Engaging Wagner

A reader writes,

Thanks to your links, I've been listening to the webcasts from the Bayreuth Festival. I've always had a problem listening to and understanding Wagner's later operas, though I'm a big fan of Tannh[ä]user and Lohengrin, and listen to those operas often. I've always thought the reason for that is that Wagner's operas are so closely tied to the theater that unless one actually attends a live performance of the more complicated later operas, one can't really understand them, and something of Wagner's genius is lost.

Your thoughts?

It's quite true that Wagner's works post-Lohengrin are theatrical (i.e., of the theater) to the very bone, which is to say one can't experience them with any degree of real comprehension by simply listening to the singing as one can in the case of conventional opera. More to the point, Wagner's mature works (called music-dramas to distinguish them from his earlier works which are all operas in the ordinary sense of the term) each constitute an organic dramatic unity that must be experienced in toto to be really understood.

One need not, however, attend a live performance to experience that dramatic unity. In fact, given the nature of most live performances of Wagner's works today one is well advised to stay as far away as possible from the theater (witness, for pertinent instance, the just-premiered Bayreuth Parsifal). What one must cultivate is the capacity to visualize in the mind's eye the drama that's being played out in libretto and music. Wagner, who built better than even he knew, put all that's necessary into the score itself, and anyone with even a modicum of imagination need only learn that score (i.e., music, text, and stage directions) to construct his own theater of the mind that, while listening to a first-rate recorded performance on the stereo, will serve at least as well as, and probably better than, anything one is likely to today encounter mounted on the stage of any opera house in the world.

In such an undertaking, however, there are certain peculiarities of music-drama (as opposed to conventional opera) of which one needs to be aware. For instance, unlike conventional opera, one must at all times know pretty much verbatim what the characters are actually saying when singing as it's not "songs" they're singing, but dialogue, much like the spoken dialogue of a staged straight drama. The importance of that verbatim knowing becomes immediately clear when one considers that Wagner's music-dramas never traffic in soap-opera melodrama and cookie-cutter plots, and to have only the gist of what the characters are saying when singing as one can do without penalty with conventional opera is a guarantee of becoming hopelessly lost in, or missing completely, the often intricate and subtle narrative twists, and the equally intricate and subtle web of interwoven dramatic and psychological complexities that are fundamental components of all Wagner's mature works.

Further, and perhaps most importantly, and once again unlike conventional opera, without knowing what the characters are actually saying when singing, one will miss totally the dramatic, psychological, and emotional gestalt of the organic union of text and music as that music issues from the orchestra wherein resides the very core of the drama itself. That locus of the dramatic core of the work, and the gestalt of the union of text and music, are the unique and most salient characteristics of music-drama; what separates it from conventional opera, and indeed what constitutes music-drama's very raison d'être. In the music itself is the core of the drama, while the sung text provides the necessary concrete particulars and narrative details which are at once both the drama's armature and context which particulars and details music alone is incapable of conveying.

All of which is to say that while one can in large part engage Wagner's early works in just the same way one engages an opera by, say, Bellini or Donizetti, or even much of Verdi, for the mature works that simply won't do, and attempting that sort of engagement is an ultimately empty exercise; a virtual guarantee of missing most of what Wagner offers.

If this engaging of Wagner sounds a daunting, even forbidding, undertaking, it's so only in the telling. Wagner's colossal genius makes it all almost automatic in the doing. All that's required of the audience (i.e., you) is the desire and will to undertake the engagement.