Composer, dramatist and theoretician, during his lifetime Richard Wagner (1813-1883) cultivated his own legend, the myth of an exceptional figure at the origin of one of the richest and most complex oeuvres. He revolutionised opera, as much in its form as in its writing and thus marked a genuine turning point in the history of music. An overview of the career of a man who still arouses passions.

A figure both reviled and adulated, Richard Wagner remains a mysterious and controversial character. Born in Leipzig in 1813, he attended the Kreuzschule in Dresden and the Thomaschule in Leipzig, took piano and harmony lessons and began composing in 1829. Passionate about dramatic art, in 1833 he obtained his first post as a chorus master in Wurzbourg and composed his first opera, Das Feen, the same year.

Even today, his place in the history of music is far from being universally acknowledged: “Wagner: a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn”, wrote Debussy. But what is the truth of the matter? Did Wagner open up new perspectives or did he in fact offer a synthesis of existing models?

Unlike Ravel, for example, for many years Wagner pursued an ideal that he forged through his contact with various personalities. His first work, Das Feen (1833), testifies to his admiration for Weber and Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony, given that Wagner aimed to reconcile opera with symphonic principles, would remain a model for him. His second opera, however, Das Liebesverbot, (1836) based on Shakespeare, was influenced by both French and Italian opera. Indeed, Wagner, who wrote his own libretti, felt the need to dip into different artistic fields to give his personality full expression. A few years later, he made the following remark: “The reconciliation of these two opposing tendencies had to be the work of the ensuing evolution of my art.” The same eclecticism is also to be observed in Rienzi (1842), a grand opera composed in Paris, where Wagner discovered and admired the music of Berlioz, having appreciated that of Meyerbeer and Auber, some of whose works, like La Muette de Portici (1828), tended towards the total art form to which he aspired.

With The Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin 1850), Wagner broadened and diversified his orchestral writing, which remains the area in which his contribution is the most notable. As for the other parameters of his operas, he wisely appropriated the innovations of his predecessors. In order to fluidify the dramatic narrative, he followed and sublimated Gluck’s reforms, firstly by unifying the general structure, made up of juxtaposed scenes in which arias and vocal ensembles emerge; then in enlarging the recitative. He also took up a procedure used by the French composer Étienne Nicolas Méhul, whom he considered to be one of his “preceptors” and developed it systematically. In order to ensure the unity of a score more solidly, recurrent motifs – the famous leitmotifs – associated for example with a character or an emotion, little by little lend expression to the orchestral fabric which, like the chorus in antique tragedy, comment on or prefigure the action. His encounter with Franz Liszt, with whom he became very close, was then a determining factor to the point of reducing him to silence for nearly ten years. Impressed by the music of the Hungarian composer, Wagner complexified his harmonic language and gradually applied the theories laid down in the many essays he wrote around 1850. The fruit of this evolution, Tristan and Isolde, reflects as much his discovery of the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer as his impossible love for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a Swiss patron who received him in Zurich and gave him asylum after the 1849 insurrection in Dresden. Completed in 1859, but not performed until 1865, thanks to Louis II of Bavaria, “Tristan” aroused both admiration and incomprehension because of its immense musical complexity. Wagner’s music belonged to “the school of pandemonium” according to Berlioz who, with regard to the prelude to “Tristan”, confessed his incomprehension: “I read and reread these strange pages; I listened with the most profound attention and a vivid desire to discover the meaning; well, I have to admit it, I still have not the slightest idea as to what the author intended.”

After such a work of personal commitment, Wagner composed a comedy, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, first performed in Munich in 1868. The opera portrays prosperous love and pays tribute to medieval Germany. In the meantime, Wagner began living with one of Liszt’s daughters, Cosima, twenty-four years his junior, and whose husband, the conductor Hans von Bülow had conducted the first performances of “Tristan” and “Mastersingers”. Cosima, who bore him three children, would jealously guard the composer’s heritage.

Wagner’s interest in Germanic sources, although mythological this time, was consolidated in the composition of the imposing cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, comprising a prologue and three operas to be performed over four days: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. The prologue relates the original sin: the gold, which ensures the power and immortality of the gods, has been stolen by the Nibelung, Alberich who, in exchange, renounces love. In the three other operas, Wotan, the supreme god, tries to safeguard his power but, realising that his struggle is vain, resigns himself to the demise of the gods. Although the first two works were premiered in 1869 and 1870 respectively, the two others were first performed in 1876 in the premier production of the entire cycle, in honour of the opening of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, which was built with the help of Louis II of Bavaria. Wagner’s prestige was then at its height and composers like Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky were present at the event. Others, like Massenet, Debussy, Richard Strauss and Puccini were soon to make the journey which rapidly acquired the status of a pilgrimage, such was the lasting impression made by the German composer, despite the fierce hatred he elicited, notably in France after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

His work only became all the more imposing and admirable. The apparent stylistic disparity existing between Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung which, with Act III of Siegfried, inherited the fruits of the research carried out in “Tristan”, is erased by a vast thematic web of a hundred or so leitmotifs that irrigate the entire cycle. The exceptional acoustics of the Festspielhaus also enhance an orchestration both subtle and majestic and which requires no less than eight horns and a large ensemble of brass instruments some of which, the Wagner-tuben, were conceived by Wagner himself. This admirable work of orchestral and thematic construction can be seen once more in Parsifal, composed specifically for Bayreuth. First performed on August 26^th 1882, this “Bühenweihfestpiel” (literally “Sacred and festive play”) portrays the initiatory quest of a Christian hero, but seems also to glorify the personage of Wagner himself, whose narcissism and megalomania irritated a fair number of his contemporaries, Nietzsche for one. The beauty of the score, however, subjugated many a musician: “One hears in it orchestral sonorities that are unique, unexpected, noble and strong,” admitted Debussy, “It is one of the most beautiful monuments of sound that has ever been erected to the imperturbable glory of music.”

At Wagner’s death, on February 18^th 1883, the composer’s influence already exceeded the domain of opera, since Bruckner and then Mahler have succumbed to it in their symphonies. Above all, his operas constituted models that were overpowering for young dramatic composers who liberated themselves from them with difficulty. By building up his oeuvre progressively from examples furnished by his predecessors, however, Wagner provided the key to his success, as Massenet did not fail to point out to his pupils, including Charles Koechlin who quoted his words: “In his first works, Wagner learns the craft of others. In Lohengrin he possesses it. In Tristan and Isolde he learns his own: moments of clumsiness and discoveries of genius. This craft that is all his own, he possesses it from “Mastersingers” onwards. Which proves that, in order to go far, one must “begin by taking the pathway that others have laid down.” 

Whilst in the midst of writing the libretto of Das Rheingold, Wagner stated that he was “one of those people for whom the very idea of capital associated with dividends is a perfectly immoral phenomenon” (letter to Julie Ritter, 9/12/1851). In accordance with this, his artistic oeuvre did not remain indifferent to either the phenomena of rampant industrialisation in the second half of the 19th century, or the rising tide of the capitalist system. Although the scenario of the Ring draws on ancient Germanic and Scandinavian myths, Wagner brings them up to date in a rather spectacular manner, and stages a veritable allegory of the 19th century world, placing much emphasis on the questioning of power relationships and the place of man and nature in modern society.

Qualified by his contemporaries as a “modern romantic realist” (Eduard Krüger), and even as the “Courbet of music” (François-Joseph Fétis), in the Ring, Wagner offers us moments that illustrate in striking manner, both realist and poetic, the world of industry. In the scene of the Nibelheim in particular, he paints a truly sombre picture of a universe in which the proletariat is ruthlessly exploited by the new dominant class, embodied by Alberich. Everything is there: the deafening racket of the forges, the columns of vapour and the stench of sulphur, the foggy half-light interrupted by showers of sparks, not forgetting the piercing cries of the Nibelungen people enslaved by a tyrannical and megalomaniac master.

The composer himself suggests a parallel between the forges of the Nibelheim and the industrial sites that sprang up throughout Europe in the second half of the 19th century. During a trip to London in 1877, he lingered over the spectacle of the industrial and commercial activity spreading over the banks of the Thames and exclaimed: “It is here that Alberich’s dream has been accomplished. Nibelheim, world domination, activity, labour, everywhere one perceives the pressure of steam and fog” (Cosima Wagner’s Journal).

References to economic relations in the modern capitalist world are not, however, limited to a few isolated tableaux, however spectacular they may be; they underpin the entire Cycle and are articulated around an important symbol, the ring. It is around the latter that cupidity, egotism and the desire for power in all its forms, are crystallised. In one of his last essays, Know Thyself (1881), the composer qualifies gold as the “demon strangling manhood’s innocence” and compares the ring of the Nibelung to a “stockmarket portfolio”. The ring is a symbol, and as such presents two facets: it is a visible object that attracts the eye (the material dimension is essential to any symbol), but it also refers to something abstract, which allows it to crystallise any number of fantasies, in particular the desire for possession and power. In a paraphrase of Karl Marx in Das Kapital, one could argue that Alberich’s ring, a seemingly simple object, is in fact a sort of fetish, “a highly complex thing, full of metaphysical subtleties”. In Wagner, the particularity of this symbol resides in its fluidity, in its capacity for constant circulation, passing rapidly from hand to hand – a quality it shares with money and shares. 

Contrary to the theories of the laws of modern economics, the circulation of the ring does not take place within a framework of freely consented exchanges, but in a violent manner, through brutal dispossession and even through murder. Taking up Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous formula, “Property is theft”, in the Ring, Wagner shows that gold cannot be owned if it has been stolen from others. After the original crime, Alberich’s theft of the gold, it is Wotan who steals the ring from the Nibelung; under constraint, the master of the gods is forced to give up the treasure he has stolen from Alberich to the giants in order to pay the debt he owes them; Fafner then slaughters Fasolt to become sole possessor of the ring; Siegfried then kills Fafner, takes the ring and offers it to Brünnhilde, before wrenching it out of her hands in a scene of unprecedented violence, akin to rape. Finally, Gunther and Hagen make a vain attempt to take possession of the ring over Siegfried’s corpse, thus precipitating their own downfall.

In Wagner, the theory of free competition characteristic of modern capitalism takes on the hideous face of relationships of pitiless rivalry, constructed out of wickedness, hatred, violence and attempts at destabilisation, whether between Alberich and his brother Mime or his son Hagen, between Fafner and his brother Fasolt, between Siegfried and Mime, his adoptive father, or between Wotan and Alberich. To these damaged relationships, to this alienation of people in relation to others must be added the self-alienation of the individual: during the two final days of the Ring, Alberich, the all-powerful master of the Nibelungen, is no more than a miserable vagabond devoured by desire and rancour; Wotan, for his part, is transformed into a ghost-like voyager, the powerless spectator of his own, ineluctable downfall; in Götterdämmerung, Siegfried, the incarnation of innocence and spontaneity, becomes a party to (and consenting victim of) the sordid intrigues contrived by Hagen. But the most spectacular metamorphosis is that of Fafner, the giant, transformed, after having taken possession of the ring, into a hideous dragon and reduced to a somnolent existence. Indeed, the phrase he utters when Wotan and Alberich come to awaken him has become emblematic of the attitude of the capitalist slumped over his accumulated wealth: “I lie here and I possess. Let me sleep.”

The ring’s victims are victims first and foremost of their own cupidity and have no more than a spectral existence, as if the ring has emptied them of their vital substance in order to feed itself. One is reminded here of Karl Marx’s famous analysis (an author that Wagner had not read but with whose theories he was, to all evidence, familiar): “...all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment.” (1844 Manuscripts). Without using irony with the same skill as Marx, in an essay published in 1848, Wagner affirmed that the “emancipation of the human species” could not be accomplished until the “demoniac notion of money” had faded like a bad dream provoked by “an evil nocturnal gnome”.