The complete idiot's guide to classical music (62 page)

I am Lohengrin, he tells the assemblage, the son of Parsifal (the old man would later get a whole Wagner opera to himself) and a Knight of the Holy Grail.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Being a Knight of the Holy Grail meant that he was a member of a brotherhood of chaste heroes who serve as protectors of the sacred chalice from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. Religious scholars maintain that the Grail was not the chalice out of which He drank, but the platter off which He ate. Still, it’s Wagner’s opera, so a chalice it is.

These knights are granted superhuman powers when defending innocent people, but once their secret is revealed, they must return to their sanctuary. Since Elsa demanded that knowledge, Lohengrin’s spell is broken, and even as she tries to talk him out of leaving, the swan appears. With evil glee, Ortrud reveals that the swan is none other than Elsa’s brother Gottfried, whom Ortrud herself had transformed by witchcraft. When Lohengrin kneels in prayer, the swan disappears and Gottfried steps out of the river; as the knight departs, the boat now drawn by a dove of peace, Elsa falls lifeless into her brother’s arms.

With
Tristan and Isolde,
Wagner broke entirely with operatic traditions of the past. There are no arias, no set pieces, no formal ensemble numbers, and just “endless melody” (Wagner’s own term) and interwoven leitmotifs conceived within a symphonic texture.

Tristan was a Knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, who slew dragons, wrote poems, hunted wild boar, saved maidens in distress, and did all the other things that knights were supposed to do. Then he happened to drink a teeny tiny bit of love potion and . . . but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

As the opera opens, Tristan is bringing the Princess Isolde from Ireland to Cornwall, where she will become the wife of Tristan’s uncle, the aging King Marke. This was not their first meeting, however. Tristan had killed Isolde’s fiancé in battle, and overcoming her own desire for revenge, Isolde had nursed the wounded Tristan back to health. Now, anger wells up in her again, since the marriage to Marke is decidedly against her will, and she orders her servant Brangane (who happens to be a sorceress on the side) to prepare poison drinks for Tristan and herself. Brangane can’t bring herself to do this, so she substitutes a love potion for the poison (the vessel with the pestle?), and instead of death, it is passion that binds Tristan and Isolde together.

Potion or no potion, Isolde marries King Marke during the intermission, and Act II begins in the castle garden on a clear summer night. Summer nights and love potions are an irresistible combination, so while the King is off hunting, Tristan and Isolde surrender to the strength of their passion, not even noticing the daylight rising around them. They awaken to be confronted by the King and his henchman, Melot. The King condemns Tristan to exile, but Melot hungers for blood and challenges Tristan to a duel. Tristan deliberately lowers his guard and allows himself to be wounded. Taken to his father’s castle, and lying near death, Tristan hears that Isolde is coming to be with him. As her ship approaches, he tears off his bandages and rises to meet her, only to fall and die in her arms. The King arrives, having learned about the love potion and ready to allow the lovers to reunite, but it is too late, Isolde sings her final lament (the exquisite “Liebestod” or “Love Death”) before falling across the body of her beloved.

Remember the troubadours and their song contest? Back in those days “Son of Tannhauser” or “Tannhauser II” wouldn’t have passed muster, so Wagner moved his new story about troubadours and their song contest to the 16th century and called it
Die Meistersinger.
He again took one of its main characters—the poet-cobbler Hans Sachs—from German history, and he called the whole thing a comedy, although the critics were not especially amused. “Its horrendous caterwauling,” said one of them, “could not be surpassed even if all the organ grinders of Berlin were locked up in the same room, each playing a different waltz.”

Never mind. The Overture to
Die Meistersinger
remains one of the most famous and oft-recorded of all Wagnerian excerpts, and its majestic tones set the stage for the pomp and ceremony of the Mastersingers convocation. As the familiar strains fade, the curtain rises on Nuremberg around 1550, where the young knight Walther von Stolzing is in love with Eva Pogner, the goldsmith’s daughter. Eva returns his affection, but her father has other plans: He has promised to marry her to the winner of the Mastersingers’ competition on the following day. Walther decides to enter the contest, but he is not too hopeful. It takes years to work your way up from apprentice to full master’s status, and besides, the competition has all sorts of complicated rules and regulations that put outsiders at a considerable disadvantage.

At the preliminary hearings, Walther sings a romantic ode to spring, impressing Hans Sachs with its honesty and originality. Leading the pedantic Sixtus Beckmesser, is another suitor for Eva’s hand, who takes extravagant note of Walther’s “mistakes” (i.e., variations from the niggling regulations), and convinces the others that Walther is an unfit candidate for the competition.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
In the original libretto, the pompous Beckmesser character was named Hans Lick, causing one famous anti-Wagner critic to stalk out of the room at an early reading. His name was Eduard Hanslick.

In Act II, Walther and Eva have confessed their love to Hans Sachs, as well as their plans to elope. When Beckmesser comes around to serenade Eva, she gets her maid, Maddalena, to impersonate her. Beckmesser’s attempted love song is thwarted by Sachs, who constantly interrupts it with hammerings on his last, and when Maddalena’s fiancé witnesses the scene, he naturally assumes that Beckmesser’s song is intended for his intended, and gives him a good thrashing. In all the confusion, Eva and Walther figure that it’s a good time to get away, but Sachs wisely stops them.

The next day, in Sach’s workshop, Walther tells the cobbler of a glorious song that came to him in a dream. Sachs copies down the first two verses (Walther improvises the third verse when Eva arrives). When Beckmesser shows up, he filches the stanzas that cobbler had notated, and the clever Sachs gives him permission to use it as his own. This he does, producing such ugly sounds, and messing up the text so badly that he becomes the center of ridicule. Desperately, he lashes out at Sachs, who reveals the truth, and invites Walther to present the noble love song in proper form. This he does in the celebrated “Prize Song,” the piece and its composer are hailed by the assemblage, and in an appropriately happy ending (we told you this was a comic opera), the songwriter gets the girl of his dreams.

Remember Lohengrin and his miraculous powers as a Knight of the Holy Grail? If not, please go back and read that part of the chapter again, so we don’t have to explain all the stuff again. Don’t worry. We’ll wait for you.

Parsifal
, as we started saying, takes place in and around the castle of Monsalvat in the Pyrenees, where resides the Holy Grail. The Knights sworn to guard it, when they’re not sallying forth doing good deeds and protecting the innocent, are bound by vows of purity in mind and spirit. King Amfortas has fallen from this high estate, having set out to storm the castle of the magician Klingsor but instead been seduced by one of the sirens Klingsor kept around the place for just such eventualities. What’s worse, Amfortas had been carrying the sacred spear that he thrust into Christ’s side during the Crucifixion, and when Klingsor wrested it from him, Amfortas received a wound that has never healed. Although he has tried every balm and curative he can find, the word is out that he can only be cured by a touch of the spear that wounded him, and further, that the spear can only be regained by an innocent, completely naive hero, a “Pure Fool.”

In comes a lad, who killed one of the swans, not realizing that the guardians of the Grail held all animals sacred. Chastised by Gurnemanz, one of the Knights, the boy destroys his bow and arrow in penitence, and when questioned, says that he has been raised in the wilderness and knows nothing of the world, not even his own name. Suspecting that here might be the Pure Fool destined to heal Amfortas, Gurnemanz leads him to the castle to witness the solemn ritual of displaying the Grail for adoration by the Knights. The youth watches in silence, understanding nothing of the proceedings, and is driven from the castle.

Soon he has wandered into the enchanted gardens of Klingsor’s castle, and meets some of the flower maidens who tease, taunt, and try to seduce him without success. Klingsor, though, is ready with his ultimate weapon, sending out Kundry. She is a kind of double agent, an ugly messenger when she serves the pious knights, but a supernaturally beautiful siren in the magician’s employ. Initially reluctant to lead the naive youth into sin, Kundry eventually rises to the challenge, reminding Parsifal, for that is his name, of his mother’s love, and how it can be recaptured in her. Then she kisses him. That much of a fool Parsifal isn’t; finally realizing what’s going on, he pushes her away, and Kundry, not used to such rejection, calls on Klingsor to take action. The magician obligingly hurls Amfortas’ spear at Parsifal, but miraculously, the weapon stops in mid-air. The lad seizes it, and the enchantments are broken, with only Kundry left lying on the ground.

As time passes, Gurnemanz finds Kundry near the mountain of the Grail and revives her. Parsifal arrives in full armor, which Amfortas asks him to remove because it is Good Friday. Recognizing Parsifal, Gurnemanz tells him that the Knights of the Grail have despaired ever since Amfortas, anguished and tormented by the still-bleeding wound, has been unable to celebrate the ritual of the Grail. Indeed, the King’s father, Titurel, has died of grief. When Parsifal enters the castle to attend Titurel’s funeral, he finds Amfortas and heals his wound by touching it with the sacred spear. Parsifal is then anointed King of the Grail in his place, unveiling the Holy Grail and renewing its ritual. A white dove appears in the sky, hovering over the castle, while Kundry, penitent and free at last from Klingsor’s enchantment, is forgiven for her sins and redeemed in death.

For more than a quarter of a century, with time out for writing other operas, songs, and instrumental pieces, Wagner worked on the mighty epic that we know as the Ring Cycle. Calling it a wonderwork, Franz Liszt said that, “
The Ring of the Niebelung
overtops and commands our whole art-epoch even as Mont Blanc does our other mountains.” It was an apt comment, even allowing for a certain family prejudice (Wagner had run off with Liszt’s daughter, had three children by her, and married her. In that order.).

The crowning glory of Wagner’s creative life fused elements of mythology, symbolism, poetry, and philosophy. It brought the leitmotif system into its most intricate and effective usage, and exploded the confining boundaries of the operatic stage. In terms of length, complexity, grandeur of design, and sheer intensity of emotional expression, the four Ring operas are unparalleled in the history of the art. Musically, they contain pages of breathtaking beauty and overwhelming power; dramatically (to quote the composer’s grandson, Wieland Wagner) they comprise “a crime story and chiller of the first order—blood, murder, and sex, with more surprise and suspense than a James Bond thriller.”

The genesis of the Ring opera is a fascinating story in itself. Intrigued by various legends and folk sagas of German and Scandinavian extraction, Wagner fashioned a libretto in 1848 called
Siegfried’s Death
. Three years later, realizing that the subject was too expansive for a single opera, he wrote another dramatic poem to preface it, called
The Young Siegfried.
Eventually,
Young Siegfried
, minus the adjective, became the third Ring opera;
Siegfried’s Death
, now dubbed
Gotterdammerung
(Twilight of the Gods) the fourth. Still later, Wagner decided that the lineage of his hero needed further elucidation, so he wrote
Die Walkure
(The Valkyries) to precede the other two. Finally, he prepared the text of
Das Rheingold
(The Rhinegold), describing it as a “preliminary evening” to the trilogy.