Summary
Composer whose Bayreuth design, prose history of music and operas open the forty-third essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, “From Silence to Sound and Back Again”: in Said’s reading Wagner creates his own antecedents in Beethoven, scants Fidelio, and stakes his operas, like Beethoven, on forestalling the silence that descends after the final chords (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.470-474).
Details
- The Bayreuth “Festpielhaus” (as printed) has a sunken, completely invisible orchestra pit producing a warm, enveloping, inclusive sound integrating voices and instruments; in Das Rheingold, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal it lets the audience imagine being present at the creation, the E-flat of the Rhine motif giving birth to the system of themes (PDF p.470).
- In prose Wagner narrated and renarrated the history of music culminating in himself — creating his own antecedents, as in Borges’s account of Kafka’s precursors — excoriating French and Italian opera and Meyerbeer, on whom his early works depended (PDF p.470).
- His dialectic counterposes composers: Haydn and Mozart are belittled for the complete exclusion of “dramatic pathos” from their symphonic work, preparing for Beethoven, who needed the word — “Freude!” — the Ninth described as “the redemption of Music” beyond which “no forward step is possible”, Wagner providing the actual universal drama Beethoven only adumbrated (quoted PDF p.471-472).
- Wagner focuses exclusively on Beethoven’s symphonies and in his 1870 centenary study eliminates Fidelio; Said speculates that Fidelio works through the vulnerability to silence and negation Wagner felt himself, with the Ninth as antecedent, to have surmounted in the Ring, Tristan and Parsifal (PDF p.472).
- He ends the Ring cycle with an attempted vindication of redemptive love contradicting the evidence of Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, where love is mixed with illicit desire, lust for power and blind obduracy; his underground realm is “Niebelheim” (as printed) (PDF p.474).
- Cage’s anti-aesthetic is aimed at freeing music from the authoritarianism of Wagner and Schönberg, putting silence on an equal footing with sound (PDF p.482).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Ludwig van Beethoven, Arnold Schönberg, John Cage, Thomas Mann