# Did Wagner see the Ring orchestration as a failure?



## matsoljare (Jul 28, 2008)

I have often wondered why Wagner himself never used the Wagnertuba in any of his later works after the Ring, nor the bass trumpet or the contrabass trombone, the two other rare instruments used therein. Clearly the use of all three of these instruments, along with many other aspects of the Ring, was supposed to be groundbreaking and forge a new path for the future of the orchestra. But his later works used a much more conventional instrumentation, if perhaps refined in their use of them for variety and expression.

But this makes me wonder if he considered the "experiment" with these unusual instruments, which hardly any other classical composers have specified before or even afterwards, to be a failure? Is there any recorded utterings from the man himself or those close to him about this? I suppose he could have used them throughout the Ring cycle just to be consistent with the first chapter, but really knowing that it didn't work out as intended after staging the first part?

I know the brass family had still not developed fully at the time he started it, as the brass instruments was indeed the last part of the orchestra to become what it is today, so maybe his reason for using them wasn't as much to be "avant garde" or different, as it was merely out of dissatisfaction with the "normal" brass instruments of the time, that he later came to rethink as the instruments and players became better?

After all, his decision to use the Wagner Tuba was supposedly made in 1853. quite a long while before the completion and performance of the entire Ring Cycle....


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

Provocative Title.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Actually, several other composers have used the Wagner tubas and some of the others you mentioned, such as Briuckner, Richard Strauss, and Schoenberg.
The last three Bruckner symphonies use Wagner tubas, as well as Schoenberg's gargantuan Gurrelieder , which features everything including the kitchen sink, and Richard Strauss uses them in Elektra, Die Frau Ohne Schatten and the Alpine symphony .
Parsifal features a normal-sized brass section . I'm not sure exactly why Wagner used a very large orchestra only for the Ring, but I supposed he felt it was especially apt for the monumental project he undertook .
If I remember correctly, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring also uses a bass trumpet , as well as Elektra .Pretty
ironic, since Stravinsky called himself" Wagner's Anti-christ ".


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

superhorn said:


> Actually, several other composers have used the Wagner tubas and some of the others you mentioned, such as Briuckner, Richard Strauss, and Schoenberg.
> The last three Bruckner symphonies use Wagner tubas, as well as Schoenberg's gargantuan Gurrelieder , which features everything including the kitchen sink, and Richard Strauss uses them in Elektra, Die Frau Ohne Schatten and the Alpine symphony .
> Parsifal features a normal-sized brass section . I'm not sure exactly why Wagner used a very large orchestra only for the Ring, but I supposed he felt it was especially apt for the monumental project he undertook .
> If I remember correctly, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring also uses a bass trumpet , as well as Elektra .Pretty
> ironic, since Stravinsky called himself" Wagner's Anti-christ ".


Re: the bass trumpet. A colleague of Freud gave him a nudge-nudge wink-wink pertaining to 'the meaning' of Freud's smoking a cigar. Freud's response, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

I think that more apt of the 'context' of that bass trumpet in Le Sacre


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I really don't think that the orchestration that Wagner used in his Ring Cycle is a failure. The orchestra that he did use was large but he specifically extended the brass section for the cause. He wanted to achieve specific brass tone colours for The Ring that might not have been as suitable for other music dramas that he wrote after 1853. If you get rid of the extra brass instruments in The Ring you basically have a standard large symphony orchestra with four too many harps.


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