Wagner's "Poems"

On an online opera forum populated for the most part by TOFs (True Opera Fan — like a teenage movie fan only worse; much worse) which we've made unnamed reference to a couple times before here on S&F, a member (whom we'll call Mr. AI) wrote a long and thoughtful post concerning the dramatic possibilities of bel canto opera (which Mr. AI insisted on referring to by the term, "ottocento opera") that included this graf:

As far as I am concerned the same questions can be asked about the hoary, silly contrivances of Tosca, the ridiculous ugliness of Turandot, neither redeemed as I hear them by their music, Faust, a snore of treacly tunes with none of the sublime wit and insight of Goethe, Werther (ditto and more). Isn't Wagner ridiculously long winded, inflated and loud with an often bizarre sensibility dressed up in weird symbolism and deadening Stabreim (does one REALLY want to understand Parsifal, it's view of women, it's bizarre treatment of the already bizarre Christian myth, its sado-masochistic sentimentality, does it signify beyond the cult exemplified by AC Douglas)?

To which another member (whom we'll call Mr. SM) responded:

Yes Wagner, often touted as far superior dramatically to the inept or silly dramas of the ottocento [bel canto] operas definitely had major weaknesses as a poet and dramatist. Without the power of the music they would be pretty worthless. Tannhauser in my opinion has absolutely the worst, most idiotic and sickeningly hypocritical libretto of any opera I have ever come across, Cammarano's libretti for Lucia di Lammermoor and Trovatore are masterpieces of dramaturgy in comparison.

Our response to Mr. SM's post — which response contains little that will be new to regular readers of S&F, but which response we post here strictly for the purpose of making it a part of the S&F archive — follows.

So as not to impair my, um, reputation as a Wagner "cult[ist]" (as Mr. AI would have it)...

I quite agree with your assessment of _Tannhäuser_, Mr. SM. But singling out this early work is really not playing quite fair.

First off, _Tannhäuser_ is an opera, not a music-drama, and Wagner here, as in all three operas of his ten-work canon (i.e., _Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_), was, in large part, a Wagner mimicking established forms and operatic conventions -- a Wagner on his way to becoming Wagner. The music-dramas, however, are a different matter altogether.

Informed native German speakers tell me that, as stand-alone text, the libretti for Wagner's music-dramas (which Wagner in fact referred to as "poems") are fairly dreadful both poetically and dramatically. But given how Wagner worked, that's *precisely* what one would expect them to be as stand-alone texts. They're merely the armature about which the drama is constructed -- an armature designed to provide the concrete narrative and factual detail which music alone is incapable of expressing, and which armature never competes poetically or dramatically with the music which is the principal carrier and transmitter of the music-drama's poetic and dramatic core. Wagner, who originally thought his "poems" to be first-rate as poetry and dramatic text in themselves, discovered that for himself after completing the first music for the _Ring_: the music for _Das Rheingold_, his first music-drama. Wrote Wagner in a letter to his confidant August Röckel, "I have now come to realize just how much there is, owing to the whole nature of my poetic aim, that becomes clear only through the music. I now simply cannot bear to look at the text [of _Das Rheingold_] by itself anymore."

While it's true that the texts of the music-dramas were written complete prior to Wagner writing the music, it's NOT correct to say that Wagner wrote the music to match that finished text, which is the usual process, more or less, when composer and librettist are two separate individuals. As Wagner was writing his texts ("poems"), he, line by line, heard always in his inner ear the shape and sense of the music that would belong to those lines even though he'd not written so much as even a single measure of the actual music. It's no surprise, then, and not for nothing, that the text and music of Wagner's music-dramas are, more than the text and music of any other opera of my experience, so fundamentally and organically intertwined, and therefore cannot be separated and be expected [each on its own] to still make their unified original sense.

As to Wagner as dramatist -- or, rather, as music-dramatist -- he is absolutely nonpareil with the single exception of Mozart who, it's a deeply-felt conceit of mine, would have outstripped Wagner as music-dramatist had he lived long enough to write the music he longed to write but refrained from writing in order to ensure his earning his daily bread and cheese. And far from Wagner's music-dramas being "long winded, inflated and loud ," as Mr. AI would have it, Wagner was perhaps the most economical composer of _drammas per musica_ who ever lived, the length of his works dictated by the depth and complexity of their musico-dramaturgy, and "loud" only when loud was dictated by the musico-dramatic context of the drama itself.

ACD