Wagner and His Music-Dramas — Themes and Context

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In Category - Opera Performance

Authors: Bagar, Robert C., 1899-1957 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2015 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883; Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883. Operas Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Reading time 56 min

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #49174

Robert Bagar's 1943 guide to Wagner's concert-hall excerpts, written for the Philharmonic-Symphony Society, examines the composer's dramatic and musical choices through concise analyses of preludes, themes, and libretto motifs.

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ason enough, what with that organization’s habit of letting expense go hang. He labored industriously at making revisions, which included a complete rewrite of the Bacchanalian scene as well as of the music for Venus and Tannhäuser in Act 1.

When he had completed his revisions he played the music for several friends. Charles Nuitter, one of these, reported on that private hearing as follows:

“When we arrived the composer sat down to the piano. He played with indescribable animation and fury. His hands pounded the keys, and the same time he strove to acquaint me with the action of the scene, crying out the entrance of the various groups. ‘Arrival of the fauns and satyrs; all are put to flight; the confusion mounts to its climax,’ he flung at me, and his hands continued to bang the keys, the musical delirium always augmenting. When he was piling on a succession of quivering chords Wagner suddenly cried, ‘Now a crash of thunder. We are all dead!’ At that moment a wagon of paving stones discharged its load into the street, thus producing a prolonged and terrible noise. Wagner turned round and regarded us with stupefaction, his eyes staring wildly. It took us some moments to recover from this stirring of our feelings. Thus it was that I was initiated into the new music.”

The first Paris performance of _Tannhäuser_ took place on March 13, 1861. That was the first of three fiascos in the French capital. The second occurred on March 18. Napoleon III and the Empress both attended, but their presence had no effect on the rest of the audience, whose cat-calls, howls, and kindred strange noises were even louder, if not funnier, than the first time.

The work was given for the third time on March 24. This was not a regular subscription performance, and it seemed to all and sundry that finally a Parisian audience would be honest and unprejudiced in its attitude toward the opera. However, the composer’s enemies had bought out the house and the result was the same. Whereupon Wagner withdrew his score. _Tannhäuser_ was not given again in Paris until thirty-four years later.

Prelude to “Lohengrin”

In the summer of 1845, while Wagner was at Marienbad, he worked out the plan for _Lohengrin_. The libretto he wrote during the following winter. Then came a topsy-turvy scheme of creation. In composing the music he began with the hero’s Narrative in the last act, “because the monologue contained the most significant musical germs in the whole score.” He finished the third act on March 25, 1847, the first act on June 8 of that year, the second act on August 2, and the Prelude on August 28. The orchestration was done during the following winter and spring. Franz Liszt conducted the première of the opera at Weimar on August 28, 1850. The Prelude was played for the first time in concert on January 17, 1853, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Julius Rietz conducting.

Discussing the Prelude, William Foster Apthorp wrote:

“Like the hero’s career in the opera, it begins, as it were, in the clouds, then gradually descends farther and farther until it embraces all the lower tones of the orchestra, and then returns to the clouds again. Its single theme is developed in free polyphony by various successive groups of instruments, each of which groups proceeds with free counter-thematic work as the next group enters with the theme. First we have the violins _piano_ in their higher registers; then come the flutes, oboes, and clarinets; then the violas, ’cellos, horns, bassoons, and double-basses; lastly the trumpets, trombones, and the tuba _fortissimo_; then comes the _decrescendo_, ending _pianissimo_ in the high violins and flutes.”

The composer, who could descant with the best of them, paraded his rhetorical gifts on the Prelude (the translation is by William Ashton Ellis):

“Love seemed to have vanished from a world of hatred and quarreling; as a lawgiver she was no longer to be found among the communities of men. Emancipating itself from barren care for gain and possession, the sole arbiter of all worldly intercourse, the human heart’s unquenchable love-longing, again at length craved to appease a want which, the more warmly and intensely it made itself felt under the pressure of reality, was the less easy to satisfy on account of this very reality. It was beyond the confines of the actual world that man’s ecstatic imaginative power fixed the source as well as the output of this incomprehensible impulse of love, and from the desire of a comforting sensuous conception of this supersensuous idea invested it with a wonderful form, which, under the name of the ‘Holy Grail,’ though conceived as actually existing, yet unapproachably far off, was believed in, longed for, and sought for.

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Robert Bagar, writing for the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York in 1943, addresses listeners who encounter Wagner primarily through orchestral excerpts rather than full staged operas. His preface makes no claim to originality, drawing instead from existing treatises, but the resulting volume offers a focused look at how Wagner's music-dramas function in concert form. Bagar's prose is brisk and opinionated, distinguishing sharply between Wagner the artist and Wagner the man—a distinction he insists upon early, noting that the composer's life rarely matched the 'super-noble purpose' of his librettos.

Diction and the Artist’s Contradictions

Bagar opens with a series of emphatic negatives: 'No artist has known a fiercer urge to create than Richard Wagner. None has labored more mightily to indoctrinate mankind with his convictions. None has been more scathing in his contempt of reaction, of pretense, of outdated mannerisms.' This triple anaphora establishes a tone of absolute commitment, yet Bagar immediately undercuts it by observing that Wagner's personal conduct rarely approached the lofty ideals of his works. The phrasing is deliberate: Wagner 'glamorized human suffering' through the symbol of renunciation, a theme Bagar traces across Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, The Flying Dutchman, and Parsifal. The author's word choices—'fiercer,' 'scathing,' 'voluptuous,' 'emotionally overwhelming'—signal a writer unafraid of strong judgments, yet he grounds these in specific observations about Wagner's recurring dramatic motifs.

Voice and the Concert-Hearer’s Perspective

Bagar consistently addresses an audience that knows Wagner from the concert hall, not the opera house. He describes the Tristan und Isolde Prelude as 'free as to form and ever widening in scope of development,' then itemizes its chief themes: a 'Love Potion' theme and 'Tristan’s Love Glance,' the latter called 'sensuous, even voluptuous in character.' The Liebestod is explained as a 'passionate flow of phrases' drawn from the second-act love duet, with a parenthetical note that Franz Liszt coined the term 'Liebestod' for music Wagner originally called 'Verklärung.' This attention to nomenclature—what to call a passage and why—reflects Bagar's pedagogical aim. He does not assume the reader knows the operas; instead, he describes musical effects in plain language, as when he notes that the Prelude to Die Meistersinger opens with a 'bitter cry' from Hans Sachs's cobbler-song, a motive that 'dies away in resignation' before the horns intone a hymn.

Structure: The Embedded Analysis

Bagar's most striking structural choice is to quote Wagner's own analysis of the Die Meistersinger Prelude at length, embedding the composer's voice directly into his own text. Wagner's description—'the bitter cry of the man who has determined to renounce his personal happiness, yet who shows the world a cheerful, resolute exterior'—is presented without editorial interruption, allowing the composer to gloss his own work. Bagar then returns to his own voice to summarize the plot: a song contest, the prize of Eva's hand, the young knight Walther von Stolzing. This alternation between primary source and summary creates a layered reading experience. Elsewhere, Bagar includes a biographical aside about Wagner's alleged paternity (Ludwig Geyer) and his mother's theatrical curse, but these details are kept brief, subordinated to the musical discussion. The overall structure moves from general claims about Wagner's artistic aims to specific analyses of individual preludes, then to plot synopsis, mirroring the concert program's logic.

Recurring Details: Renunciation and the Man-Artist Split

Two motifs recur across Bagar's text: the theme of renunciation and the distinction between Wagner's life and art. Renunciation appears in the opening paragraphs as the central symbol of Wagner's work, then resurfaces in the Meistersinger analysis, where Sachs's 'determined to renounce his personal happiness' is quoted from Wagner himself. Bagar also notes that Wagner wrote Die Meistersinger as a 'lighter work' during a period of doctor-ordered rest, yet the opera took years to complete amid 'financial snarls, domestic tribulations, romantic attachments.' The man-artist split is introduced early—'There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between Wagner the man and Wagner the artist'—and reinforced by the aside that Wagner settled a personal score by caricaturing the critic Eduard Hanslick as the pedantic Beckmesser. These details, drawn from the excerpts, give the reader a sense of the composer's character without requiring knowledge of the full biography.

Bagar's guide is best read as a companion for a concert program, not a substitute for the operas themselves. His willingness to quote Wagner directly, to name themes with their orchestral sources, and to acknowledge the limits of his own originality gives the text a practical, unpretentious character. Readers unfamiliar with the music-dramas will find clear descriptions of musical gestures; those who know them may appreciate the sharpness of Bagar's judgments and the historical context he supplies.

Bagar’s little wartime guide taught me how Wagner built whole worlds from a few aching notes. It made me return to the tales themselves, those old plots of love and ruin. There is a quiet kinship between them, like two shelves holding the same storm. Stories from the operas — Inside the Classic keeps the human heart of it all warm.