The Short

Ex. 3.83. Liszt, Eine Faust-Symphonie, i, ‘Faust’
NOTATION OF ACCENTS AND DYNAMICS 131
he intended the sign to indicate a discrete vibrato (which also has some implication of accent 253 ): Heinrich Porges noted
in his account of the rehearsals for the première of the Ring in 1876 that at one point in Act III, Scene iii of Siegfried
‘The strokes [lines] above the E and B of “zitternd” indicate that here Wagner wanted that gentle vibrato—not to be
confused with the bad habit of tremolando—whose importance in expressive singing he often spoke of’ 254 (Ex. 3.84.)
Elsewhere, apart from his use of the horizontal line (instead of the conventional dot) under a slur for portato, the sign
may sometimes occur in Wagner's scores with a meaning similar to that envisaged by Liszt. According to transcriptions
of his instructions at rehearsals of Parsifal he asked at one point that the quavers should be ‘very sustained and held
[sehr getragen und
253
See Ch. 14, esp. pp. 518 ff .
254
Die Bühnenproben zu der Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876 (Chemnitz and Leipzig 1881–96), trans. Robert L. Jacobs as Wagner Rehearsing the ‘Ring’ (Cambridge, 1983), 109.