# Wagner and program music



## Sol Invictus (Sep 17, 2016)

From what I understand Wagner was a champion for music meant to represent something. Surely he wrote music for its own sake right? He didn't mean for all music to have the obligation to express something?


----------



## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Well he incorporated a lot of symbolic motifs in his operas, representing curses, love, redemption, swords, etc;. His "Siegfried's Rhine Jouney" is glorious.

I close my eyes while listening and I'm inhaling that intoxicating odor of rotting Rhine fish.


----------



## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

What are you cooking this time, surströmming? You sure have interesting culinary leanings


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

No, he didn't think all music had to represent something. But it was pretty much assumed during the Romantic era that the expression of feeling was the purpose of art (though diehard classicists like Brahms and critic Hanslick disagreed). Wagner held earlier music - Bach, Mozart - in the highest regard, but the tendency in his time was toward more specific representation of emotion, atmosphere, poetic ideas, etc. New developments in harmony and orchestration provided the means, and the dramatic situations of opera provided the ideal arena. Wagner's rich opera scores are, in a real sense, gigantic works of program music, and as a first-rate imaginative genius he was up to the challenge of representing almost anything, from emotions to scenic panoramas, with amazing specificity.

It's an interesting fact, and not well known, that Wagner remarked that the requirements of opera and of the symphony were quite different, that the kinds of effects he created for dramatic presentations were not necessarily suitable for use in absolute music (but I'd say that the composer who came closest to proving him wrong was Mahler). One of music's more tantalizing unfulfilled promises is Wagner's decision to make _Parsifal_ his last opera and to compose only symphonies thereafter. I like to imagine that they would have suggested both Bruckner and Mahler, and structurally might have been surprisingly conservative and classical, given his remarks on the subject and his lifelong worship of Beethoven.


----------



## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> What are you cooking this time, surströmming? You sure have interesting culinary leanings


Post of the day!!!!!!


----------



## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Woodduck, Wagner did not intend Parsifal to be his last opera, but he was planning to write symphonies. He was planning to write another opera called "Die Sieger" (The victors ) , which would be based on Buddhism , something which interested him greatly . If only he had lived long enough . . . . . . 
Wagner also wrote a pretty goody symphony when he was only 19, and there is an unfinished second ,
as well as a number of piano pieces and other non-operatic works, but these mostly date from his early years .


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

superhorn said:


> Woodduck, Wagner did not intend Parsifal to be his last opera, but he was planning to write symphonies. He was planning to write another opera called "Die Sieger" (The victors ) , which would be based on Buddhism , something which interested him greatly . If only he had lived long enough . . . . . .
> Wagner also wrote a pretty goody symphony when he was only 19, and there is an unfinished second ,
> as well as a number of piano pieces and other non-operatic works, but these mostly date from his early years .


The chronology is a bit different. _Parsifal_ was already on Wagner's mind in the 1850s, when he was writing _Tristan._ He had also drawn up the scenario for a _Jesus of Nazareth_. _Die Sieger_ was conceived later, as an expression of his interest in Buddhism (largely via Schopenhauer), but once the Ring was finished and the exhausting experience of the first Bayreuth festival was out of the way, he got to work on _Parsifal_ in earnest, and both _Die Sieger_ and _Jesus_ were put away permanently. _Parsifal_ absorbed from these works both Buddhist and Christian themes, and may have utilized some musical ideas originally intended for them. By the time of _Parsifal_'s premiere Wagner was not in good health and stated that _Parsifal_ would be his last opera.

Neither _Jesus of Nazareth_ (which depicted Jesus mainly as a revolutionary leader, in accordance with Wagner's youthful preoccupation with radical politics) nor _Die Sieger_ (which was about the love of an outcast woman for a Buddhist monk) had the complex symbolism of _Parsifal_ or the _Ring,_ and it's understandable that he put them both aside in favor of a work that in so many ways summarizes his philosophical concerns and artistic achievement.


----------



## Retrograde Inversion (Nov 27, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> The chronology is a bit different. _Parsifal_ was already on Wagner's mind in the 1850s, when he was writing _Tristan._ He had also drawn up the scenario for a _Jesus of Nazareth_. _Die Sieger_ was conceived later, as an expression of his interest in Buddhism (largely via Schopenhauer), but once the Ring was finished and the exhausting experience of the first Bayreuth festival was out of the way, he got to work on _Parsifal_ in earnest, and both _Die Sieger_ and _Jesus_ were put away permanently. _Parsifal_ absorbed from these works both Buddhist and Christian themes, and may have utilized some musical ideas originally intended for them. By the time of _Parsifal_'s premiere Wagner was not in good health and stated that _Parsifal_ would be his last opera.
> 
> Neither _Jesus of Nazareth_ (which depicted Jesus mainly as a revolutionary leader, in accordance with Wagner's youthful preoccupation with radical politics) nor _Die Sieger_ (which was about the love of an outcast woman for a Buddhist monk) had the complex symbolism of _Parsifal_ or the _Ring,_ and it's understandable that he put them both aside in favor of a work that in so many ways summarizes his philosophical concerns and artistic achievement.


The more mischievous side of me can't help wondering what might the outcome have been if Wagner had actually dared to write an opera about Jesus himself, if only _pour épater le bourgeois_.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Retrograde Inversion said:


> The more mischievous side of me can't help wondering what might the outcome have been if Wagner had actually dared to write an opera about Jesus himself, if only _pour épater le bourgeois_.


I believe he completed the scenario, if not the libretto, for _Jesus of Nazareth_, though I don't know whether it's ever been translated into English. In my understanding, it makes Jesus more a political than a religious figure, which could explain why he abandoned it later as he lost faith in political solutions to the world's problems. The one comment I recall him making about the opera was something like "Jesus a tenor? Ridiculous!"

Wagner was too much of a messianic idealist to want to _epater le bourgeois_. He didn't want to outrage people. He wanted to redeem them! Yeah, it's nuts, but ya gotta love the guy for tryin'.


----------

