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German Opera

Mozart’s Singspiele, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) and Die Zauberflöte (1791) were an important breakthrough in achieving international recognition for German opera. The tradition was developed in the 19th century by Beethoven with his Fidelio, inspired by the climate of the French Revolution. Carl Maria von Weber established German Romantic opera in opposition to the dominance of Italian bel canto. His Der Freischütz (1821) shows his genius for creating a supernatural atmosphere.

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (22 May 1813–13 February 1883)  a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor  is primarily known for his operas. Some of  his later works were  known as “music dramas”.. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionized opera through his concept of the Wagner was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history. Starting under the influence of Weber and Meyerbeer, he gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”),  a synthesis of the poetic, visual, musical, and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. Wagner realized this  idea  most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle  Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). He greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of leitmotifs, recurring themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama. He also was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such atonality, in his quest for greater expressiveness.  In  his mature music dramas, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, he  abolished the distinction between aria and recitative in favor of a seamless flow of “endless melody.”
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Wagner also brought a new philosophical dimension to opera in his works, which were usually based on stories from Germanic or Arthurian legend.

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Wagner’s influence on  future composers:  Tristan and Isolde

His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centers, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.  See Powerpoint (slides 9-17)  in the previous topic “Verdi and Italian Opera”  (Go to  end of this page for the  Powerpoint pages).              https://courses.lumenlearning.com/vccs-tcc-music-rford/wp-admin/post.php?post=1483&action=edit

Wagner built his own opera house at Bayreuth – the Bayreuth Festspielhaus –  which embodied many novel design features, exclusively dedicated to performing his own works in his style.  It was here that the Ringand Parsifal received their premieres and where his most important stage works continue to be performed in an annual festival run by his descendants. His thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera changed  again, when he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).

Figure 3. Gustav Mahler

Wagner inspired great devotion. For a long period, many composers were inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner’s music. Anton Bruckner,  César Franck,  Jules Massenet, and  Richard Strauss  were greatly indebted to him. Gustav Mahler was also devoted to Wagner and his music; aged 15, he sought him out on his 1875 visit to Vienna, became a renowned Wagner conductor. Wagner’s  compositions are seen by Richard Taruskin as extending  his “maximization” of “the temporal and the sonorous” in music to the world of the symphony. The harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (both of whose oeuvres contain examples of tonal and atonal modernism) have often been traced back to Tristanand Parsifal. The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo also  owed much to the Wagnerian concept of musical form.

Wagner also  made a major contribution to the principles and practice of conducting. His essay “About Conducting” (1869) advanced Hector Berlioz’s technique of conducting and claimed that conducting was a means by which a musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism for achieving orchestral unison. He exemplified this approach in his own conducting, which was significantly more flexible than the disciplined approach of Mendelssohn; in his view this also justified practices that would today be frowned upon, such as the rewriting of scores. Wilhelm Furtwängler felt that Wagner and Bülow, through their interpretative approach, inspired a whole new generation of conductors (including Furtwängler himself).

Tristan and Isolde

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Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde, or Tristan and Isolda, or Tristran and Ysolt) is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the romance by Gottfried von Straßburg. It was composed between 1857 and 1859. Wagner referred to the work not as an opera, but called it “eine Handlung” (literally a drama, a plot or an action).  Tristan und Isolde was inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (particularly The World as Will and Representation) and Wagner’s affair with Mathilde Wesendonck. Tristan was notable for Wagner’s unprecedented use of chromaticism, harmonic suspension,  tonality, and  orchestral color.

The opera  provided direct inspiration to composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg and Benjamin Britten while . other composers like Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky formulated their styles in contrast to Wagner’s musical legacy. Many see Tristan as the beginning of the move away from common practice harmony and tonality and consider that it lays the groundwork for the direction of classical music in the 20th century. Both Wagner’s libretto style and music were also profoundly influential on the Symbolist poets of the late 19th century and early 20th century.

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T

” Liebestod” ([ˈliːbəsˌtoːt] German for “love death”) is the title of the final, dramatic music from the 1859 opera Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner. When used as a literary term,liebestod (from German Liebe, love and Tod, death) refers to the theme of erotic death or “love death” meaning the two lovers’ consummation of their love in death or after death. Other two-sided examples include Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, and to some degree Wuthering Heights. One-sided examples are Porphyria’s Lover and The Sorrows of Young Werther. The joint suicide of Heinrich von Kleist and lover Henriette Vogel (de) is often associated with the Liebestod theme.

The aria is the climactic end of the opera as Isolde sings over Tristan’s dead body. Note the extreme chromaticism and  continuous modulation from  one tonality  to another

Opera after Wagner – Strauss

Opera would never be the same after Wagner and for many composers his legacy proved a heavy burden. On the other hand, Richard Strauss accepted Wagnerian ideas but took them in wholly new directions. He first won fame with the scandalous Salome and the dark tragedy Elektra, in which tonality was pushed to the limits. Then Strauss changed tack in his greatest success, Der Rosenkavalier, where Mozart and Viennese waltzes became as important an influence as Wagner. Strauss continued to produce a highly varied body of operatic works, often with libretti by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The operatic innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and his successors are discussed in the section on modernism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_pr%C3%A9ludes

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