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OhOne hundred and fifty years ago this summer, Richard Wagner wanted to change the world. Not just country music, but country, political thought, even the idea of what it means to be human. Opening Bayreuth Festival it opened on 13 August 1876, with the first cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen composed by Wagner. Bayreuth Festival Hall in Bavaria. The first listeners were kings, queens, nobles and politicians as well as musicians and composers of Europe (Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Bruckner and Liszt among them). Wagner, who was a revolutionary on the streets of Dresden in the 1840s, wanted the four Ring songs to bring a new world, redeemed and creative with this great story of power, love, redemption, betrayal and renewal.
Wagner’s horrors are impossible to understand today. The stage design aside (having the musicians hidden in the pit and darkening the room were two of his innovations in Bayreuth) his writings are heard in the arts from the way Wagnerism affected the German philosophers and artists and poets of Paris in the 19th century, to the seismic changes that disrupted politics, and destroyed traditional politics. fire after his death in 1883.
But – a thought experiment – is it possible to imagine a world where Wagner never lived? What would happen if Bayreuth disappeared and the magical growth it caused; What will happen to music and culture in his absence?
First, Bavaria would have more money. King Ludwig manipulated the government into paying for Wagner’s dreams and peccadilloes. And, without Wagner, the composer would have been led by the difficult but generous master of piano and composition, Franz Liszt. Instead of Bayreuth, Liszt’s Weimar would have remained central to the nineteenth-century vision of the future of music. Liszt’s ego was big enough, but he didn’t come close to the narcissism and power of Wagner (whose marriage to Cosima made him Liszt’s daughter-in-law). The arena of Liszt’s inspired and admired musicians would have been better off in Wagner’s absence, while his symphonic poems and his later piano pieces would have taken their place in the late 1900s but never did. Instead of Wagner’s gigantism and verbosity, Liszt’s pieces are musical questions, stones thrown into the future.
Instead of looking at the late romantic ideas of progress and development, without Wagner to encourage them in the future, there would be a huge difference in the production of sound and vision. Without Bayreuth, the Great Exhibitions of Paris and London in the second half of the 19th century would have been very important in opening the creative mind to many musical cultures. Musical theaters in Russia and America, as well as in France and the UK, can be allowed to flourish without being weakened by what Thomas Adès called the “mushroom” of Wagner’s words and ideas. (It is a problem transformed into a mycelial essence: imagining a world without Wagner is like imagining. The Last of Us without mushrooms – he’s everywhere – he’s everywhere!)
The most important question is what music it will be noise as without Wagner. His world of shadows, constant expression, thoughts that are always created, just as his appearance is always with the change of thoughts and harmonics, is not for himself. Richard Strauss or Arnold Schoenberg would indeed have written the same music without Wagner, but they would have found their own worlds that connect without his influence, with very primitive languages, less in Wagner’s cosmology of ego and expression.
At this time at the beginning of the 20th century, a world without Wagner is similar to what Debussy and Stravinsky wanted – and what they found, when they acted against his influence as clearly as possible in their music. But without Wagner he would not have had the same power, so perhaps their music would have been obscured in his escapist career. Be careful what you wish for: a world without Wagner might be more – well, Wagnerian!
But that is only the beginning: no Wagner, no Bayreuth, no German religious shrine for Hitler to worship. Would Hitler have erected a shrine to his favorite composer, Franz Lehár, and his confectionary operettas instead? Or would Nazi poison have been used more dangerously on Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner? The impossibility of this project proves the point: a world without Wagner is unthinkable.
Almost. The historical champion in the anti-Wagner world is Brahms. His visions of the past and the future converge on a vague and complex perspective, his personal and political convictions against the rise of antisemitism that he saw in Vienna in the 1880s and 90s: this is a clear call for wisdom and a very different insight for Wagner. Brahms’s music – late piano pieces, songs, and orchestral instruments in particular – is an acceptance of the limits of what music can do, its ability to express the conflict of a moment of history and turn them into a story that does not dare to change the world, but instead can speak from one heart to another. Brahms’s vision is anti-utopian and sympathetic, unlike Wagner’s. Those are the qualities that the culture of that time, and the world today, need more than ever. Imagine a world without Wagner…
This week Tom has been listening to: pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s new album, Hourglassincluding work with Philip Glass and his string band Baroklyn. Listen to the final movement of the Tirol Concerto to hear the tempo, composition and counterpoint pushed to their limits. It’s music against the weaving of predictable patterns; more like a rollercoaster that is kept – just – on a track. Listen Spotify | | Apple Music Classical
