# Did Wagner Revolutionize Modern Music?



## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

He wrote about thirteen complete operas, ten of which are "Wagner canon". While these stage works are operas/musical dramas, there were vast elements that influenced generations of composers to this day. even watching old films from the middle of the 20th century, you can hear film composers wrote similarly using Wagnerian methods.

Wagner truly revolutionized modern music.

Edit: apologies for the spelling mistake - the first option in the poll is "Yes, unquestionably yes".


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

`Perhaps revolutionized opera more than he revolutionized modern music? But then maybe his operatic innovations did impact music in general. As I voted, I don't know enough to really say.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

ArtMusic said:


> He wrote about thirteen complete operas, ten of which are "Wagner canon". While these stage works are operas/musical dramas, there were vast elements that influenced generations of composers to this day. even watching old films from the middle of the 20th century, you can hear film composers wrote similarly using Wagnerian methods.
> 
> Wagner truly revolutionized modern music.
> 
> Edit: apologies for the spelling mistake - the first option in the poll is "Yes, unquestionably yes".


Yes to this extent: he created an interest in writing excessive music. This led to, for example, Morton Feldman's excessively long duration late music; Stockhausen's excessive demands in the Licht operas, for example, for a helicopter; Ferneyhough's excessive rhythmic complexity, Cage's excessive multi media circus pieces; Bedrossian's excessively saturated timbres and I pass over many others.


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## Flamme (Dec 30, 2012)

Most definitely...The same as AH, his admirer was a revolutionary and not a reactionary...


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

I think his music acted as a kind of bridge towards modernism, the same can be said about Liszt and Mussorgsky perhaps even Brahms to a smaller extent. It was an influence on modernism, and then composers like Debussy and Stravinsky revolutionized modern music.


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## Flamme (Dec 30, 2012)

AH's ideology was traditionalism with MODERN weapons and RW was not so far off...


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

He influenced some composers. Some for the balance of their lives, others for a certain period of fascination that then was followed by repudiation or just a wandering away. Others not at all. And to what extent was he the recipient of the influence of Berlioz and Liszt?


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

View attachment 148131

"... Yes, the missing tonality was in fact C minor; "atonality" is of course not justified, but it was certainly hinted…Adorno's *« hegemony of tonality» remains* and Mozart's acquisitions anticipate those of Wagner, transforming musical language « only indirectly, by means of the *amplification of the tonal space and not through its abolition»*"

It depends what you mean by "modern music"


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## George P Smackers (Jan 5, 2021)

It's a claim made so frequently that I can find no reason to dispute it.

There are piles and piles of articles, pop and academic, YouTube videos, lectures, TV segments, books, etc. on the revolutionary nature of the "Tristan chord" alone, its influences, musical meanings, "philosophical" significance, etc.

So yeah, he did.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

I don't know...I think maybe forms of the word "revolutionary" are overused and then quality level us judged by how "revolutionary" -- i.e.how unlike what came before -- a composer's works are. Wagner was influenced by Beethoven and others and Wagner in turn was enormously influential. Btw I'm thinking of getting a whole Ring cycle on CD, I just don't know which to get yet.


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## Agamenon (Apr 22, 2019)

Debussy, Strauss, Mahler, Schönberg, Berg, etc, etc, were influenced by Wagner.

After Tristan, music was not the same; Unbelievable, Barenboim decided to rethink Beethoven´s 32 piano sonatas after his first Tristan und Isolde.

And Bernstein claimed: "_"'Tristan und Isolde' is the central work of all music history, the hub of the wheel... I have spent my life since I first read it, trying to solve it. It is incredibly prophetic." --Leonard Bernstein, 1981_


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

consuono said:


> I don't know...I think maybe forms of the word "revolutionary" are overused and then quality level us judged by how "revolutionary" -- i.e.how unlike what came before -- a composer's works are. Wagner was influenced by Beethoven and others and Wagner in turn was enormously influential. *Btw I'm thinking of getting a whole Ring cycle on CD, I just don't know which to get yet.*


Just get the Solti. It was the first complete _Ring_ recorded, and it hasn't been surpassed as a whole. It features most of the best Wagner singers of the postwar decades, it's dramatically involving, and the sound was state-of-the-art for the 1960s and holds up very well today. (I never bought it as a complete set, but substituted the Leinsdorf _Die Walkure,_ recorded at about the same time, for the Solti, partly because Hans Hotter, Solti's Wotan, was too far over the hill vocally by 1965.)


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Get the Blu Ray version of Solti's Ring - stunning sound. Even better than the CD remasters.

What Wagner accomplished:

1) Incredible fusion of all the arts into his music dramas.
2) Huge expansion of the tonal palette of composers. Pushed tonality to the limits and opened new vistas for everyone who came after.
3) Created new sounds with new instruments - Wagner Tuben - and new methods of blending instruments. No less a composer than Rimsky-Korsakov was thrilled with Wagner's orchestration and proceeded in new directions and we know where that led.
4) Demonstrated to followers the creation of mythologies that would echo for 150 years - you think Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and others came out of nowhere?
5) Created the leitmotiv that practically every opera composer, film movie composer and even Broadway show composer used after him.

Wagner was a creative force never equaled. He and he alone forced music on a new trajectory. It was something no Hanslick or Brahms could stop. It's just so unfortunate that he was a racist and his music taken up by the Nazis.


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

Woodduck said:


> Just get the Solti. It was the first complete _Ring_ recorded, and it hasn't been surpassed as a whole. It features most of the best Wagner singers of the postwar decades, it's dramatically involving, and the sound was state-of-the-art for the 1960s and holds up very well today. (I never bought it as a complete set, but substituted the Leinsdorf _Die Walkure,_ recorded at about the same time, for the Solti, partly because Hans Hotter, Solti's Wotan, was too far over the hill vocally by 1965.)


Karajan's _Die Walküre_ would be a great choice, too, but Karajan's Wagner isn't to everyone's taste. 

In my opinion it's quite undeniable that Wagner revolutionised his contemporary classical music. Modern music was more like a further development that Wagner during his lifetime was only able to inspire but not exactly revolutionise. It could be argued, however, that modern classical music wouldn't have been the same without Wagner.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

annaw said:


> Karajan's _Die Walküre_ would be a great choice, too, but Karajan's Wagner isn't to everyone's taste.


I suggested the Leinsdorf _Walkure_ as a substitute for the Solti because it shares important singers with that cycle (Birgit Nilsson and George London). The Karajan is a fine performance, but very different, artistically and sonically.


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## Axter (Jan 15, 2020)

I would say he introduced new themes and motifs into his musical patterns specially the overtures.
Themes that one can associate with "heroic acts, standing above the crowd, hope" etc...

Take "ride of the Valkyries" for example or the overture to "Tannhauser" express a certain heroic cause. 
Just imagine how _modern_ they would have sound back then on their premiere performances. I would say, Wagner mesmerized his audience to a good extent. In that regards, yes he did have a great deal of impact on music and operas specifically.

Just imagine how the audience might have perceived this in 1876 when it was first premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus:


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

Woodduck said:


> I suggested the Leinsdorf _Walkure_ as a substitute for the Solti because it shares important singers with that cycle (Birgit Nilsson and George London). The Karajan is a fine performance, but very different, artistically and sonically.


Okay, I see, that actually makes a lot of sense. It's one of my favourite _Die Walküres_ AND it has Vickers.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> Yes to this extent: he created an interest in writing excessive music. This led to, for example, Morton Feldman's excessively long duration late music; Stockhausen's excessive demands in the Licht operas, for example, for a helicopter; Ferneyhough's excessive rhythmic complexity, Cage's excessive multi media circus pieces; Bedrossian's excessively saturated timbres and I pass over many others.


Those other composers and works are not noteworthy. Barely anyone has listened to them, let along remain in the repertoire or have opera houses perform them every year in contrast to Wagner's. Fact.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Just get the Solti. It was the first complete _Ring_ recorded, and it hasn't been surpassed as a whole. It features most of the best Wagner singers of the postwar decades, it's dramatically involving, and the sound was state-of-the-art for the 1960s and holds up very well today. (I never bought it as a complete set, but substituted the Leinsdorf _Die Walkure,_ recorded at about the same time, for the Solti, partly because Hans Hotter, Solti's Wotan, was too far over the hill vocally by 1965.)


What about on DVD/Blu-Ray? I like the Boulez Bayreuth version.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Agamenon said:


> And Bernstein claimed: "_"'Tristan und Isolde' is the central work of all music history, the hub of the wheel... I have spent my life since I first read it, trying to solve it. It is incredibly prophetic." --Leonard Bernstein, 1981_


Bernstein could be so hyperbolic! I'm wondering how Tristan could be the central work in all of music history, when the composers that are most universally agreed upon as the greatest all came before Wagner? Even if Tristan was the sole influence and gateway to _all_ of modernism (which it clearly is not), that statement would still be highly exaggerated.

I think Bernstein was all around a fantastic musician and educator, he just got carried away sometimes in his enthusiasm, he has made similarly exaggerated claims about Beethoven and about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

Thanks for the suggestions...I think I'll probably go with the Solti set.

I think Wagner is one of those composers -- maybe *the* only composer -- that you love and hate at the same time.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

tdc said:


> *I think his music acted as a kind of bridge towards modernism*, the same can be said about Liszt and Mussorgsky perhaps even Brahms to a smaller extent. It was an influence on modernism, *and then composers like Debussy and Stravinsky revolutionized modern music.*





annaw said:


> Karajan's _Die Walküre_ would be a great choice, too, but Karajan's Wagner isn't to everyone's taste.
> 
> In my opinion *it's quite undeniable that Wagner revolutionised his contemporary classical music. Modern music was more like a further development* that Wagner during his lifetime was only able to inspire but not exactly revolutionise. It could be argued, however, that modern classical music wouldn't have been the same without Wagner.


I suggest these statements aim closer to a viable factual statement: Wagner revolutionized _Romantic_ music, "his contemporary classical music". Beethoven revolutionized Haydn's and Mozart's "classicism" to create "romanticism", in the same way William Wordsworth revolutionized English neo-classical poetry to create an expressive style hitherto unseen.

Modernism, of course, didn't just pop up into existence one day. It was a gradual process. If anything, we might be able to say that Schoenberg _created_ Modernism in music. He at least created one aspect of it with his twelve-tone system, which proved something quite different from the tonal/modal music of even Wagner and Debussy. But to say Schoenberg revolutionized romantic music seems an odd statement to me. Schoenberg wrote some magnificent (if a touch overblown) romantic-styled music. He then turned in a different direction. It is somewhat a different approach from what Wagner did, which was more like a gradual expansion of tonal harmony and a muddying of tonal centers. Schoenberg didn't do the gradual thing so much as throw what he had out the window and started anew. It was revolutionary. But it was not necessarily a revolution of romanticism.

We might maintain that Stravinsky revolutionized Russian romanticism, expanding it into what would become termed modernism. (I think specifically of the _Rite_, which is strongly based on romantic principles moreso than is, say, Schoenberg's _Pierrot Lunaire_ which seems to just pop out of nowhere.) We could possibly argue that John Cage revolutionized modernism with his defining use of chance techniques, but he didn't seem to invent it. In fact, Cage studied with Schoenberg. So Schoenbergian "modernism" was well on its way.

"Modernism" becomes a flexible term. Sure, we won't mistake Xenakis and (early) Penderecki for "classical" or "romantic" works, but Howard Hanson and Samuel Barber are modern composers whose brand of neo-Romanticism is in some sense a revolutionizing of modernism. As much as I listen to Hanson and Barber, I cannot mistake their music for anything that Schumann, Mendelssohn, or Brahms would have composed.

Perhaps the word "modify" is more apt than "revolutionize". Many composers modify the music of their eras, and eventually something "new" results.

I have long postulated the concept of two sorts of artists: the perfecter, and the innovator. Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Mahler seem perfecters: those who take their art techniques to their highest example of excellence. After such artists, their forms (in some sense now "dead" through perfection) scream a need for change. Thus, the innovators. Bach's sons were innovators, moving music from their papa's Baroque formats into "modern" classicism. Beethoven was a great innovator. We know something is different from the Ninth Symphony and anything Mozart ever wrote, perfect as Mozart's music is. Debussy and Schoenberg are innovators.

Wagner, who to my sense somewhat resembles Stravinsky (in terms of the way he works with his art form's techniques), strides between the art of the perfecter and that of the innovator. Both produced masterpieces of perfected Romanticism, but were able to step beyond that and move into the new work of the innovator.

Mahler seems to me a hopeless perfecter (and I don't mean that in any derogatory or negative sense). I always hear the closing movement of his Ninth Symphony as a kind of somber, melancholy bid of goodbye to the music he knew and loved and wrote, recognizing that a fellow name Schoenberg was standing on the new territory, a land Mahler couldn't have traversed. Saint-Saens is probably moreso a hopeless case of a Romantic perfecter stuck on his side of the fence. I think Mahler recognized the need for music's expansion, but was himself incapable (either by sensibility or desire) of moving in that direction. I cannot see Mahler writing anything like Schoenberg's _Five Pieces for Orchestra_, but I can see Schoenberg writing something like a symphony by Mahler.

I don't fault artists one way or the other. There is plenty of directions for self-expression. I remain happy that folks pursue these directions, each to his own. And I welcome the fruits of their artistic endeavors, however diverse. I can choose to listen to what I want, and that works for me.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

tdc said:


> Bernstein could be so hyperbolic! I'm wondering how Tristan could be the central work in all of music history, when the composers that are most universally agreed upon as the greatest all came before Wagner? Even if Tristan was the sole influence and gateway to _all_ of modernism (which it clearly is not), that statement would still be highly exaggerated.
> 
> I think Bernstein was all around a fantastic musician and educator, he just got carried away sometimes in his enthusiasm, he has made similarly exaggerated claims about Beethoven and about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.


Granting that Bernstein had biases (like all of us) and was a bit of a drama queen, he has a point. It isn't necessary to accept that any single work is "central" to Western music, but if we do entertain that as a reasonable notion it's hard to think of another work that qualifies as well as _Tristan und Isolde._ And I think it qualifies on grounds both musical and cultural. 
_
Tristan_ came in the very middle of the 19th century, a moment when the basic harmonic language of Western music had congealed at the hands of the Classical masters and was in the process of being expanded in ways that existing theoretical concepts could describe only with difficulty, if at all. More fundamentally, it came at the time when the very idea of music - or, to be precise, the idea of musical meaning and expression - had been transformed by the Romantic movement from a representation of ideal values and affective categories to a seismograph of the soul, psyche, or inner life of the individual. It was an enormous expansion of the notion of what music could or should concern itself with, and the elements of music - melody, harmony, form - had to find radically new shapes in order to represent philosophical concepts, poetic ideas, phenomena of nature, and the infinite nuances of human feeling.

Wagner was ideally suited to play a major role in this evolution. Having grown up around the theater where his stepfather was a performer, and having written plays as a child before he composed music, he was essentially a musical dramatist, and his works were eventually to prove that no art form is more sympathetic to Romanticism's expressive premises and expanded musical techniques than opera. It was the dramatist in Wagner that provided the impetus for his musical innovations - his expansion of harmony and orchestration, his use of pregnant and adaptable motifs to weave rich and extended textures and create a psychological narrative, and his breakup of traditional forms. And it was the quintessentially Romantic theme of _Tristan_ in particular - romantic love, or erotic passion - that forced these tendencies to extremes that sent shock waves through the musical - and nonmusical - culture of Europe.

A three-hour opera almost devoid of physical action and devoted almost entirely to the uninhibited probing of a central focus of the subjective life of the human individual was something that couldn't have been attempted, or probably even imagined, before its own particular moment in history. It can be seen in retrospect as the work that Wagner was destined to write, and the writing of it had for him the quality of a compulsion and a revelation, stretching his musical powers so far beyond his own previous efforts that he himself found the work's emergence from his psyche astonishing and almost frightening. But it can just as well be seen as the work which Romanticism itself was striving to compose, the climactic product of a new sensibility which had revolutionized Western society as the focus of human perception and purpose shifted from God and society to the human individual. In its intense exploration of passion, _Tristan,_ based on the classic romance of the Middle Ages, locates passion - in its dual sense of love and suffering - at the center of the emotional life of Western man, and it's a work that continues, like passion itself, to be as unsettling as it is exalting.

Few composers could escape completely from the grip of this work on the musical thinking and feeling of the decades that followed it. I think an exhaustive tracing of its influence would show Bernstein's sense of its importance to be pretty accurate.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> Bernstein was a bit of a drama queen


O come on, he wasn't even the worst drama queen :angel:














 (Victor Borge explains what a conductor actually does)


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

^^^That's charming, but of course the subject is Bernstein's tendency to make exaggerated pronouncements (e.g., Beethoven was a mediocre melodist or harmonist). Did you have an opinion on that?


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

ArtMusic said:


> _Wagner truly revolutionized modern music._


but, his intentions were not quite those of a revolutionary....

Wagner's no such resentment Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven music has.

besides, Romanticism is more about Universe cycles and the Apocalypse theme.

it more concerns how to stave off a revolution and survive the next wave of destruction.


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## Handelian (Nov 18, 2020)

Zhdanov said:


> but, his intentions were not quite those of a revolutionary....
> 
> Wagner's no such resentment Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven music has.
> 
> ...


I suppose that's why Wagner had to run from an attempted revolution he took part in?


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

Handelian said:


> _I suppose that's why Wagner had to run from an attempted revolution he took part in?_


i suppose we talk his music and not his legend ?


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## Handelian (Nov 18, 2020)

Zhdanov said:


> i suppose we talk his music and not his legend ?


Suppose we talk history? Like the facts?


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

Handelian said:


> _Suppose we talk history? Like the facts?_


suppose you listen to the music ?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Zhdanov said:


> but, his intentions were not quite those of a revolutionary....
> 
> Wagner's no such resentment Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven music has.
> 
> ...


I think that in Wagner there was a very deeply felt criticism of some fundamental aspects of the common morality of the time. I mean the morality which bans the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, Tristan and Isolde. The morality which treats others, women especially, as objects to be manipulated in the way of Gunter.

But your initial point seems right, he had no resentment of Mozart and Beethoven - though whether you could tell from the music is not clear to me. Yes, he writes respectfully of Mozart, but I'm not sure you can hear much of Mozart's style in his operas.

That being said I can see that Don Giovanni's moral failing - the way he uses his power to manipulate others - women and Leporello - is a Wagnerian concern.


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## Handelian (Nov 18, 2020)

Zhdanov said:


> suppose you listen to the music ?


I have done. Suppose you read some history?


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> Few composers could escape completely from the grip of this work on the musical thinking and feeling of the decades that followed it. I think an exhaustive tracing of its influence would show Bernstein's sense of its importance to be pretty accurate.


I agree with much of what you're saying. I don't have a problem with people saying it's a key work, or a work that had a major impact on music and culture, but saying it is "_the_ central work", "the hub", is frankly ridiculous.

That statement then implies that the classical music following Tristan --> Modernism into Post Modernism, bears the same weight as all of the classical music that preceded it, from around the 12th century up until the 19th century. It is basically relegating centuries of music into a small foot note. It is a silly statement, and highly exaggerated.


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## Handelian (Nov 18, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> I think that in Wagner there was a very deeply felt criticism of some fundamental aspects of the common morality of the time. I mean the morality which bans the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, Tristan and Isolde. The morality which treats others, women especially, as objects to be manipulated in the way of Gunter.
> 
> But your initial point seems right, he had no resentment of Mozart and Beethoven - though whether you could tell from the music is not clear to me. Yes, he writes respectfully of Mozart, but I'm not sure you can hear much of Mozart's style in his operas.
> 
> That being said I can see that Don Giovanni's moral failing - the way he uses his power to manipulate others - women and Leporello - is a Wagnerian concern.


As one who used women himself, I don't think Wagner's operas are a protest about it but rather a right for men to treat women in the way he was doing.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> ^^^That's charming, but of course the subject is Bernstein's tendency to make exaggerated pronouncements (e.g., Beethoven was a mediocre melodist or harmonist). Did you have an opinion on that?


I can agree with the sentiment :angel:





 ( 10:44 ~ 13:27 )
"...I guess if one had to point to a work that symbolized in itself the essence of the whole Faustian experience of man since the Renaissance, this would be it..."
"...Of course I wouldn't have been so upset if the interruption had come during my talk, but to interrupt Mozart -to interrupt that extraordinary wholeness, and continuity, that entity, which is this work- was the greatest insult of all..."


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

hammeredklavier said:


> (Victor Borge explains what a conductor actually does)


3:38 :lol:  ............

Amazing that at the end there was also something for the modernists in the audience.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Many see Wagner as a path to music that came after him. He influeced Wagner who influenced Mahler. Wagner's melodrama and chromatic style were paths Schoenberg followed and, he said, exhausted when he created the 12 tone system.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

tdc said:


> I agree with much of what you're saying. I don't have a problem with people saying it's a key work, or a work that had a major impact on music and culture, but saying it is "_the_ central work", "the hub", is frankly ridiculous.
> 
> That statement then implies that the classical music following Tristan --> Modernism into Post Modernism, bears the same weight as all of the classical music that preceded it, from around the 12th century up until the 19th century. It is basically relegating centuries of music into a small foot note. It is a silly statement, and highly exaggerated.


I find your reaction to Bernstein's statement more exaggerated, and frankly confusing, than his statement, and I grant that that statement is a bit hyperbolic, at least stylistically (but that's Lennie). Why and how does he relegate centuries of music into a small footnote? Not even a large footnote? And what does "bears the same weight" mean?

Musical theoreticians have long looked at _Tristan_ as a sort of crisis point in Western music, a point beyond which music would have to reassess itself and be irresistibly changed - a view which could, again, be overstated, but which has abundant evidence to support it. I gather that the young members of the Second Viennese School used to gather around the piano with the score of the opera and contemplate seriously the question of how music could get beyond what Wagner had done. I've hinted at the work's position as a cultural culmination and watershed, pushing the impulses and aesthetic premises of Romanticism to an extreme and revealing its psychic and spiritual ambivalences. I suppose the importance of this depends upon one's view of the centrality of Romanticism in the development of Western culture, but I tend to agree with what I presume to be Bernstein's view that it is indeed central, that we can trace its roots to Christianity and the Middle Ages and that it's still with us (a subject for another time, perhaps). The centrality of _Tristan_ in the evolution of Western sensibilities is cultural as well as musical, and the two can't be separated - which I'm sure was a consideration in Bernstein's assessment - and I can't think of any single work of music that even comes close to it in that regard. Can you?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

It is a peculiarly Western way of seeing history as the march of progress, the result of cause and effect, that this thread highlights. 

Wagner's importance is limited, IMO, and hardly revolutionary. First, his influence only extends to a certain period of European classical music, second, by the second decade of the 20th century his influence is negligible if at all.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Handelian said:


> As one who used women himself, I don't think Wagner's operas are a protest about it but rather a right for men to treat women in the way he was doing.


This foolishnmess is clearly a deliberate attempt to degrade the discussion. You, DavidA (Handelian), do not actually believe that this is what Wagner's works are about. And you're far from an authority on how Wagner treated women.

Trivializing and sabotaging discussions of Wagner has been your favorite sport for years. It's disgraceful, but apparently those of us trying to have a meaningful conversation can do nothing to stop you.

I expect that this post will be removed and that your nonsense will remain. There's too little respect for truth-telling around here.


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

SanAntone said:


> It is a peculiarly Western way of seeing history as the march of progress, the result of cause and effect, that this thread highlights.
> 
> Wagner's importance is limited, IMO, and hardly revolutionary. First, his influence only extends to a certain period of European classical music, second, by the second decade of the 20th century his influence is negligible if at all.


Wagner was the hip, underground music that music students read in the 1880s and 1890s, then the dominating legacy force in the times of Debussy, Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Holst, Scriabin, Vaughan Williams, Ravel, Korngold... And Debussy's legacy by proxy is often also Wagner's legacy.

Wagner and Liszt were the ones who popularized the concept of "blob-like", shapeless expressive music, which actually might be the largest common denominator of a lot of concert music in the 20th century (across many a niche and label) - as opposed to the relative conservatism of Saint-Saens, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, or some strict 12-tone piano music.

But the main line has indeed been all but exhausted by 1950 when it comes to major players. The last clear practicing Wagnerian to reach some major stature might have been Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975).


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Fabulin said:


> Wagner was the hip, underground music that music students read in the 1880s and 1890s, then the dominating legacy force in the times of Debussy, Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Ravel, Korngold... And Debussy's legacy by proxy is often also Wagner's legacy.
> 
> Wagner and Liszt were the ones who popularized the concept of "blob-like", shapeless expressive music, which actually might be the largest common denominator of a lot of the concert music in the 20th century - as opposed to the relative conservatism of Saint-Saens, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky.
> 
> But the main line has indeed been all but exhausted by 1950 when it comes to major players. The last clear practicing Wagnerian to reach some major stature might have been Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975).


Debussy intentionally avoided Wagnerisms in his music, to the extent Wagner exerted any influence on him it was in a negative reaction. While he was initially swept up in Wagner's harmonic slush, he did not remain there long. I don't hear much Wagner in Puccini or Ravel, and it is questionable in Mahler. All three of these composers were much more "classical" in their formal approach to composing, more akin to Brahms than Wagner, IMO.

Korngold and Hermann are irrelevant since the bulk of their careers occurred in film, which has produced the longest lasting Wagnerian sounding music, but it is inconsequential vis a vis legitimate classical music, again IMHO.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

tdc said:


> Bernstein could be so hyperbolic! I'm wondering how Tristan could be the central work in all of music history, when the composers that are most universally agreed upon as the greatest all came before Wagner? Even if Tristan was the sole influence and gateway to _all_ of modernism (which it clearly is not), that statement would still be highly exaggerated.
> 
> I think Bernstein was all around a fantastic musician and educator, he just got carried away sometimes in his enthusiasm, he has made similarly exaggerated claims about Beethoven and about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.


I agree more-or-less with your assessment. I also think that Bernstein had a tendency to read things into music that he wanted to read into it. This seems especially true with Mahler who Bernstein went to great lengths to point out the "dualities" or "contractions" with Mahler: cosmopolitan vs. lover of the countryside; Jew vs. Christian; composer vs. conductor; eternal child vs. wise old man, etc. Am I the only one who suspects that Bernstein sought a kinship with Mahler by projecting his own self-image onto Mahler?

What I love about Bernstein, though, as an educator is his level of love and enthusiasm that he has for the music and this is why I think a Bernstein lecture is always engaging; because apart from being so well-spoken and witty first and foremost Bernstein LOVES the music. In this sense, even Bernstein's air of pompousness and pretentiousness comes off as charming, as what he REALLY seems to teach us is how to LOVE the music.

It reminds me of contrasting English teachers I had in high school. One, during freshman year, made everyone memorize _Stopping By Woods of a Snowy Evening_ by Robert Frost and step up in front of the class one by one to recite the poem. There was no commentary, no class discussion, not even any indication as to how and why Frost structured the poem the way he did. We had another guy in junior year for English who was teaching _My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold_, and other poems by William Wordsworth, and this other teacher explained it, but not only that, he once got so caught up in reading Wordsworth that he forgot about the time and took us almost to the bell and said, "I guess I got so caught up the poetry" that I lost my sense of time. Rule number one of teaching (apart from keeping up with the paperwork) is that you have to LOVE your subject.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

The way I see it, Beethoven dominated the first half of the 19th century. Beethoven was the ideal for the Romantics even his music belongs as much or even more to the Classical era; the way the Romantics understood or even misunderstood Beethoven was that his sense of struggle, heroism, and even nature-painting, embodied the Romantic essence. 

Wagner dominated the 2nd half of the 19th century. The sweep, power and passion, of the Wagner musical vision can be heard in the grand Late-Romantic style up until Debussy and Stravinsky are able to beak the hold. 

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Stravinsky who brought back a sense of Classical sensibility to music (hence the term, Neo-Classical); broke the hold that Wagner had on music; and made Wagner's bombast sound faintly (Or not so faintly) ridiculous. 

Schoenberg dominates the 2nd half of the 20th century of classical music and despite the fact that Schoenberg saw himself as a traditionalist and a Romantic who saw himself as the next logical step in German music after Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner; his new atonal language sparked a revolution of cool, intellectual, mathematical, precision, well-suited for the atomic age.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Coach G said:


> The way I see it, Beethoven dominated the first half of the 19th century. Beethoven was the ideal for the Romantics even his music belongs as much or even more to the Classical era; the way the Romantics understood or even misunderstood Beethoven was that his sense of struggle, heroism, and even nature-painting, embodied the Romantic essence.
> 
> Wagner dominated the 2nd half of the 19th century. The sweep, power and passion, of the Wagner musical vision can be heard in the grand Late-Romantic style up until Debussy and Stravinsky are able to beak the hold.
> 
> ...


I just think this picture of domination is a hopeless oversimplification for the 20th century, I don't know anything about 19th century music. Why did Stravinsky dominate the first half more than Strauss or Debussy or Bartok? Why did Schoenberg dominate the second half more than Shostakovich or Cage or Rihm?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> Debussy intentionally avoided Wagnerisms in his music, to the extent Wagner exerted any influence on him it was in a negative reaction. .


But listen to the homage to Tristan here, at 1.25


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

Mandryka said:


> But listen to the homage to Tristan here, at 1.25


Wow, I've never noticed that despite having listened to it many times. Thanks!

If I recall correctly, Debussy also quotes Wagner's Bell motif from _Parsifal_ in _Pelléas et Mélisande_.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> But listen to the homage to Tristan here, at 1.25


I'd call this "homage" more of a playful parody.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

amfortas said:


> I'd call this "homage" more of a playful parody.


I knew someone would say that!


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> I knew someone would say that!


I delight in proving people correct.


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## Musicaterina (Apr 5, 2020)

I don't like Wagner and his music at all.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> I just think this picture of domination is a hopeless oversimplification for the 20th century, I don't know anything about 19th century music. Why did Stravinsky dominate the first half more than Strauss or Debussy or Bartok? Why did Schoenberg dominate the second half more than Shostakovich or Cage or Rihm?


It IS an oversimplification, maybe even a hopeless one, but I think it's a good starting point. There were lots of composers, some of them favorites of mine, such as Shostakovich, Britten, and Barber, who were great composers if the 20th century, who composed in a style that was basically tonal and traditional. Richard Strauss was more-or-less a Romantic or Late-Romantic and even in his most adventurous state was pushing the limits of Romanticism, and not really creating much that was new. Debussy was a great innovator whose path led into Stravinsky and even Schoenberg. But Stravinsky and Schoenberg, as I understand it, were the ones who loomed large and caught the imaginations of the times. Charles Ives might have been even MORE innovative than either Stravinsky or Schoenberg but he was working in a vacuum and wasn't discovered until years AFTER he had already stopped composing. Cage was great but was also a product of the Age of Schoenberg, not just because he had studied under Schoenberg himself, but also because Cage's method and artistic philosophy of indeterminancy was a reaction to the complete organization or "serialization" of sound that began with Schoenberg, but was actually much more the idea behind the music of Webern.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> ... Bernstein ... was a bit of a drama queen ...
> 
> It was the dramatist in Wagner that provided the impetus for his musical innovations - his expansion of harmony and orchestration, his use of pregnant and adaptable motifs to weave rich and extended textures and create a psychological narrative, and his breakup of traditional forms.


Actually, it seems Wagner was the true drama queen. Drama king would be an even better term. Wagner couldn't settle for anything _under_dramatic when a full blown doing of it was possible. He not only wrote the giant scripts, he provided masterful music, designed instruments and machines to create sounds hitherto unsoundable, designed the sets and costuming, informed the directing, and was master architect for the physical structure where all the other stuff would occur. (I don't know if he ever acted in any of his own productions on the stage, but I suspect that would not satisfy him unless there were a way to perform all of the part including the chorus.) It don't git no more drama king than what Wagner accomplished. And thank the heavens or whomever for it, 'cause the fellow gave us some pretty darned great and influential art which I for one would not want to be without.

Bernstein is small bananas compared to Wagner. Bernstein might hop around a bit on the podium while he conducts. I would suspect that Wagner likely designed and built the podium he stands behind while throwing out thunder and lightning at his orchestra and stage. Sometimes you gotta like the drama king, or queen.

* By the way, Woodduck, that was a finely phrased piece of prose. Bravo!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> Debussy intentionally avoided Wagnerisms in his music, to the extent Wagner exerted any influence on him it was in a negative reaction. While he was initially swept up in Wagner's harmonic slush, he did not remain there long. I don't hear much Wagner in Puccini or Ravel, and it is questionable in Mahler. All three of these composers were much more "classical" in their formal approach to composing, more akin to Brahms than Wagner, IMO.


Puccini was an ardent Wagnerian who kept scores of _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_ on his piano to play through when he needed inspiration. His musical personality was highly original and strong enough to withstand the influence, but his through-composed works are unthinkable without that influence (as are those of his Italian contemporaries Mascagni and Leoncavallo). The impact of Wagner on Debussy, who also began as a devotee (he once tried to play the entirety of T_ristan_ at the piano by memory), was similarly powerful, and can be heard in many works. He complained about being unable to exorcise the ghost of _Parsifal_ during the composition of _Pelleas et Melisande,_ especially the orchestral interludes. The Wagnerian influence on early 20th-century French composer such as Massenet, Chausson, Dukas, Chabrier, Lekeu and D'Indy was enormous. In Russia, Rimsky-Korsakov shows in his operas and tone poems how well he learned his Wagnerian lessons. In Germany, Strauss composed operas and tone poems that descend directly and obviously from Wagner and Liszt. Mahler's symphonies are reasonably described as hybrids between the symphony and the music drama. The Wagnerian qualities of Schoenberg's early and even middle-period works are blatant, as they are in Berg's operas. And shall we mention British composers, starting with Elgar, and Scandinavian composers, starting with Sibelius?

I really wonder what you hear when you listen to the music of these composers. I also wonder what you hear when you describe Wagner's incredibly structured works as "slush." Maybe chromatic harmony confuses you.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> I find your reaction to Bernstein's statement more exaggerated, and frankly confusing, than his statement, and I grant that that statement is a bit hyperbolic, at least stylistically (but that's Lennie). Why and how does he relegate centuries of music into a small footnote? Not even a large footnote? And what does "bears the same weight" mean?
> 
> Musical theoreticians have long looked at _Tristan_ as a sort of crisis point in Western music, a point beyond which music would have to reassess itself and be irresistibly changed - a view which could, again, be overstated, but which has abundant evidence to support it. I gather that the young members of the Second Viennese School used to gather around the piano with the score of the opera and contemplate seriously the question of how music could get beyond what Wagner had done. I've hinted at the work's position as a cultural culmination and watershed, pushing the impulses and aesthetic premises of Romanticism to an extreme and revealing its psychic and spiritual ambivalences. I suppose the importance of this depends upon one's view of the centrality of Romanticism in the development of Western culture, but I tend to agree with what I presume to be Bernstein's view that it is indeed central, that we can trace its roots to Christianity and the Middle Ages and that it's still with us (a subject for another time, perhaps). The centrality of _Tristan_ in the evolution of Western sensibilities is cultural as well as musical, and the two can't be separated - which I'm sure was a consideration in Bernstein's assessment - and I can't think of any single work of music that even comes close to it in that regard. Can you?


Sure, but music reaches crisis points at the end of each era when a style has become pushed to its limits and composers are looking to find new paths forward. Why is Wagner's work more central in the historical timeline of music than say certain works by Dufay, or Josquin or Monteverdi? etc. By saying Wagner's work is _the one_ central work it implies to me that it is the crucial point in all of music history, and it far outweighs any of the musical innovations of the past. It implies that the changes it inspired in music ie. Modernism, must be then looked at as an equally important trend in music and history to all of the other preceding eras combined. You don't think the statement implies that? In a timeline as long as Western classical music there is not one central work, because it has become too vast and varied, however surely all of the composers that preceded Wagner owe no debt to his music, yet how do we calculate his debt to them?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Woodduck said:


> Maybe chromatic harmony confuses you.


No, it doesn't.

Wagner's music is exceedingly self-indulgent to my ears, and his operas do not interest me in the least. The traits I enjoy the most are composers whose works exhibit a tight formal construction and restraint, traits which I do not find in Wagner.

To the extent Wagner can be credited with stretching the limits of tonality then almost every composer after him could be cited as being influenced. However, I disagree with you most strongly regarding Debussy, since when I listen to works by him I hear little of Wagner, and if I did I would not enjoy his music as much as I do. Also, I've read several books on Debussy and in every one Debussy spoke harshly about Wagner and disavowed his earlier infatuation with Wagner, which dates mainly from his days as a student.

I've give you Strauss, he is another composer I do not enjoy.

Massenet, Chausson, Dukas, Chabrier, Lekeu, D'Indy, and Rimsky-Korsakov do not figure in my regularly listening, and I don't consider them important composers in any event.

After _Gurre-Lieder_, Schoenberg essentially abandoned Wagner, and with his atonal works, and 12-tone method - on what his reputation is staked - Schoenberg surpassed Wagner's waining influence on 20th century composers. As has been pointed out, Stravinsky's astringent style increasingly made Wagner sound so 19th century.

I think Brahms, not Wagner, was more important to Schoenberg, since Schoenberg was very conscious of the classical forms which he continued to use throughout his career. Something for which he was criticized by Boulez, i.e. pouring new music into old jars.

Like I said in my earlier post, Wagner did exert an influence on some composers in his wake, but I think it was relatively short-lived (50 years after Tristan) and ultimately not what I would call revolutionary.


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

tdc said:


> Sure, but music reaches crisis points at the end of each era when a style has become pushed to its limits and composers are looking to find new paths forward. Why is Wagner's work more central in the historical timeline of music than say certain works by Dufay, or Josquin or Monteverdi? etc. By saying Wagner's work is _the one_ central work it implies to me that it is the crucial point in all of music history, and it far outweighs any of the musical innovations of the past. It implies that the changes it inspired in music ie. Modernism, must be then looked at as an equally important trend in music and history to all of the other preceding eras combined. You don't think the statement implies that? In a timeline as long as Western classical music there is not one central work, because it has become too vast and varied, however surely all of the composers that preceded Wagner owe no debt to his music, yet how do we calculate his debt to them?


When you evaluate the influence of a composer in such a way, no modern, contemporary, Romantic, or even Classical composer could be considered more influential than, say, Monteverdi just because he lived a longer time ago. Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, or the whole _bel canto_ school wouldn't stand a chance of being more influential than Jacobo Peri. According to your evaluation, composer's importance would be affected by a factor that is independent and cannot be affected by the composer. Monteverdi would be more influential just because his cumulative indirect influence on contemporary music is more long-lasting than that of Wagner.

I don't think this reflects the idea of influence correctly, because it takes into a consideration a factor has little to do with the merit of the composer but just with the time that has passed since his death. To me, it would be more logical to "evaluate" the direct influence of a composer and the extent of change that the music of that composer initiated. _Tristan_'s direct influence has certainly been immense.

Of course, it's possible to argue that Jacobo Peri *was* more influential than Wagner, because he wrote the first opera and thus had indirectly influenced every opera that has ever been written in the European opera tradition since his _Dafne_, but I'm afraid it would simply lead to some absurd conclusion.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> No, it doesn't.
> 
> Wagner's music is exceedingly self-indulgent to my ears, and his operas do not interest me in the least. The traits I enjoy the most are composers whose works exhibit a tight formal construction and restraint, traits which I do not find in Wagner.
> 
> ...


I'm taking from this that your strong dislike of Wagner (that purveyor of formally loose, unrestrained, self-indulgent slush) is getting in the way of your ability to perceive the extent of his influence. It also strikes me as rather convenient that the composers you dislike or consider unimportant are simply dismissed as irrelevant and not allowed to cast doubt on your basic argument. Given such views, any further discussion would probably be futile.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

annaw said:


> When you evaluate the influence of a composer in such a way, no modern, contemporary, Romantic, or even Classical composer could be considered more influential than, say, Monteverdi just because he lived a longer time ago. Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, or the whole _bel canto_ school wouldn't stand a chance of being more influential than Jacobo Peri. According to your evaluation, composer's importance would be affected by a factor that is independent and cannot be affected by the composer. Monteverdi's indirect influence on contemporary music is more long-lasting than that of Wagner.
> 
> I don't think this reflects the idea of influence correctly, because it takes into a consideration a factor has nothing to do with the merit of the composer but just with the time that has passed since his death. To me, it would be more logical to "evaluate" the direct influence of a composer and the extent of change that the music of that composer initiated.
> 
> Of course, it's possible to argue that Jacobo Peri *was* more influential than Wagner, because he wrote the first opera and thus had indirectly influenced every opera that has ever been written in the European opera tradition after him.


Basically you are saying that I'm factually correct, but it's unfair because it is beyond a composer's control. Or in other words people want to raise Wagner to a certain echelon and will then ignore inconvenient facts to help them do so.

Why not just acknowledge that there is no 'one central work' around which everything spins and that both Wagner and Monteverdi contributed great and important works to the musical timeline?

I'm not arguing that Monteverdi is greater than Wagner because he was first, I'm just pointing out the extent of his influence is a fact we shouldn't over look if we are analyzing the claim that Tristan is the 'one central work' a claim which again is in my view utter nonsense.


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

tdc said:


> Basically you are saying that I'm factually correct, but it's unfair because it is beyond a composer's control. *Or in other words people want to raise Wagner to a certain echelon and will then ignore inconvenient facts to help them do so. *
> 
> Why not just acknowledge that there is no 'one central work' around which everything spins and that both Wagner and Monteverdi contributed great and important works to the musical timeline?
> 
> I'm not arguing that Monteverdi is greater than Wagner because he was first, I'm just pointing out the extent of his influence is a fact we shouldn't over look if we are analyzing the claim that Tristan is the 'one central work' a claim which again is in my view utter nonsense.


My argument is not connected with my fondness of Wagner's music. Influence is quite a neutral thing - not good, nor bad. It's a statistical argument without numbers.

I haven't participated in the "central work" argument at all but I was just pointing out that time shouldn't be taken into consideration when one wishes to compare composers from different eras in such a way. I personally think that it's impossible to compare the influence of different composers in the first place for the same reason you have already pointed out - the lines of influence are simply too complex.

What I am saying, basically, is that it *would* make sense to argue that the direct influence of _Tristan_ was greater than that of very many, if not most, classical music compositions. That's in my opinion the logic behind the Tristan-is-the-central-work-of-classical-music argument. Its influence is quite undeniable.

Anyways, my comment was just a remark.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

The simple fact is music that preceded Wagner cannot revolve around Wagner in any way. So Bernstein's statement is a non sequitur.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Even if he specified that all music _after _Tristan revolves around Tristan (which was not in the quote, but perhaps he meant) it would still be exaggerated.


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

tdc said:


> The simple fact is music that preceded Wagner cannot revolve around Wagner in any way. So Bernstein's statement is a non sequitur.


(This post is just for the sake of the argument .) There's another way to look at it. Don't you think that Wagner combining his own revolutionary compositional ideas *with* the ideas of the composers who preceded him, would indeed make his _Tristan_ a central work of classical music?


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

annaw said:


> (This post is just for the sake of the argument .) There's another way to look at it. Don't you think that the Wagner combining his own revolutionary compositional ideas *with* the ideas of the composers who preceded him, would indeed make his _Tristan_ a central work of classical music?


I don't actually have as much of an issue with this statement, because you said 'a central work', not the 'one central work'. Big difference!

But still I would just ditch the 'central' aspect of the comment all together and call it 'important' or 'monumental' or something of that nature.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

tdc said:


> The simple fact is music that preceded Wagner cannot revolve around Wagner in any way. So Bernstein's statement is a non sequitur.


I don't think we know what Bernstein meant. Let's have a seance and ask him.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

I still love Bernstein, I agree with CoachG's post earlier this thread, its his love of music that is infectious. As a musical educator I'll take Bernstein over someone like Boulez any day. Watching Bernstein conduct is magical, watching Boulez conduct is depressing!


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

I interpret what Bernstein has said regarding Tristan being "the" central work in the history of music like this: tonal music culminated with Wagner's Tristan, which brought tonality to its furthest reach. After Tristan, tonality began to break down until it was abandoned altogether. 

Seen in this manner, Tristan was both the highest manifestation of tonality as well as signaling the beginning of the end of tonality.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

As an aside, I am watching this. A nice production that makes sense of stage without stupid modern staging.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

SanAntone said:


> I interpret what Bernstein has said regarding Tristan being "the" central work in the history of music like this: tonal music culminated with Wagner's Tristan, which brought tonality to its furthest reach. After Tristan, tonality began to break down until it was abandoned altogether.
> 
> Seen in this manner, Tristan was both the highest manifestation of tonality as well as signaling the beginning of the end of tonality.


This is probably close to the mark, but the pronouncement then is fairly subjective, and not really based on anything solid. It's a fair statement if viewed in a more subjective way based on the preferences of the person making the claim. Of course Tristan is a highly important, significant work, which is probably full of mysteries I don't fully yet grasp. Bernstein's theoretical knowledge of this work is certainly deeper than my own.

This said, as Charles Rosen has pointed out 'tonality' as a system was already beginning to break down and deteriorate at the dawn of Romanticism. So an equally valid and possibly more historically accurate perspective is that tonal music actually culminated and reached its zenith with Bach and Mozart and has been gradually declining ever since. Making them, if anything the "central" composers, though again, I don't like that term.

If we ignore the strict definition of tonality and look at it in a looser way in order to accommodate your theory, then my question becomes why is Wagner's Tristan seen as the farthest reaches of tonality, and not say certain works by Debussy or Bartok?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

tdc said:


> If we ignore the strict definition of tonality and look at it in a looser way in order to accommodate your theory, then my question becomes why is Wagner's Tristan seen as the farthest reaches of tonality, and not say certain works by Debussy or Bartok?


I'd say that with Wagner there is the sense that his harmonic language still remains related to an underlying tonality, which his shifting harmonies strain against, delaying the arrival at their home. Whereas with Debussy, there is more of a sense that his harmonies are suspended in space, floating, with no direction home.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

SanAntone said:


> Wagner's music is exceedingly self-indulgent to my ears, and his operas do not interest me in the least. The traits I enjoy the most are composers whose works exhibit a tight formal construction and restraint, traits which I do not find in Wagner.
> I've give you Strauss, he is another composer I do not enjoy.
> Massenet, Chausson, Dukas, Chabrier, Lekeu, D'Indy, and Rimsky-Korsakov do not figure in my regularly listening, and I don't consider them important composers in any event.


I think Debussy was deeply affected by Wagner, but feared that Wagnerian influence might dominate French music, so Debussy cultivated a sort of rebellious attitude toward Wagner. Anti-German sentiment in France was crazy at the time.
I don't think it matters how much influence Wagner had on avant-garde composers like Cage, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Babbitt; it's doubtful if those avant-garde composers are really "classical music composers" (we talked about this already many times). The question of how much influence Wagner had on them is only as significant as the question of how much he had on modern film music.



SanAntone said:


> Blah, blah, blah - John Williams writes movie soundtracks. Period.







Every man or woman in charge of the music of moving picture theater is, consciously or unconsciously, a disciple or follower of Richard Wagner - Stephen Bush, film critic, 1911
Please write music like Wagner, only louder - Sam Goldwyn to a film composer
If my grandfather were alive today, he would undoubtedly be working in Hollywood -Wolfgang Wagner
http://wagnertripping.blogspot.com/2013/12/wagners-influence-on-movie-music.html


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

tdc said:


> Bernstein could be so hyperbolic! I'm wondering how Tristan could be the central work in all of music history, when the composers that are most universally agreed upon as the greatest all came before Wagner? Even if Tristan was the sole influence and gateway to _all_ of modernism (which it clearly is not), that statement would still be highly exaggerated.


When it comes to topics like this, I often find that you're a bit too generous towards Bach, and unfair towards Wagner (and Beethoven).

[ "The paper, points out the fact that Mahler owned much of Bach's music and became more interested in counterpoint in the later stages of his life, and that he employed some of the same elements in his music as Bach, such as counterpoint, palindrome and some similar religious elements." -tdc 
"A new conception of harmonic tension was later developed by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and, above all by Chopin, but they could not start from the classical style at its most highly organized, and Beethoven was of no use to them. The Romantic style did not come from Beethoven, in spite of the great admiration that was felt for him, but from his lesser contemporaries and from Bach." -tdc ]

And I've seen lots of people out there who actually believe this:









BUT (not to discredit Bach's genius) think of it this way- Berlioz was somewhat "underwhelmed" by Bach's "sense of musical drama"; https://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/692.html
"...they are listening to a solemn discourse, they are hearing the gospel sung, they are attending divine service rather than a concert. And really such music ought to be thus listened to. They adore Bach, and believe in him, without supposing for a moment that his divinity could ever be called into question. A heretic would horrify them, he is forbidden even to speak of him. God is God and Bach is Bach."

Beethoven considered Handel more important, and it's been suggested that:









What do you think? Compared to Bach's, is Wagner's influence really "overestimated"? (I don't think it is)



hammeredklavier said:


> To what extent do you think were the Salzburg masters, J.E. Eberlin (1702~1762), L. Mozart (1719~1787), A.C. Adlgasser (1729~1777), M. Haydn (1737~1806) influenced by Sebastian?
> I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, it's just a topic I'm constantly interested in and eager to investigate more about.
> Btw, I think M. Haydn's Missa sancti Hieronymi (1777) is a contrapuntal masterpiece.





hammeredklavier said:


> I think the "Salzburgian-ness" of this work is largely overlooked by many people today


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> I'd say that with Wagner there is the sense that his harmonic language still remains related to an underlying tonality, which his shifting harmonies strain against, delaying the arrival at their home. Whereas with Debussy, there is more of a sense that his harmonies are suspended in space, floating, with no direction home.


Yes, Wagner is a firmly grounded tonalist - in a way even a traditionalist. In his most advanced work (exemplified particularly by _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_) he walks a high wire, engaging in an unprecedented degree of chromatic enrichment and freedom of modulation while firmly grounded in tonal designs with carefully plotted key centers and strong underlying direction. What arrests us in Wagner at first is the richness, subtlety and evocativeness of the chromaticism, but what impresses on deeper acquaintance is the tonal control that allows him to create long spans of music which seem free in form yet coherent and satisfying. The third act of _Tristan_ may be the ultimate demonstration of his skill; it's both emotionally harrowing, taking chromaticism to the breaking point, and a structural _tour de force._

It's probably not well-known that Wagner warned young composers wishing to be "avant-garde" that his innovations were not to be imitated and indulged in without good reason, and he asserted that genres of "absolute" music such as the symphony were essentially different from dramatic music and required a different way of thinking. He didn't elaborate (at least in the quotes we have), but it's notable that where Wagner has no need to express extreme or unusual states of mind or emotion his harmony is far more diatonic. This fact places him squarely in the centuries-long tradition of Western music, in which chromaticism was nearly always a special effect to be employed for specific purposes, usually - just as in _Tristan_ - to express such exceptional or "abnormal" states as mystery, pain or eroticism (see the Italian madrigalists, or the songs of Purcell).

I'm saying all this not to diminish Wagner's innovativeness, but to show him as a culmination of the Western tonal tradition who pushed its potentialities so far that composers felt compelled to react to him and reassess their own procedures and goals. The reaction could take many forms, some obvious, some subtle, some positive, some negative. Rejection, too, can be a sign of influence.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

hammeredklavier said:


> What do you think? Compared to Bach's, is Wagner's influence really "overestimated"? (I don't think it is)


I have not denied Wagner's influence, I've acknowledged it. I only objected to the term 'one central work' regarding Tristan and that phrase still doesn't make sense to me.

One of the quotes you attributed to me there is not even my quote it is Charles Rosen.

So Wagner had a massive influence on modernism, and then by your own words you think that classical music has essentially died in the post-modern age, am I correct in that? So after Bach we have a rich tradition lasting around a couple centuries, and after Wagner we have modernism and then, what? Film music still influenced by Wagner? Yet despite this you don't think calling Tristan the 'one central work' in the entire history of classical music history is over stating things at all?


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> I don't think we know what Bernstein meant. Let's have a seance and ask him.


I believe that in a few days, with the assistance of one Madame Flora, we may be able to conjure up Gian Carlo Menotti, who died February 1, 2007. I'm not certain Flora could help us with Bernstein. Still, Menotti and Bernstein shared some "common interests", let us say, so perhaps they do hang around together in the afterworld.

Just beware, Madame Flora is known for her drunkenness, so I'm not fully confident in her reliability. And I'd keep all the guns locked up away from her.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

annaw said:


> My argument is not connected with my fondness of Wagner's music. *Influence is quite a neutral thing - not good, nor bad.* It's a statistical argument without numbers.
> 
> I haven't participated in the "central work" argument at all but I was just pointing out that time shouldn't be taken into consideration when one wishes to compare composers from different eras in such a way. I personally think that it's impossible to compare the influence of different composers in the first place for the same reason you have already pointed out - the lines of influence are simply too complex.
> 
> ...


Agreed and worth underlining.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Woodduck said:


> Yes, Wagner is a firmly grounded tonalist - in a way even a traditionalist. In his most advanced work (exemplified particularly by _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_) he walks a high wire, engaging in an unprecedented degree of chromatic enrichment and freedom of modulation while firmly grounded in tonal designs with carefully plotted key centers and strong underlying direction. What arrests us in Wagner at first is the richness, subtlety and evocativeness of the chromaticism, but what impresses on deeper acquaintance is the tonal control that allows him to create long spans of music which seem free in form yet coherent and satisfying. The third act of _Tristan_ may be the ultimate demonstration of his skill; it's both emotionally harrowing, taking chromaticism to the breaking point, and a structural _tour de force._
> 
> It's probably not well-known that Wagner warned young composers wishing to be "avant-garde" that his innovations were not to be imitated and indulged in without good reason, and he asserted that genres of "absolute" music such as the symphony were essentially different from dramatic music and required a different way of thinking. He didn't elaborate (at least in the quotes we have), but it's notable that where Wagner has no need to express extreme or unusual states of mind or emotion his harmony is far more diatonic. This fact places him squarely in the centuries-long tradition of Western music, in which chromaticism was nearly always a special effect to be employed for specific purposes, usually - just as in _Tristan_ - to express such exceptional or "abnormal" states as mystery, pain or eroticism (see the Italian madrigalists, or the songs of Purcell).
> 
> I'm saying all this not to diminish Wagner's innovativeness, but to show him as a culmination of the Western tonal tradition who pushed its potentialities so far that composers felt compelled to react to him and reassess their own procedures and goals. The reaction could take many forms, some obvious, some subtle, some positive, some negative. Rejection, too, can be a sign of influence.


Btw, my personal dislike of Wagner's music does not inhibit my ability to acknowledge his importance, greatness and influence. But because I haven't spent much time listening to his work I can't add anything to your excellent post.

What I've said is that while I do think he was very influential, I think that after Schoenberg and Stravinsky Wagner's influence began to evaporate, and certainly by the time of the post-war generation it was non-existent. We then had Minimalism, Neo-Romaticism, Spectral Music, New Complexity, and other styles of composition, which solidified his position as a 19th century composer with little impact on the second half of the 20th century and beyond.

So I quibble with the term "revolutionary".


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> Btw, my personal dislike of Wagner's music does not inhibit my ability to acknowledge his importance, greatness and influence. But because I haven't spent much time listening to his work I can't add anything to your excellent post.
> 
> What I've said is that while I do think he was very influential, I think that after Schoenberg and Stravinsky Wagner's influence began to evaporate, and certainly by the time of the post-war generation it was non-existent. We then had Minimalism, Neo-Romaticism, Spectral Music, New Complexity, and other styles of composition, which solidified his position as a 19th century composer with little impact on the second half of the 20th century and beyond.
> 
> So I quibble with the term "revolutionary".


Basically, I agree with this. Too many things are called "revolutionary," but then humans are prone to oversimplification and overstatement. Debussy's assessment was that Wagner was a "glorious sunset mistaken for a dawn." That's an overstatement too, understandable coming from an ex-Wagnerite who continued to struggle with exorcising the ghost of old Klingsor. I don't think it's an overstatement to call _Tristan_ itself revolutionary; it's Wagner's most radical gesture, unlike any previous work of musical theater no matter how you look at it. But it was to some extent a one-off; Wagner learned an enormous amount in the process of composing it, but in subsequent works he allowed back in some of the operatic conventions _Tristan_ almost totally eschewed.

My view is that Wagner's musical influence, and his influence on musical drama in particular (musical theater and film), was widespread and strong well into the 20th century, even as the Modernist and "avant-garde" movements you mention were under way, and there's no reason to think that his ideas on the use of music for dramatic purposes will not always remain potent and creatively challenging. I think there's a tendency among a subset of classical music lovers to view these modern and postmodern developments as expressing a broader and deeper change in cultural sensibility than actually occurred.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Woodduck said:


> *My view is that Wagner's musical influence, and his influence on musical drama in particular (musical theater and film), was widespread and strong well into the 20th century*, even as the Modernist and "avant-garde" movements you mention were under way, and there's no reason to think that his ideas on the use of music for dramatic purposes will not always remain potent and creatively challenging.


I've read that if Wagner were alive today he'd be working in Hollywood.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> Btw, my personal dislike of Wagner's music does not inhibit my ability to acknowledge his importance, greatness and influence. But because I haven't spent much time listening to his work I can't add anything to your excellent post.
> 
> What I've said is that while I do think he was very influential, I think that after Schoenberg and Stravinsky Wagner's influence began to evaporate, and certainly by the time of the post-war generation it was non-existent. We then had Minimalism, Neo-Romaticism, Spectral Music, New Complexity, and other styles of composition, which solidified his position as a 19th century composer with little impact on the second half of the 20th century and beyond.
> 
> So I quibble with the term "revolutionary".


I strongly disagree that by the time of the post-war generation, Wagner's influence was non-existent. Film composers for example continue to use many of Wagner's compositional techniques and numerous examples can be heard.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

ArtMusic said:


> I strongly disagree that by the time of the post-war generation, Wagner's influence was non-existent. Film composers for example continue to use many of Wagner's compositional techniques and numerous examples can be heard.


While I agree that film composers have mined Wagnerisms for their scores, I don't consider film composers relevant to a discussion of classical music.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> I've read that if Wagner were alive today he'd be working in Hollywood.


It's a reasonable view. His scores are dramatic narratives of cinematic scope and evocativeness, and the problem of translating his visions - especially the mythical world of the _Ring_ - into practical theater is fully solved only by the medium of film. He would have loved it, and it would probably have inspired him to imagine even more fantastic scenes. But I can't imagine him accepting the ordinary position of the film composer as subordinate to the director. He would insist on being the artistic mastermind - the creator of a new art form called "cinemopera" or something - with the director working for him.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Woodduck said:


> It's a reasonable view. His scores are dramatic narratives of cinematic scope and evocativeness, and the problem of translating his visions - especially the mythical world of the _Ring_ - into practical theater is fully solved only by the medium of film. He would have loved it, and it would probably have inspired him to imagine even more fantastic scenes. But I can't imagine him accepting the ordinary position of the film composer as subordinate to the director. He would insist on being the artistic mastermind - the creator of a new art form called "cinemopera" or something - with the director working for him.


I would agree. In fact it is surprising that someone else hasn't done something like that. I am not aware if there has been a completely cinematic production of any of his operas. The Ring could be a Star Wars like series.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> While I agree that film composers have mined Wagnerisms for their scores, I don't consider film composers relevant to a discussion of classical music.


John Williams would beg to differ, one of our greatest living composers alive today. And your comments are more credible if you are at least as talented as Dr. Williams in composing new music today.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> It's a reasonable view. His scores are dramatic narratives of cinematic scope and evocativeness, and the problem of translating his visions - especially the mythical world of the _Ring_ - into practical theater is fully solved only by the medium of film. He would have loved it, and it would probably have inspired him to imagine even more fantastic scenes. But I can't imagine him accepting the ordinary position of the film composer as subordinate to the director. He would insist on being the artistic mastermind - the creator of a new art form called "cinemopera" or something - with the director working for him.


Yes, and note that could be said far more than supposedly "revolutionary" composers like Schoenberg would have us believe nearly a century ago with his "new" music then.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

ArtMusic said:


> John Williams would beg to differ, one of our greatest living composers alive today. And your comments are more credible if you are at least as talented as Dr. Williams in composing new music today.


For me it is simply a matter of taxonomy, with no judgment of quality. Film scores fall under the category of popular entertainment; classical music does not.

It is also a matter of taste. You find the music of John Williams very enjoyable; I do not. But I do recognize that he is a gifted composer and highly accomplished orchestrator of his music. I don't listen to film scores often, if at all; in fact I rarely listen to orchestral music at all. My favorite classical music is chamber music, string quartets especially.

I know Williams has written some classical works, concertos and other things. But his reputation is based on his film work, and that is how I place him.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> For me it is simply a matter of taxonomy, with no judgment of quality. Film scores fall under the category of popular entertainment; classical music does not.
> 
> It is also a matter of taste. You find the music of John Williams very enjoyable; I do not. But I do recognize that he is a gifted composer and highly accomplished orchestrator of his music. I don't listen to film scores often, if at all; in fact I rarely listen to orchestral music at all. My favorite classical music is chamber music, string quartets especially.
> 
> I know Williams has written some classical works, concertos and other things. But his reputation is based on his film work, and that is how I place him.


A great composer today influenced by Wagner.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

SanAntone said:


> For me it is simply a matter of taxonomy, with no judgment of quality. Film scores fall under the category of popular entertainment; classical music does not.


Much of classical music was the popular entertainment of its day.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

amfortas said:


> Much of classical music was the popular entertainment of its day.


Not really. Most of the classical music we listen to was supported, and written for, the aristocracy or church from the 14th-19th centuries. The popular music of the day was made by itinerant performers, essentially folk music.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> I would agree. In fact it is surprising that someone else hasn't done something like that. I am not aware if there has been a completely cinematic production of any of his operas. The Ring could be a Star Wars like series.


Decades ago a friend and I used to dream about a film of the _Ring_ utilizing all the techniques available, and we wondered why it had never been done. It would be expensive, of course, but I think it could be a surprise hit and would open many people's ears to opera and classical music. There are plenty of videos of staged productions, some of which are interesting, and there is the very strange and controversial Syberberg film of _Parsifal,_ but no attempts, as far as I know, to take Wagner's own conceptions seriously and use the resources of film to realize them. I think it's a major cultural oversight.


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

Woodduck said:


> Decades ago a friend and I used to dream about a film of the _Ring_ utilizing all the techniques available, and we wondered why it had never been done. It would be expensive, of course, but I think it could be a surprise hit and would open many people's ears to opera and classical music. There are plenty of videos of staged productions, some of which are interesting, and there is the very strange and controversial Syberberg film of _Parsifal,_ but no attempts, as far as I know, to take Wagner's own conceptions seriously and use the resources of film to realize them. I think it's a major cultural oversight.


If it used all possible resources to make the landscape, props, etc. ultra realistic, and then main actors would open their mouths as if they tried to swallow a coconut and started to shriek, it would look unintentionally funny.

Normal musicals are usually light-hearted and still get away with being musicals mostly because the type of singing involved is not too far from what a normal person might sing while going about their business, taking a shower, gardening, or whatever.

A purely orchestral "Ring" adaptation would be a different matter, with some clever dialogues and good acting substituting for the sung parts. But then plots would have to be remade into a new medium... in other words: a mess no matter what approach would be taken.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

SanAntone said:


> I know Williams has written some classical works, concertos and other things. But his reputation is based on his film work, and that is how I place him.


This is like saying " I know John Cage has written some avant-garde music, pieces for prepared piano and other things. But his reputation is based on 4'33" and the philosophy that "everything we do is music", which is not found even in de facto non-classical genres such as jazz or prog rock "


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## Durendal (Oct 24, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> Decades ago a friend and I used to dream about a film of the _Ring_ utilizing all the techniques available, and we wondered why it had never been done. It would be expensive, of course, but I think it could be a surprise hit and would open many people's ears to opera and classical music. There are plenty of videos of staged productions, some of which are interesting, and there is the very strange and controversial Syberberg film of _Parsifal,_ but no attempts, as far as I know, to take Wagner's own conceptions seriously and use the resources of film to realize them. I think it's a major cultural oversight.


I really can't picture the Instagram generation not only sitting through, but actively enjoying 15 hours worth of film adaptations of German opera music, even if they had a Lord Of The Rings style massive budget to make them look, like, "EPIC", yo!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Durendal said:


> I really can't picture the Instagram generation not only sitting through, but actively enjoying 15 hours worth of film adaptations of German opera music, even if they had a Lord Of The Rings style massive budget to make them look, like, "EPIC", yo!


I'm sure you're closer to the instagram generation than I am, so I can't presume to argue about them, whoever they are. But of course not everyone belongs to the instagram generation. I'd have been captivated by a magically filmed _Ring_ at any age, but then that's me. You may underestimate people in general, and underestimate the combined power of music and film.


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

Durendal said:


> I really can't picture the Instagram generation not only sitting through, but actively enjoying 15 hours worth of film adaptations of German opera music, even if they had a Lord Of The Rings style massive budget to make them look, like, "EPIC", yo!


I'm quite definitely a member of the Instagram generation and I don't even need a film to enjoy the full Ring cycle. I might be in the minority, but then so are all opera listeners.

Personally, I think that a film combined with great singing would be marvellous! And a film of Tristan would be great, too - I still haven't found a good production.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Fabulin said:


> If it used all possible resources to make the landscape, props, etc. ultra realistic, and then main actors would open their mouths as if they tried to swallow a coconut and started to shriek, it would look unintentionally funny.


I take it you don't enjoy filmed opera. By your description it sounds as if you've never even seen one (there are a few good ones). But why would you want ultra-realistic props for a mythological epic? Filmmakers have been creating visual magic for generations. I can even visualize a _Ring_ done entirely with computer animation, using real singers only for the soundtrack. I can also imagine a _Ring_ done entirely in black and white, which can create a wonderful sense of a parallel reality more intense and "psychological" than everyday reality, as it does in _film noir_ and many films of the early decades of the medium.



> Normal musicals are usually light-hearted and still get away with being musicals mostly because the type of singing involved is not too far from what a normal person might sing while going about their business, taking a shower, gardening, or whatever.


What does "get away with being musicals" mean? Musicals are actually quite varied in their vocal requirements. _Sweeney Todd_ and _Phantom of the Opera_ are not in the repertoire of most gardeners and shower-takers. Many of the classic musicals benefit from or even require well-trained voices. There is no distinct line between opera, operetta and the musical or between the styles of singing they require.



> A purely orchestral "Ring" adaptation would be a different matter, with some clever dialogues and good acting substituting for the sung parts. But then plots would have to be remade into a new medium... in other words: a mess no matter what approach would be taken.


It would certainly be a mess if you were in charge, since you seem to have decided in advance that that's what it would be! I think a filmed _Ring_ without singing could be interesting in its own way, but the main difficulty would not be revising the plot - that could remain as is - but arranging the music. It would no longer really be Wagner, and the idea of messing with the music makes me cringe. But this is really beside the point.



>


Fritz Lang's silent films are beautiful works of art, though of course not Wagner. Thanks for posting them!


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Woodduck said:


> I take it you don't enjoy filmed opera. By your description it sounds as if you've never even seen one (there are a few good ones). But why would you want ultra-realistic props for a mythological epic? Filmmakers have been creating visual magic for generations. I can even visualize a _Ring_ done entirely with computer animation, using real singers only for the soundtrack. I can also imagine a _Ring_ done entirely in black and white, which can create a wonderful sense of a parallel reality more intense and "psychological" than everyday reality, as it does in _film noir_ and many films of the early decades of the medium.
> 
> What does "get away with being musicals" mean? Musicals are actually quite varied in their vocal requirements. _Sweeney Todd_ and _Phantom of the Opera_ are not in the repertoire of most gardeners and shower-takers. Many of the classic musicals benefit from or even require well-trained voices. There is no distinct line between opera, operetta and the musical or between the styles of singing they require.
> 
> ...


I agree with everything you posted here. Even though Tristan is the only Wagner opera I have watched all the way through, a filmed version of the Ring with excellent special effects and sound might be a worthwhile version.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

annaw said:


> I'm quite definitely a member of the Instagram generation and I don't even need a film to enjoy the full Ring cycle. I might be in the minority, but then so are all opera listeners.
> Personally, I think that a film combined with great singing would be marvellous! And a film of Tristan would be great, too - I still haven't found a good production.


Yeah, they should all be set in WWII


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> For me it is simply a matter of taxonomy, with no judgment of quality. Film scores fall under the category of popular entertainment; classical music does not.
> 
> It is also a matter of taste. You find the music of John Williams very enjoyable; I do not. But I do recognize that he is a gifted composer and highly accomplished orchestrator of his music. I don't listen to film scores often, if at all; in fact I rarely listen to orchestral music at all. My favorite classical music is chamber music, string quartets especially.
> 
> I know Williams has written some classical works, concertos and other things. But his reputation is based on his film work, and that is how I place him.


Taxonomy is that wonderful subject for people to debate, discuss but the reality does not change.


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

Durendal said:


> I really can't picture the Instagram generation not only sitting through, but actively enjoying 15 hours worth of film adaptations of German opera music,


it is not a matter of 'generation' or whatever false notion 20th century ideologies have spawned in order to make believe that mass opinion counts.

art has always been intended for elites, that is for the few and not many, so its main point is create new realities the masterpieces to which must convey messages, symbols and meanings that will shape a new world, besides providing artifacts for the worlds to come, just in case there be a need for great ideas.


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## amfortas (Jun 15, 2011)

SanAntone said:


> Not really. Most of the classical music we listen to was supported, and written for, the aristocracy or church from the 14th-19th centuries. The popular music of the day was made by itinerant performers, essentially folk music.


Dependence on aristocracy or church gradually waned; much of the 19th-century music that forms the core of today's classical repertoire was written for the concert hall. And opera had become popular entertainment while still in its first (17th) century.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Zhdanov said:


> it is not a matter of 'generation' or whatever false notion 20th century ideologies have spawned in order to make believe that mass opinion counts.
> 
> art has always been intended for elites, that is for the few and not many, so its main point is create new realities the masterpieces to which must convey messages, symbols and meanings that will shape a new world, besides providing artifacts for the worlds to come, just in case there be a need for great ideas.


Nobody need be an 'elite' (what does it even mean in this context) to enjoy 'art'.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Mandryka said:


> But listen to the homage to Tristan here, at 1.25


I thought of another example when I read your post last month, but couldn't remember the title until now.
0:18


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## Andrew Kenneth (Feb 17, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> Decades ago a friend and I used to dream about a film of the _Ring_ utilizing all the techniques available, and we wondered why it had never been done. It would be expensive, of course, but I think it could be a surprise hit and would open many people's ears to opera and classical music. There are plenty of videos of staged productions, some of which are interesting, and there is the very strange and controversial Syberberg film of _Parsifal,_ but no attempts, as far as I know, to take Wagner's own conceptions seriously and use the resources of film to realize them. I think it's a major cultural oversight.


Well, in 2010 a film adaptation of "Der Freischütz" was made. (also available on dvd/blu-ray)
Filmed in the style of modern movies.

If this can be adapted, Wagner should be also possible.

trailer =>


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

janxharris said:


> Nobody need be an 'elite' (what does it even mean in this context) to enjoy 'art'.


not only art but also to enjoy life you need be an elite if want real stuff.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Zhdanov said:


> not only art but also to enjoy life you need be an elite if want real stuff.


Humility is preferable imo.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

Wagner didn't revolutionize music, he killed it. It's hard not to regard Wagner as the absolute zenith of Western music. Before him, music was enslaved to form, after him, music loses its way in the trappings of atonality and we see the rise of disposable "popular music" in response. With _Parsifal_, music has seemingly served its purpose, and suffers a slow death, its fatal dying gasps can be heard in Cardi B's "WAP".


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## Music Snob (Nov 14, 2018)

Couchie said:


> Wagner didn't revolutionize music, he killed it. It's hard not to regard Wagner as the absolute zenith of Western music. Before him, music was enslaved to form, after him, music loses its way in the trappings of atonality and we see the rise of disposable "popular music" in response. With _Parsifal_, music has seemingly served its purpose, and suffers a slow death, its fatal dying gasps can be heard in Cardi B's "WAP".


Hey Couchie- I couldn't agree more. I said the exact same thing to a cellist I know and I think she thought I was hyperbolic at best- idiotic at worst. I stand by that statement. In Act 3 of Parsifal music all but ceases to exist. He killed it. Thank you for that post. I generally avoid these types of online discussions if possible but I had to log in just to back you up. Wagner wasn't love at first hearing, but I was and am continually humbled by Wagner's musical insights.

I recommend studying his scores.

PS- I just re- read that post and wanted to say that I would give it 100 likes if I could.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Couchie said:


> Wagner didn't revolutionize music, he killed it. It's hard not to regard Wagner as the absolute zenith of Western music. Before him, music was enslaved to form, after him, music loses its way in the trappings of atonality and we see the rise of disposable "popular music" in response. With _Parsifal_, music has seemingly served its purpose, and suffers a slow death, its fatal dying gasps can be heard in Cardi B's "WAP".


Raise it one bar further: Wagner was the absolutist demigod of music.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

Music Snob said:


> Hey Couchie- I couldn't agree more. I said the exact same thing to a cellist I know and I think she thought I was hyperbolic at best- idiotic at worst. I stand by that statement. In Act 3 of Parsifal music all but ceases to exist. He killed it. Thank you for that post. I generally avoid these types of online discussions if possible but I had to log in just to back you up. Wagner wasn't love at first hearing, but I was and am continually humbled by Wagner's musical insights.
> 
> I recommend studying his scores.
> 
> PS- I just re- read that post and wanted to say that I would give it 100 likes if I could.


It's never hyperbolic to adulate _Parsifal_. Hyperbole is impossible where the infinite is concerned. All music is foreplay and denouement to _Parsifal_. What is _Parsifal _but the the Holy Grail itself? Most look upon it with bewilderment, but to those select few called to its service, it nourishes and perfects the soul.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

ArtMusic said:


> Raise it one bar further: Wagner was the absolutist demigod of music.


Wagner was the second coming of Christ, paired was he with the Antichrist (Nietzsche).


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Couchie said:


> Wagner was the second coming of Christ, paired was he with the Antichrist (Nietzsche).


Whatabout Hitler?


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

hammeredklavier said:


> Whatabout Hitler?


Not a great mind, was he? Nietzsche's lapdog.


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## janxharris (May 24, 2010)

Couchie said:


> Wagner didn't revolutionize music, he killed it. It's hard not to regard Wagner as the absolute zenith of Western music. Before him, music was enslaved to form, after him, music loses its way in the trappings of atonality and we see the rise of disposable "popular music" in response. With _Parsifal_, music has seemingly served its purpose, and suffers a slow death, its fatal dying gasps can be heard in Cardi B's "WAP".


Tonal music continued to thrive following Wagner, so your assertion must be wrong. Clearly, you are merely stating an opinion.

And Parsifal (based on Act I) isn't, to my ears at least, anything like as harmonically adventurous as the Tristan Prelude.

Cardi B's music is hardly representative of the diversity and quality of modern popular music; it's difficult to imagine her music gaining as much interest if it weren't for her use of sexually charged images.


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## Ludwig Schon (10 mo ago)

Those pregnant pauses, that unerring hum, an undertow of impending doom, cleaved from Der fliegende Holländer through to Parsifal…

These chasm-spanning paradigm shifts of a Goddam Germanic Genius…

Chapeau, Richardinho! 🎩


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

He certainly did something unique. And he wanted to be a radical (albeit for an unpleasant ideology). But how do you decide whether a composer was a revolutionary or a great composer (necessarily with a distinctive voice)? Is it down to whether many followed in his footsteps? If so, who followed Wagner? Debussy perhaps (and a good few followed _him_)? It's a nice story, Wagner and Liszt the revolutionaries and Brahms to conservative but it's just spin.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

Couchie said:


> Wagner didn't revolutionize music, he killed it. It's hard not to regard Wagner as the absolute zenith of Western music. Before him, music was enslaved to form, after him, music loses its way in the trappings of atonality and we see the rise of disposable "popular music" in response. With _Parsifal_, music has seemingly served its purpose, and suffers a slow death, its fatal dying gasps can be heard in Cardi B's "WAP".


Old post, but I feel compelled to note that atonality was basically the antithesis of Wagner's aesthetic style that involved the tension created by the ambiguous, androgynous suggestion/co-existence of multiple possible keys and tonalities. The profound, impassioned yearning in much of Parsifal and in the opening theme/motif of Tristan is built from that tension. Atonality eliminated this tension by eliminating tonality altogether. You can't have tension without tonal hierarchies and the expectations those tonal relations create. Atonality, despite what some may say (including the atonal theorists) was not a logical progression from Wagner's ambiguous tonalities, it was a complete destruction of everything Wagner himself tried to achieve with his tonal innovations.

FWIW, I don't hate atonality myself and think many great works came from it; and tonality continued to flourish after Wagner as well with all the composers who chose not to buy into the dogma of the 2nd Viennese School and theorists. Plenty of composers continued to tread middle grounds between tonality and atonality, or alternative grounds altogether like Mahler, Scriabin, R. Strauss, and Messiaen. Plus, even if all atonality ever gave us Wozzeck I think the entire movement would've been worth it.

Also, as an aside, WAP is a novelty song. There have been dozens/hundreds of such songs that achieved temporary popularity and quickly faded from public consciousness. Musically it's just a typical Trap song; completely uninteresting if it wasn't for its scandalous sexual lyrics, which, IMO, are more funny than anything else.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Alex Ross's 2020 book _Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music _says so. Among other things he says:

"... interior monologue and stream of consciousness, considered modernist literary innovations, can be traced back to Wagner’s operas, as can the modernists’ use of repeating literary elements, similar to leitmotifs ... The composer came to represent the cultural-political unconscious of modernity—an aesthetic war zone in which the Western world struggled with its raging contradictions, its longing for creation and destruction, its inclinations toward beauty and violence. Wagner was arguably the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900 and then went to its doom."


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## marlow (11 mo ago)

Unfortunately for RW motion pictures were invented and took over as the artwork of the future


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## Agamenon (Apr 22, 2019)

I don´t want to discuss with some posters. Just read the following statements:

*Bernstein* called Tristan und Isolde “the central work of all music history, the hub of the _wheel_”

*Barenboim*: "Beethoven sonatas are something else for me after directing _Tristan". _ 

*Stravinsky: " *How powerful this man must have been to have destroyed an essentially musical form [opera] with such energy that fifty years after his death we are still staggering under the rubbish and racket of the music drama! For the prestige of the Synthesis of the Arts is still alive."


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> Old post, but I feel compelled to note that *atonality was basically the antithesis of Wagner's aesthetic style that involved the tension created by the ambiguous, androgynous suggestion/co-existence of multiple possible keys and tonalities.* The profound, impassioned yearning in much of Parsifal and in the opening theme/motif of Tristan is built from that tension. Atonality eliminated this tension by eliminating tonality altogether. You can't have tension without tonal hierarchies and the expectations those tonal relations create. *Atonality, despite what some may say (including the atonal theorists) was not a logical progression from Wagner's ambiguous tonalities, it was a complete destruction of everything Wagner himself tried to achieve with his tonal innovations.*


This is an important observation, which I second not merely because I used to argue it strenuously with another member who is no longer on the forum. Wagner is as insistent a tonalist as Mozart, which accords with his tribute to the latter, calling him a "great chromaticist." Wagner didn't want or try to get out of tonality, but to see how much could be got out of it. His last work, _Parsifal_, is in its extremes of both diatonicism and chromaticism a tribute to the tradition of tonal harmony, as well as an extension of it, much as his _Meistersinger_ is a tribute to the contrapuntal tradition of Bach.

In the basic elements of his musical vocabulary, Wagner was more summation than innovation, and yet the effect of much of his work was of something unprecedented and challenging. That effect came not only from his unprecedented emphasis on chromaticism, but from his breaking down of familiar formal templates in favor of an apparently free expressive narrative allied to theatrical action, which replaced the more or less closed forms of traditional arias and ensembles - "apparently free," because the narrative was given coherence by carefully plotted key relationships and the elaborate deployment of interrelated and interacting thematic germs (leitmotifs). The choice to illuminate the dramatic action of the play in this way also entailed the extension of music's time scale, not merely in the length of his operas (there had been other operas of similar length) but in the rate at which musical ideas are introduced and disposed of. The "story" of a sonata movement may be told in ten minutes, but the "real life" pace of theatrical action allows for a more leisurely exposition of musical ideas which have the new function of tracing the shifting psychological states of the characters, as well as commenting on the larger context of the drama, even on things absent, things past, and things to come. It's no accident that the title of Proust's magnum opus, "In Search of Lost Time" (commonly known in English as "Remembrance of Things Past") was invented by one of many writers inspired by Wagner's musical meta-narratives.

I do think it's fair to say that Wagner played a major role in "revolutionizing" modern music. The unmooring of music from traditional forms in favor of an apparently free expressive narrativity was an important innovation, but it was one that less masterful composers followed at their peril. Wagner himself warned against applying his ideas in the context of non-operatic works, saying once that "in the symphony one thinks very differently." His statement of intent to write symphonies after _Parsifal_ remains one of music's tantalizing "what ifs."


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Wager sometimes wrote his own librettos. It's interesting how more composers were not able to write their own librettos. In this case, I don't think he set any kind of role model, as a composer who could also create poetry/lyrics/librettos.

Polyartists (doing more than one art) and those polyartists combined with polymath is largely what built our civilization. We look at multidisciplinary artists as a modern thing, and its true many modern arts work in many different arts and even write theory, but it goes back to Hildegaard of Bingen.

We've had this thread on composers who did other arts and sciences.


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Agamenon said:


> And Bernstein claimed: "_"'Tristan und Isolde' is the central work of all music history, the hub of the wheel... I have spent my life since I first read it, trying to solve it. It is incredibly prophetic." --Leonard Bernstein, 1981_


I think Bernstein could be a bit flamboyant and use such to be pedantic for his audience. Do we have any other instances where he imposed something as changing the whole of his life, or exaggerating mystically something a composer did, maybe to be a bit of an entertainer in the process? I think so but I don't remember them. Listening to his lectures, it seems he used this method often enough.


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## Philidor (11 mo ago)

ArtMusic said:


> Wagner truly revolutionized modern music.


What do you mean by "modern music"?

Or, more precisely: Modern music at which time?

The word "modernus" appeard in the 5th century a. c. and immigrated in the early Tudor period from French to Early Modern English, but its connotation was not alway positive. Shakespeare used it with the meaning of "every-day, ordinary, commonplace".

Some people say, modernity is over ... we are post-modern.

So what do you mean?


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Asking questions of a banned member does not make much sense...............


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## Philidor (11 mo ago)

Oh, apologies ... i didn't realize this ...


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Philidor said:


> Shakespeare used it with the meaning of "every-day, ordinary, commonplace".



That's interesting, I wasn't aware of that. That's how Baudelaire used it, I think -- at least part of what he had in mind. And Baudelaire would probably have had some acquaintance with Shakespeare through Stendhal's _Racine_ _et Shakespeare. _

Have you got a citation for the Shakespeare?


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## Philidor (11 mo ago)

Mandryka said:


> Have you got a citation for the Shakespeare?


I took a look at the english Wikipedia as of today ... 
Modernity - Wikipedia 
See Etymology.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Re Wagner and the modern. Nietzche's term (in the English translation) for modernity is _decadence _-- and he thinks Wagner was decadent (= modern) because of the lack of organic development of the ideas in his music. This sense of modernity is related to the idea of the eternal present -- that each now is experienced separately -- I suppose this idea of modernity is what Boulez appreciated in Debussy's _Jeux_, an idea which may have its apogee in Stockhausen's concept of _Moment Form_.

For the Nietzche (which I may have misinterpreted -- please criticise my gloss) see his _Fall of Wagner

There is hallucination at the commencement in Wagner -- not of tones, but of gestures; for these he seeks the appropriate semeiotic tones. If vou want to admire him, see him at work here: how he separates, how he arrives at little unities, how he animates them, inflates them, and renders them visible. But by so doing his power exhausts itself: the rest is worth nothing. How pitiable, how confused, how laic is his mode of "developing," his attempt to pierce at least into one another, things which have not grown out of one another! His manner here reminds one of the Frčres de Goncourt, whose style approaches Wagner's in other respects also. A sort of pity is aroused for so much trouble. That Wagner has masked under the guise of a principle his incapacity for creating organically, that he asserts a "dramatic style" where we assert merely his incapacity for any style, corresponds to an audacious habit which has accompanied Wagner all his life: he posits a principle where he lacks a faculty (very different in this respect, let us say in passing, from old Kant, who loved another kind of audacity: whenever he lacked a principle, he posited a "faculty" in human beings ...). Once more let it be said that Wagner is only worthy of admiration and love in the invention of minutić, in the elaboration of details; -- here we have every right to proclaim him as a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in music, who compresses into the smallest space an infinitude of meaning and sweetness. His wealth of colours, of demi-tints, of the mysteries of vanishing light, spoils us to such a degree that almost all other musicians seem too robust afterwards _

Friedrich Nietzsche: <i>The Case of Wagner</i> (muni.cz)


And particularly scathing about Wagner in the Spring 1888 notebooks (again, I read _decadents _as _moderns_)

_The typical decadents who necessarily feel comfortable in their corruptions of style, so take a higher taste in demand and the others want to apply a law, the Goncourt, the Richard Wagner are distinguished from the decadents with a bad conscience, the rebellious decadents -_

FERNLN (philarchive.org)


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

I went back and read the thread from the beginning and found my own contributions, which I had completely forgotten about. And voiced views which I no longer hold. I went through a Wagner conversion sometime after those posts and became an ardent admirer of the Ring, as well as Tristan.

I do agree with Bernstein when he says that Tristan was a dividing line, demarcating the Romantic era (and all of music history up to then) from the Modern era. The Prelude was the gateway that later composers walked through and abandoned diatonic tonality in the process.

Of course tonality never really disappeared, and plenty of composers never abandoned it at all and still were influenced by Wagner, since there is a lot in Wagner's style which does not touch on the break down of diatonic tonality.

I don't think Wagner alone revolutionized modern music. But his music was definitely one body of work, along with other composers both before and after, which contributed to the development of the stylistic strains which ended up being what we call modern music.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> I went back and read the thread from the beginning and found my own contributions, which I had completely forgotten about. And voiced views which I no longer hold. I went through a Wagner conversion sometime after those posts and became an ardent admirer of the Ring, as well as Tristan.
> 
> I do agree with Bernstein when he says that Tristan was a dividing line, demarcating the Romantic era (and all of music history up to then) from the Modern era. The Prelude was the gateway that later composers walked through and abandoned diatonic tonality in the process.
> 
> ...


You seem to think that modernity in music is about harmony. How can it be, at least if modernism in music is related to modernism in literature, painting and other arts? I want to propose that harmony is not essential to the discussion - form is what matters. Modernist composers wrote music with a form similar in some ways to the form of modernist literature and modernist painting - a form where the present is wholly experienced in the now, rather than with reference to the past or ideas and expectations about future evolution. Modernism is about time.

If some modernist composers wrote in a way which abandons tonality, that matters only in that, by so doing, they also abandoned development, the evolution of an idea through the duration of the music. And in so far as they abandoned the « standing on giant’s shoulders » conception of history, of progress - for modernists, everything must be new, _épater la bourgeoisie_, reject the past completely.


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## Yabetz (Sep 6, 2021)

...


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> You seem to think that modernity in music is about harmony.


In the case of Wagner, in general, and _Tristan und Isolde_ in particular, historically it has been analyzed harmonically with a study of how Wagner stretched the bounds of diatonic tonality. This work, or I should say, the Prelude to this work, is probably the most analyzed movement from the 19th century - precisely because of the harmonic developments of Wagner.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

.


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## Yabetz (Sep 6, 2021)

This sounds kinda 20th century-ish. The most similar music I can think of from roughly that era is from Mussorgsky and late Liszt.


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## Yabetz (Sep 6, 2021)

Also this. Wagner cast a gigantic, long shadow on everything that came after.


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