RICHARD WAGNER
One of the key figures in the history of opera, Wagner was largely responsible for altering its orientation in the Nineteenth Century. His program of artistic reform, though not executed to the last detail, accelerated the trend towards organically conceived, through-composed structures, as well as influencing the development of the orchestra, of a new breed of singer,
and of various aspects of theatrical practice. As the most influential composer during the second half of the Nineteenth Century, Richard Wagner's conception of music remains very much with us even a century after his death. His style of orchestration, his intensely chromatic harmonic pallet, and even his use of the leitmotiv can be heard in many movie scores, neo-tonal symphonies, and modern program music of our time. Wagner thought his music dramas were to be the models for Twentieth Century opera, but he could not foresee the path
of total abandonment of traditional harmony that was to revolutionize music in the early Twentieth Century.
But in more recent days, with the widespread renaissance of tonality in serious music, many familiar sounds of Wagnerian origins are evident in new compositions heard at symphony concerts and on Hollywood sound tracks. It was not Wagner's style of vocal composition in his music dramas that has remained so influential, but his orchestral language of chromatic tension and release, his brilliant use of instrumental tone color, and his flair for
dramatic effects balanced with his long, sensually serene harmonic progressions that have become a mainstay in the arsenal of modern composers.
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1813 as the son of a policeman, Friedrich Wagner, who died soon after the composer's birth. It is both fitting and psychologically congruous that a question mark should hover over the identity of the father and mother of the composer whose works resonate so eloquently with themes of parental anxiety.
His mother remarried the painter-actor-poet, Ludwig Geyer, in August 1814. Many people believe that Geyer was Wagner's biological father, since the mother and Geyer had been friends long before Friedrich Wagner’s death. There is much evidence that Richard believed this as well.
Wagner attended school in Dresden and then Leipzig. At age fifteen, he wrote a play, and at sixteen he composed his first music: two piano sonatas and a string quartet. In 1831 he attended Leipzig University, and he also studied piano and composition with the Cantor of St. Thomas Choir School, C.T. Weinlig, but unlike many other prominent composers, he never became proficient on this or any other instrument. Wagner's formal training in music was brief,
and he was largely a self-taught musician. He composed a symphony, and it was successfully performed in 1832. In 1833 he was employed as the chorus master at the Würzburg theater where he wrote the text and music of his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).
His first opera was never produced during Wagner's lifetime. It was first performed by Hermann Levi in Munich in 1888. But his next opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), was staged in 1836. He made his debut as an opera conductor with a small company that went bankrupt soon after performing his opera. Wagner married the singer, Minna Planer, in 1836 and went with her to Königsberg, where he became musical director at the city theater.
But he soon resigned from the position and took a similar post in Riga where he began his next opera, Rienzi. In Riga he also gained much experience conducting the symphonies and overtures of Beethoven. His marriage suffered from displays of his personal character as the couple's financial debts mounted in Riga. Minna Wagner came to realize that her husband was
not only dishonest with money, but that he was irritable; he was tactless; he was a liar.
In 1839 the Wagners "slipped away" from creditors in Riga by ship to London and then to Paris, where he was befriended by the composer, Meyerbeer. In Paris Wagner did musical arranging for publishers and theaters. He also labored on the text and music of an opera based on the "Flying Dutchman" legend. But in 1842 Rienzi, a large-scale opera with a political theme, set in imperial Rome, was accepted for production in Dresden, and Wagner
went there for its highly successful premiere. Its theme reflects something of Wagner's own politics (He was involved in the semi-revolutionary, intellectual "Young Germany" movement).
Die fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), produced the next year, was less well received, though it was a much more well-constructed music drama than Rienzi. The Dutchman began Wagner's movement away from the "number opera" tradition, and his style was strong in its evocation of atmosphere, especially the supernatural and the raging seas.
The success of these two operas gained for Wagner the prestigious post as Orchestra Conductor at the Dresden court.
Wagner was largely his own librettist in his music dramas, and the theme of redemption through a woman's love, in The Dutchman, recurred in Wagner's works and perhaps his life also. In 1845 Tannhäuser was completed and performed, and Lohengrin was begun. In both of these music dramas, Wagner moved toward a more continuous texture with semi-melodic
narrative and a supporting orchestral fabric helping to convey its sense. In 1848 he was caught up in political revolution, and the next year he fled to Weimar where Franz Liszt helped him.
Later he fled to Switzerland and also France. Politically suspect, Wagner was unable to return to Germany for several years.
In Zürich during his exile of 1850, he wrote his ferociously antisemitic tract: Jewishness in Music. Some passages of this short work were an attack on Meyerbeer, who had previously befriended him in Paris. Also while in Zurich, he completed his basic statement on musical
theater, Opera and Drama. Wagner also began sketching the text and music for a series of
monumental operas based on the Nordic and Germanic myths. By 1853 the texts for this
four-night cycle of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung, were completed and published.
Wagner read his texts to his friends, among whom were his generous patrons, the wealthy
Swiss industrialist, Otto Wesendonck and his wife Mathilde.
Wagner became involved in an extramarital affair with Mathilde Wesendonck who had
fallen in love with him. Mrs. Wesendonck wrote love poems to Wagner that he set to music. He
also composed the Piano Sonata in A-Flat Major for Mathilde. This affair inspired the music
drama Tristan und Isolde which was first conceived in 1854 and completed five years later.
The basic plot of Tristan is the theme of forbidden love. By 1854 Wagner had completed more
than half of the music to The Ring. But he abandoned Siegfried in the middle of the second act
in 1857, not to resume work on this opera until 1869.
The twelve-year hiatus was filled by Tristan und Isolde (1859), originally intended as a
"practical" opera which would not require elaborate staging or scenery, and Die Meistersinger
(1861), Wagner's most beloved opera, hailed even by those who dislike his other works.
Wagner's new kind of opera had many antecedents: the "symphonic style" of the operas by
Mozart, Cherubini, and Beethoven; the continuous texture of Weber's Euryanthe and
Meyerbeer's mature operas, in which the boundaries between the "set-numbers" were blurred;
and the cyclic instrumental forms, with thematic linking, from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5
onward. Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where all operatic devices are united in a
whole, stemmed not only from Gluck's operas but also from the dramas of Goethe and Schiller
whose Die Braut von Messina of 1803 would have been the first Gesamtkunstwerk had there
been adequate musical and theatrical resources in Weimar. Even at his most innovative,
Wagner preserved links with the musical past. Wagner's vocal melody, often just another
strand in the orchestral texture and chiefly devoted to expressing the text, is sometimes
perfunctory.
In 1855 Wagner conducted in London, and tensions with his wife Minna led to a
prolonged stay in Paris where Minna eventually joined him in 1860. Wagner revived
Tannhäuser for the Paris Opera in 1861, but its production was a failure with Parisian
audiences, partly for political reasons. In 1862 he was freely allowed to return to Germany, and
that same year Wagner and Minna separated permanently. Minna could accept most aspects
of Wagner's less-than-sterling personal character, but she could not endure his marital
infidelity. In 1864 King Ludwig II invited Wagner to settle in Bavaria, near Munich. The king
paid all of the composer's considerable debts and agreed to provide Wagner with an annual
salary so he could be free to compose.
Wagner did not stay long in Bavaria, because of opposition at King Ludwig's court. This
disdain for the composer surfaced when it became public knowledge that he was having an
extramarital affair with Cosima Liszt von Bülow, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow and
daughter of Franz Liszt. Hans von Bülow (who condoned Wagner’s affair with his wife)
conducted the music at the premiere of Tristan und Isolde in 1865. Here Wagner developed a
style richer and more chromatic than anyone had previously attempted, using dissonance and
its urge for resolution in a continuing pattern to build up tension and a sense of profound
yearning.
Before returning to his composition of The Ring, Wagner composed The Mastersingers
of Nuremberg beginning in 1866. This work was in quite a different vein, a comedy set in
Sixteenth Century Nuremberg in which a noble poet-musician wins, through his victory in a
music contest, the hand of his beloved, fame, and riches. The analogy with Wagner's view of
himself is obvious. The music of Die Meistersinger is less chromatic than that of Tristan. It is
warm, good-humored, often contrapuntal, and unlike the mythological figures of his other
operas, the characters in Die Meistersinger have real humanity. The opera was premiered
with von Bülow as conductor in 1868.
Wagner had been living at Tribschen, near Lucerne, since 1866, and during this year his
estranged wife Minna died. Cosima von Bülow joined Wagner at Tribschen shortly after
Minna’s death, and she subsequently gave birth to two children before they were
married in 1870.
The first two Ring music dramas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were first performed
in 1869 in Munich, on King Ludwig's insistence, since Ludwig was still providing Wagner with
an annual salary years after their first acquaintance. Wagner was very anxious to have a
special festival opera house constructed for the complete cycle of The Ring, and he spent
much energy trying to raise money for it. Eventually, when he had almost despaired, Ludwig
came to the rescue, and in 1874, the year the fourth opera, Die Götterdämmerung (The
Twilight of the Gods), was finished, King Ludwig provided the necessary funds.
The theater was built at Bayreuth, and it was designed by Wagner himself as the home
for his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work). The first festival, an artistic triumph but
a financial disaster, was held there in 1876 when the complete Ring of the Nibelungs was
performed. The entire cycle of four music dramas comprised about eighteen hours of music
and was held together by an immensely detailed network of leitmotifs, each of which had some
allusive meaning. The leitmotifs change and develop as the ideas within the opera take shape.
They are heard in the orchestra, not merely as labels but carrying the action, sometimes
informing the listener of connections of ideas or the thoughts of those on the stage. It took
Wagner twenty-two years to complete The Ring entirely, and it stands as one of the most
remarkable and profoundly influential achievements in Western music. The drama cycle is not
just a story about gods, humans, and dwarfs, but it embodies reflections on every aspect of the
human condition. It has been interpreted as socialist, fascist, Jungian, prophetic, as a parable
about industrial society, and much more.
In 1877 Wagner conducted in London, hoping to recoup some of his Bayreuth losses.
Later in the year he began a final music drama, Parsifal. Wagner continued his musical and
political writings, concentrating on "racial purity" as his primary theme. He spent most of 1880
in Italy. Parsifal, a sacred music drama based on a theme of man's redemption through the
acts of communion and renunciation, was first performed at the Bayreuth Festival in 1882.
Wagner went to Venice following the festival and died there in February 1883 of heart failure.
His body was returned for burial at Bayreuth.
The Ring contains the most extensive use of leitmotives found in Wagner's works
because of the necessity for continuity in this long tetralogy depicting a mythological universe
divorced from mundane reality. Leitmotives are fewer in the other operas because they
depend so much on atmosphere (especially Tristan and Parsifal). There is less need for
recapitulatory reminiscences, and the few leitmotives used are even more striking and have
more of an individual character than those of the Ring. Leitmotives are essential ingredients of
Wagner's musical fabric, which has been called "endless melody" and which is really a
replacement of authentic cadences with deceptive cadences or other modulations. Though
leitmotives sometimes occur in the voice part, they are usually embedded in the orchestra.
As the leitmotive is Wagner's most important external unifying device, tonality is his most
important means of internal structure. Wagner is often called a "chromatic composer," but
even in Tristan (his most notoriously chromatic work), he writes lengthy diatonic passages, as
in the parts associated with Kurvenal. In the more chromatic sections, Wagner achieves tonal
stability by using "tonal cells" which often consist of a major or minor triad (the tonic), usually
inverted, and containing either a leitmotive, a diminished or half-diminished seventh chord, or
a dominant seventh, also containing a leitmotive. This is followd by a deceptive cadence, after
which another character often sings, or an orchestral interlude occurs. The "open-ended"
leitmotives permit several possible resolutions: sometimes to the tonic, more often to the
dominant or to a new tonic through a deceptive cadence, or to a diminished-seventh chord,
which even in traditional practice has four possible resolutions. The longer leitmotives, like
those signifying "Valhalla" or "Siegfried's destiny" can be treated sequentially to give the effect
of rising tonal plateaus. When he interrupts the effect of tonal stability, he uses deceptive
cadences or coloristic harmony. Wagner was simply a genius at structuring harmonic
progressions and creating dramatic tension in his music dramas.
Richard Wagner remains for many the most fascinating figure in Nineteenth Century
music. His life and his music arouse passions like that of no other composer. Wagner's works
are hated as much as they are worshiped in the world, even today. His music is only now
resurfacing from a political setback, having been the music most strongly supported by and
endorsed personally by Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich. Hitler and Wagner shared many
common ideas about "racial purity" and antisemitism in general. But to Wagner, such ideas
were "theory" and not the basis of actions like those that Hitler imposed on the Jewry of
Europe. Hitler forbade performances of Parsifal in Bayreuth during World War II. He thought its
content was not appropriate to war time and to what he wanted the German people to believe.
As a man, Wagner was prepared to sacrifice his family and friends in the cause of his
own music, and he will never be known otherwise. But as a composer alone, he was a man of
great genius. However, it is understandable that since the formation of Israel as a modern
state, no composition by Richard Wagner has ever been performed in that country. Justice is
sometimes harsh.
One of the key figures in the history of opera, Wagner was largely responsible for altering
its orientation in the Nineteenth Century. His program of artistic reform, though not executed to
the last detail, accelerated the trend towards organically conceived, through-composed
structures, as well as influencing the development of the orchestra, of a new breed of singer,
and of various aspects of theatrical practice. As the most influential composer during the
second half of the Nineteenth Century, Richard Wagner's conception of music remains very
much with us even a century after his death. His style of orchestration, his intensely chromatic
harmonic pallet, and even his use of the leitmotiv can be heard in many movie scores,
neo-tonal symphonies, and modern program music of our time. Wagner thought his music
dramas were to be the models for Twentieth Century opera, but he could not foresee the path
of total abandonment of traditional harmony that was to revolutionize music in the early
Twentieth Century.
But in more recent days, with the widespread renaissance of tonality in serious music,
many familiar sounds of Wagnerian origins are evident in new compositions heard at
symphony concerts and on Hollywood sound tracks. It was not Wagner's style of vocal
composition in his music dramas that has remained so influential, but his orchestral language
of chromatic tension and release, his brilliant use of instrumental tone color, and his flair for
dramatic effects balanced with his long, sensually serene harmonic progressions that have
become a mainstay in the arsenal of modern composers.
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1813 as the son of a policeman,
Friedrich Wagner, who died soon after the composer's birth. It is both fitting and
psychologically congruous that a question mark should hover over the identity of the father and
mother of the composer whose works resonate so eloquently with themes of parental anxiety.
His mother remarried the painter-actor-poet, Ludwig Geyer, in August 1814. Many people
believe that Geyer was Wagner's biological father, since the mother and Geyer had been
friends long before Friedrich Wagner’s death. There is much evidence that Richard
believed this as well.
Wagner attended school in Dresden and then Leipzig. At age fifteen, he wrote a play,
and at sixteen he composed his first music: two piano sonatas and a string quartet. In 1831 he
attended Leipzig University, and he also studied piano and composition with the Cantor of St.
Thomas Choir School, C.T. Weinlig, but unlike many other prominent composers, he never
became proficient on this or any other instrument. Wagner's formal training in music was brief,
and he was largely a self-taught musician. He composed a symphony, and it was successfully
performed in 1832. In 1833 he was employed as the chorus master at the Würzburg theater
where he wrote the text and music of his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).
His first opera was never produced during Wagner's lifetime. It was first performed by
Hermann Levi in Munich in 1888. But his next opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love),
was staged in 1836. He made his debut as an opera conductor with a small company that
went bankrupt soon after performing his opera. Wagner married the singer, Minna Planer, in
1836 and went with her to Königsberg, where he became musical director at the city theater.
But he soon resigned from the position and took a similar post in Riga where he began his
next opera, Rienzi. In Riga he also gained much experience conducting the symphonies and
overtures of Beethoven. His marriage suffered from displays of his personal character as the
couple's financial debts mounted in Riga. Minna Wagner came to realize that her husband was
not only dishonest with money, but that he was irritable; he was tactless; he was a liar.
In 1839 the Wagners "slipped away" from creditors in Riga by ship to London and then
to Paris, where he was befriended by the composer, Meyerbeer. In Paris Wagner did musical
arranging for publishers and theaters. He also labored on the text and music of an opera
based on the "Flying Dutchman" legend. But in 1842 Rienzi, a large-scale opera with a
political theme, set in imperial Rome, was accepted for production in Dresden, and Wagner
went there for its highly successful premiere. Its theme reflects something of Wagner's own
politics (He was involved in the semi-revolutionary, intellectual "Young Germany" movement).
Die fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), produced the next year, was less well
received, though it was a much more well-constructed music drama than Rienzi. The
Dutchman began Wagner's movement away from the "number opera" tradition, and his style
was strong in its evocation of atmosphere, especially the supernatural and the raging seas.
The success of these two operas gained for Wagner the prestigious post as Orchestra
Conductor at the Dresden court.
Wagner was largely his own librettist in his music dramas, and the theme of redemption
through a woman's love, in The Dutchman, recurred in Wagner's works and perhaps his life
also. In 1845 Tannhäuser was completed and performed, and Lohengrin was begun. In both
of these music dramas, Wagner moved toward a more continuous texture with semi-melodic
narrative and a supporting orchestral fabric helping to convey its sense. In 1848 he was caught
up in political revolution, and the next year he fled to Weimar where Franz Liszt helped him.
Later he fled to Switzerland and also France. Politically suspect, Wagner was unable to return
to Germany for several years.
In Zürich during his exile of 1850, he wrote his ferociously antisemitic tract: Jewishness
in Music. Some passages of this short work were an attack on Meyerbeer, who had previously
befriended him in Paris. Also while in Zurich, he completed his basic statement on musical
theater, Opera and Drama. Wagner also began sketching the text and music for a series of
monumental operas based on the Nordic and Germanic myths. By 1853 the texts for this
four-night cycle of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung, were completed and published.
Wagner read his texts to his friends, among whom were his generous patrons, the wealthy
Swiss industrialist, Otto Wesendonck and his wife Mathilde.
Wagner became involved in an extramarital affair with Mathilde Wesendonck who had
fallen in love with him. Mrs. Wesendonck wrote love poems to Wagner that he set to music. He
also composed the Piano Sonata in A-Flat Major for Mathilde. This affair inspired the music
drama Tristan und Isolde which was first conceived in 1854 and completed five years later.
The basic plot of Tristan is the theme of forbidden love. By 1854 Wagner had completed more
than half of the music to The Ring. But he abandoned Siegfried in the middle of the second act
in 1857, not to resume work on this opera until 1869.
The twelve-year hiatus was filled by Tristan und Isolde (1859), originally intended as a
"practical" opera which would not require elaborate staging or scenery, and Die Meistersinger
(1861), Wagner's most beloved opera, hailed even by those who dislike his other works.
Wagner's new kind of opera had many antecedents: the "symphonic style" of the operas by
Mozart, Cherubini, and Beethoven; the continuous texture of Weber's Euryanthe and
Meyerbeer's mature operas, in which the boundaries between the "set-numbers" were blurred;
and the cyclic instrumental forms, with thematic linking, from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5
onward. Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where all operatic devices are united in a
whole, stemmed not only from Gluck's operas but also from the dramas of Goethe and Schiller
whose Die Braut von Messina of 1803 would have been the first Gesamtkunstwerk had there
been adequate musical and theatrical resources in Weimar. Even at his most innovative,
Wagner preserved links with the musical past. Wagner's vocal melody, often just another
strand in the orchestral texture and chiefly devoted to expressing the text, is sometimes
perfunctory.
In 1855 Wagner conducted in London, and tensions with his wife Minna led to a
prolonged stay in Paris where Minna eventually joined him in 1860. Wagner revived
Tannhäuser for the Paris Opera in 1861, but its production was a failure with Parisian
audiences, partly for political reasons. In 1862 he was freely allowed to return to Germany, and
that same year Wagner and Minna separated permanently. Minna could accept most aspects
of Wagner's less-than-sterling personal character, but she could not endure his marital
infidelity. In 1864 King Ludwig II invited Wagner to settle in Bavaria, near Munich. The king
paid all of the composer's considerable debts and agreed to provide Wagner with an annual
salary so he could be free to compose.
Wagner did not stay long in Bavaria, because of opposition at King Ludwig's court. This
disdain for the composer surfaced when it became public knowledge that he was having an
extramarital affair with Cosima Liszt von Bülow, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow and
daughter of Franz Liszt. Hans von Bülow (who condoned Wagner’s affair with his wife)
conducted the music at the premiere of Tristan und Isolde in 1865. Here Wagner developed a
style richer and more chromatic than anyone had previously attempted, using dissonance and
its urge for resolution in a continuing pattern to build up tension and a sense of profound
yearning.
Before returning to his composition of The Ring, Wagner composed The Mastersingers
of Nuremberg beginning in 1866. This work was in quite a different vein, a comedy set in
Sixteenth Century Nuremberg in which a noble poet-musician wins, through his victory in a
music contest, the hand of his beloved, fame, and riches. The analogy with Wagner's view of
himself is obvious. The music of Die Meistersinger is less chromatic than that of Tristan. It is
warm, good-humored, often contrapuntal, and unlike the mythological figures of his other
operas, the characters in Die Meistersinger have real humanity. The opera was premiered
with von Bülow as conductor in 1868.
Wagner had been living at Tribschen, near Lucerne, since 1866, and during this year his
estranged wife Minna died. Cosima von Bülow joined Wagner at Tribschen shortly after
Minna’s death, and she subsequently gave birth to two children before they were
married in 1870.
The first two Ring music dramas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were first performed
in 1869 in Munich, on King Ludwig's insistence, since Ludwig was still providing Wagner with
an annual salary years after their first acquaintance. Wagner was very anxious to have a
special festival opera house constructed for the complete cycle of The Ring, and he spent
much energy trying to raise money for it. Eventually, when he had almost despaired, Ludwig
came to the rescue, and in 1874, the year the fourth opera, Die Götterdämmerung (The
Twilight of the Gods), was finished, King Ludwig provided the necessary funds.
The theater was built at Bayreuth, and it was designed by Wagner himself as the home
for his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work). The first festival, an artistic triumph but
a financial disaster, was held there in 1876 when the complete Ring of the Nibelungs was
performed. The entire cycle of four music dramas comprised about eighteen hours of music
and was held together by an immensely detailed network of leitmotifs, each of which had some
allusive meaning. The leitmotifs change and develop as the ideas within the opera take shape.
They are heard in the orchestra, not merely as labels but carrying the action, sometimes
informing the listener of connections of ideas or the thoughts of those on the stage. It took
Wagner twenty-two years to complete The Ring entirely, and it stands as one of the most
remarkable and profoundly influential achievements in Western music. The drama cycle is not
just a story about gods, humans, and dwarfs, but it embodies reflections on every aspect of the
human condition. It has been interpreted as socialist, fascist, Jungian, prophetic, as a parable
about industrial society, and much more.
In 1877 Wagner conducted in London, hoping to recoup some of his Bayreuth losses.
Later in the year he began a final music drama, Parsifal. Wagner continued his musical and
political writings, concentrating on "racial purity" as his primary theme. He spent most of 1880
in Italy. Parsifal, a sacred music drama based on a theme of man's redemption through the
acts of communion and renunciation, was first performed at the Bayreuth Festival in 1882.
Wagner went to Venice following the festival and died there in February 1883 of heart failure.
His body was returned for burial at Bayreuth.
The Ring contains the most extensive use of leitmotives found in Wagner's works
because of the necessity for continuity in this long tetralogy depicting a mythological universe
divorced from mundane reality. Leitmotives are fewer in the other operas because they
depend so much on atmosphere (especially Tristan and Parsifal). There is less need for
recapitulatory reminiscences, and the few leitmotives used are even more striking and have
more of an individual character than those of the Ring. Leitmotives are essential ingredients of
Wagner's musical fabric, which has been called "endless melody" and which is really a
replacement of authentic cadences with deceptive cadences or other modulations. Though
leitmotives sometimes occur in the voice part, they are usually embedded in the orchestra.
As the leitmotive is Wagner's most important external unifying device, tonality is his most
important means of internal structure. Wagner is often called a "chromatic composer," but
even in Tristan (his most notoriously chromatic work), he writes lengthy diatonic passages, as
in the parts associated with Kurvenal. In the more chromatic sections, Wagner achieves tonal
stability by using "tonal cells" which often consist of a major or minor triad (the tonic), usually
inverted, and containing either a leitmotive, a diminished or half-diminished seventh chord, or
a dominant seventh, also containing a leitmotive. This is followd by a deceptive cadence, after
which another character often sings, or an orchestral interlude occurs. The "open-ended"
leitmotives permit several possible resolutions: sometimes to the tonic, more often to the
dominant or to a new tonic through a deceptive cadence, or to a diminished-seventh chord,
which even in traditional practice has four possible resolutions. The longer leitmotives, like
those signifying "Valhalla" or "Siegfried's destiny" can be treated sequentially to give the effect
of rising tonal plateaus. When he interrupts the effect of tonal stability, he uses deceptive
cadences or coloristic harmony. Wagner was simply a genius at structuring harmonic
progressions and creating dramatic tension in his music dramas.
Richard Wagner remains for many the most fascinating figure in Nineteenth Century
music. His life and his music arouse passions like that of no other composer. Wagner's works
are hated as much as they are worshiped in the world, even today. His music is only now
resurfacing from a political setback, having been the music most strongly supported by and
endorsed personally by Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich. Hitler and Wagner shared many
common ideas about "racial purity" and antisemitism in general. But to Wagner, such ideas
were "theory" and not the basis of actions like those that Hitler imposed on the Jewry of
Europe. Hitler forbade performances of Parsifal in Bayreuth during World War II. He thought its
content was not appropriate to war time and to what he wanted the German people to believe.
As a man, Wagner was prepared to sacrifice his family and friends in the cause of his
own music, and he will never be known otherwise. But as a composer alone, he was a man of
great genius. However, it is understandable that since the formation of Israel as a modern
state, no composition by Richard Wagner has ever been performed in that country. Justice is sometimes harsh.