in tone poems which sets the stage for the automatic association we have with many kinds of music as it appears in the more predictable popular films.

Jeongwon Joe

Jeongwon also considered a Syberberg film: Parsifal. He contended that, in the film, Syberberg attempted to expose Wagner’s mysogyny by converting Parsifal into a female character, still with a male voice, in the Act II seduction scene with Kundry. Joengwon then suggests that the effect of this artistic manouevre is to create an androgynous character which fits closely with Wagner’s description of the character.

Joengwon then explored a number of aspects of the way Kundry is presented in the opera, including the way she is reduced to a scream or the words "dienen…dienen" (to serve…to serve) and then a corpse near the end of the opera.

Julie Hubbert

Hubbert also considered the influence of Wagner on the development of film music, particularly the way film music has developed a repertoire of leitmotiven which can be called upon to create the desired reaction in the well conditioned audience.

Hubbert traces this powerful heritage of Wagner to what she contends is Wagner’s "exploration into the nature of music, specifically music’s referential capabilities" as exemplified in The Ring Cycle.

Hubbert answers her rhetorical questions -

"Can music represent or suggest certain emotions or feelings?

"Is music’s relationship with the text literal or suggestive?

"Is music more suited to enhancing action rather than representing ideas or concepts?" –

by suggesting that it is those sections of The Ring Cycle where Wagner experiments with "music’s expressive capabilities" which have had the greatest impact on film music and by quoting Aaron Copland:

"Film music can be used to underline or create psychological refinements – the unspoken thoughts of a character or the unseen implications of a situation".

Marshall Tuttle, Nicholas Baragwanath, Warren Drake and Chi Keung Mark Wong

These three presenters, addressed specifically technical musical aspects of The Ring Cycle which are to a large extent well outside my competence to report on.

I was fascinated by the work being done to identify tonal patterns in The Ring Cycle, to explicate Wagner’s harmonic grammar, to chart the interval cycles, which structure the leitmotiven in all the operas from Die Walküre onwards, and to deconstruct their "cryptic dramatic and autobiographical meaning" (Baragwanath), and how "the musico-dramatic structure of [the opening scene of Die Walküre] is based on the organic growth of increasingly complex musical ideas from a primal motif, andhow that process serves to articulate the dramatic action of the scene"(Drake).

Wong’s account of the narrative use of musical leitmotiven in Tristan und Isolde was a welcome change from the concentration on The Ring Cycle. Wong contended that, parallel to the dramatic narrative, there is a musical narrative which functions so that "when a musical theme or motif appears again after the first presentation, the qualitative differences between them, such as harmonies, musical texture, orchestral colour, and tonalities, underlines the essence of a musical narrative, as the latter somehow acquires ‘the quality of a meditation on a remembered past’".

Baragwanath gave a fascinating account of the significance of the diminished 7^th in The Ring Cycle because it gave Wagner the greatest flexibility in composition. It also gave Wagner musical reflection of a key dramatic theme - redemption from a world of suffering through union of character with the infinite. For example, Brünnhilde's "redemption" (in quotes now, in deference to points made by earlier speakers about the naming of motifs) is an inversion of Siegfried's theme which is musically completed by the addition of the missing notes. The implication is that Brünnhilde has taken over Siegfried's mission and turned it to her own ends.

Eva Rieger and Peter Russell

Rieger and Russell returned to the way in which Wagner portrayed his female characters. Rieger attempts to outline series of contradictions in Wagner's portrayal of Brünnhilde to account for the powerful appeal of The Ring Cycle to women and men. She suggests that despite the sacrifice which Brünnhilde makes of her life, she is also in part a femme fatale; she seems to take on the housewife role as she sends Siegfried off to have adventures; she possesses desires, but is, initially reluctant to express them.

Rieger also suggests that the music in The Ring Cycle is gendered in a accordance with a well established compositional tradition in that Siegfried is characterised by strong diatonic "fanfare figurations or upward surging intervals" while Brünnhilde is characterised by the chromatic, ornamental "descending semitones" which also represent the world of love.

In another welcome change of focus, Russell gave an extensive and provocative analysis of the nature of the conflicts Wagner was portraying in Tannhäuser . Rather than the usual conflicts between pagan and Christian love or sexual and spiritual love, Russell posits that Wagner was more interested in the conflicts set up by "the emotional immaturity and self-division" of the character.

Russell suggests that this division is reflected in the hitherto unremarked bifurcation of the world of the opera into the female (the Venusberg and pagan) and the male (the Court and Christian). In both there is an misfit - Tannhäuser in the first and Elizabeth in the second. Tannhäuser doesn't fit into either comfortably - he is a poet but a Christian; a courtier but a rebel; a male but femininely inclined because of the traditionally feminine nature of the Arts. This mixture of contradictions is established early on with the "masculine" portrayal of the actively seducing Venus and the passively resisting Tannhäuser.

Russell went on to illustrate how this division is reflected in the music. In the Venusberg, for example, Tannhäuser sings a strongly conventional, diatonic set of three verses between which Venus sings a tonally amorphous and unpredictable antiphon. In between these extremes, the young Shepherd sings a diatonic song celebrating Nature and the Pilgrims one of Christian faith.

Russell contends that Tannhäuser is impelled to find a third way between these contradictions by leaving the Venusberg, but his experience at Court again remind him that it is not a world in which he belongs. At the climax of Act II, the Pilgrim's tenor voices cut across the battle for Tannhäuser's soul between Elizabeth and the enraged nobles. Russell concludes that "the basic antinomy of Tannhäuser was never overcome more than temporarily by Wagner, whose last opera, Parsifal, depicts a world even more intransigently defined by gender than is Tannhäuser . Both operas posit a world structured on a rigid gender-division which can only be escaped in death".

Terence Watson - 8 May 1999