Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
The music of the Ring makes use of a large number of leitmotifs (or Grundthemen, as Wagner termed
them). These often act as musical symbols for various aspects of the drama, though Wagner himself
did not explain their meaning. Hans von Wolzogen (1848–1938), a close associate of Wagner, wrote
the first thematic guide to the Ring: it came out in 1876 and named all the recurring themes that he
could identify. Although Wolzogen’s work has been criticised for being too literal, many of the names
he gave to particular leitmotifs have been used by subsequent writers. Some of them represent
objects (gold, the ring itself, the sword, the Tarnhelm), others places (the Rhine, Valhalla) or people
(the Rhinemaidens, the giants, the Valkyries, Siegfried, the Wanderer, Mime, Hunding). Far more of
them, however, concern concepts or states of mind (nature, the renunciation of love, anxiety, youth,
love, sleep, freedom, Siegfried’s heroism, the downfall of the gods). Wagner made extensive use
of the Lisztian technique of thematic transformation, allowing him to show connections between
significant elements of the drama without the need to explain them in words. Sometimes these
are fairly obvious: the leitmotif that represents the downfall of the gods is an inversion of the Rhine
motif, which is itself a melodic in-filling of the nature motif (the broken chord of E flat major which
opens Das Rheingold). More often, however, the transformations are much more subtle, pointing to
a complex of relationships between people, events and ideas. The music thus acts as a continuous
commentary on the action and the true significance of particular events is often stated more clearly
by the orchestra than by the characters, who do not necessarily understand the full context of what
is happening at the time when it happens. This technique sometimes allows Wagner to show what a
character is thinking, but does not say. As the action unfolds and the characters begin to be caught
up in the consequences of their earlier deeds, the musical commentary becomes increasingly
complex. In the parts of the Ring that were composed after the twelve-year break, Wagner frequently
constructs long passages that contain several leitmotifs, often allowing more than one motif to
sound simultaneously through a careful manipulation of melody, harmony and counterpoint. The
discontinuity of style is therefore not altogether a negative point: with a greater range of technical and
stylistic means at his disposal, Wagner was able to compose music that matches every nuance of the
final stages of his extraordinarily intricate drama.
In the autumn of 1876 Wagner was exhausted, still further in debt and depressed at the number of
compromises he had been obliged to make so that his festival could take place at all. The audiences
of wealthy, paying patrons had been far from his vision of a German people united in their fervour for
his new art form and there seemed little prospect of repeating the event the following year. He visited
London in 1877 for a series of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, but these raised only a tiny fraction of
the money he needed to pay off the costs of the festival. At one point he even contemplated leaving
his problems behind him and emigrating to America. The financial problems were eventually solved
by an arrangement with the Court Theatre in Munich, which gave Wagner a royalty on performances
in exchange for the right to perform his works without charge.
Meanwhile Wagner’s thoughts had turned to a drama which he had first encountered in 1845, when
he read the epic poem Parzifal, attributed to Wolfram von Eschenbach (c.1170–c.1220). It deals with
the quest for the Holy Grail by Parzifal (the Percival of the Arthurian legend). Wagner had used part
of this poem as the basis for Lohengrin (who is identified by Wolfram as Parzifal’s son). The original
prose sketch for a music drama based on the Parzifal legend dated from 1857, though it has not
survived; a more complete draft was written at the request of Ludwig II in 1865. This was elaborated
in 1877 (at which point Wagner changed the spelling of the name to Parsifal) and the complete poem
was finished in April 1878. Composition of the music was largely finished by April 1879 and the
orchestration was mainly carried out between then and January 1882.
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