It was a beautiful day today in the City of Angels, boys and girls. It wasn't too hot in the Valley, and it was even more pleasant downtown. I should know. I hopped on the subway this afternoon and headed downtown to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for an Opera League seminar on Siegfried, part three of Wagner's Ring Cycle, which LA Opera will be staging later this month as well as next month. As for the station fire, which I'm sure you've been reading about in the news no matter where you live, it's still going, but it's not as--how shall I say?--influential as it was a week ago, when my mom was still here on vacation. Last weekend we went to Encino on her last day here, and you could easily see the station fire umpteen miles away in the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. It looked like an atomic mushroom cloud. It didn't look all that different today, only the smoke from the fire wasn't permeating the atmosphere. Indeed, the sky was a vivid blue. And you could easily make out the details of the hills and mountains.
It was a packed house on the fifth floor of the Chandler, the salon level, as they say, where they have this huge plush banquet hall where I've now been several times for seminars since becoming an Opera League member a couple years ago. They've also got a kitchen up there, which I suppose is logical considering it's a banquet hall, but I never noticed it before. You had servers decked out in their best black and whites rushing back and forth through the swinging metal door with the little window in it. Further down the hall look to be a bunch of offices. I've yet to venture down that far. Next time I'll have to make a point of doing just that.
As always, Dr. Allan Edmiston stepped up onto the makeshift stage in front of the windows overlooking the Music Center plaza and told everyone, in his soft-spoken way, to sit down and be quiet. Of course he's much more gentle than that. The vast majority of Opera League members are of retirement age so it's not like he's got a rowdy bunch to corral or anything. Still, a good bunch of them are usually women who come with their women friends. And do they love to chat or what? So the flipside of his soft-spoken coin is that he typically has to repeat himself a few times to get everyone to take their seats.
Allan's a pretty unassuming guy for someone so accomplished. Check it out. He's a USC-trained cardiologist who's served as the head honcho in cardiology at both Huntington Memorial in Pasadena and Methodist Hospital in Arcadia. Originally from Illinois, he came out to L.A. for his training at SC and apparently never looked back. Pasadena's been his home for a long time now. For you non-LAers out there, it's pretty easy to reach downtown LA from Pasadena, just a quick shot down the 110 Pasadena Freeway. According to the Opera League site, Doc is a seminar consultant and "opera docs coordinator." Not sure what the latter means. But as you can tell, working around the clock to keep people's hearts pumping can't deter this guy from getting his operatic ya-yas out.
The first thing he talked about was Siegfried. An event like this has got to be right up Doc's alley as he is a die hard Wagner fan. They've got this society here in Southern California called......wait for it......The Wagner Society of Southern California. Doc's a member of that, and I think last year or the year before he was the president. He talked about how Siegfried used to be THE opera that any company worth its salt would stage. The Met circa 1900 was still a mostly German company. It wasn't even twenty years old at that point. And they would put on Siegfried, sometimes as part of the Ring, other times just on its own, and it always sold out. He also couldn't help plugging the Ring Festival Los Angeles, a city-wide event taking place next May and June, at the end of the 2009-10 season, when LA Opera will stage the Ring in its entirety three times over the course of three or so weeks. Dozens of companies and vendors throughout L.A. will be taking part in this festival. It's still a little vague to me what exactly that all means, but I sure am excited to find out.
As this was the first Opera League seminar of the 2009-10 season, which officially kicks off next Saturday with a production of Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore (The Elixir of Love), Doc's main order of business was to introduce us to the brand new League president, a kat called Lieb, Judy Lieb. A petit lil' thing, around sixty or so with a dark bob, Judy is Orange County born and bred. For a long time she was the school administrator in Buena Park. She still consults with the Orange County Board of Education. She came up and plugged the various props on display on the back tables. These props were used in LA Opera's production of The Birds back in April. Indeed, one of my April posts on this very blog is about the League seminar on The Birds, a week before I saw the production. It wasn't bad. And the props sure looked interesting, including that giant bird claw on a pole, but alas, I just don't have the budget to buy opera props at this juncture. Anyway, Judy seems like a smart and sweet gal. I'm sure the League will do just fine with her at the helm.
While she had the mic, Judy introduced us to a woman in the audience named Julie Benson, a volunteer from Chicago's resident opera company, Chicago Lyric Opera. Julie's just become president of Opera Volunteers International. We all clapped when she stood up, but she didn't give a talk or anything. This Opera Volunteers International, by the way, is a pretty big deal. LA Opera takes part in their events. They had an article about it in the most recent issue of Bravo, the LA Opera newsletter.
The seminar was split into two lectures, each examining various aspects of Siegfried. The first lecture was given by Simon Williams, a middle-aged Englishman who teaches drama at UC Santa Barbara. I've seen him here before. Simon's a very articulate and animated guy. Dude is obviously passionate about his subject matter. His lecture was called "Siegfried and the Problem of Fear." As you'll see, more than just fear, the bigger theme at work here is Siegfried as a drama, how it works, how it doesn't work, and pluses and minuses of the title character as a dramatic figure. So in other words, Simon's whole thing was about the storytelling aspects of the opera. The second lecture, called "The Music of Siegfried" by Mitchell Morris, was about exactly that. But more on Mitchell's lecture in a bit. First, let's deal with Simon.
Siegfried and the Problem of Fear - Simon Williams
Simon didn't pull any punches. He said right up front that he wanted to tell us why Siegfried, while it is a terrific piece of work, is actually the most flawed of the four Ring operas. He cited four main flaws. First, it's male dominated. You don't have a single female character enter the stage until the end of act two. Secondly, there isn't much of a cast to speak of. It's all about this one character. Siegfried. Although he did temper that by saying the one-character thing gives you an epic quality, that we get to watch Siegfried grow and mature as a man. His character arc is very complete. The third flaw is the opera's "rough and raucous" tone, as Simon put it. In other words, whereas the other three Ring operas are mostly dramatic and somber and sometimes brutal, Siegfried feels like a vaudeville. One example he cited is the duel between Siegfried and Fafner in the middle of act two. Fafner and Fasolt were the two giants from the first opera, Das Rheingold. Fasolt dies at the end of that one, but Fafner lives. By the time we see him again in Siegfried, he's become a dragon (don't ask). Siegfried has a duel with him and finishes him off. Simon was saying the duel isn't as dramatic as you'd think. The dialogue, in fact, is kind of hilarious, sometimes unintentionally so, it seems. And finally, the last flaw he talked about was sort of implied in the second and third, that Siegfried is more of a comedy and less of a drama. Again, he talked about Siegfried's character arc. Simon said it's unintentionally hilarious that you'd have a story line that only encompasses two days, and yet Siegfried grows and matures so much in that time. It feels like years have passed when the curtain falls. Of course, that might at least partly be because the damned opera is five friggin' hours long, but whatever.
So yes, Siegfried is far from a perfect opera. Simon claims that Tristan und Isolde is, in fact, the one and only perfect opera Wagner ever wrote. LA Opera actually staged that halfway into the 2007-08 season. I saw it. Maybe I need to see it again. It didn't exactly keep my attention rapt. Man, I tell you. Wagner, more than any other composer in my experience, is an acquired taste. The attention span required to appreciate his work is beyond the purview of most of society these days, in the age of Twitter and all that.
By far the biggest reason for Siegfried's flaws is that Wagner stopped working on the score after act two. That was 1857. He didn't come back to it until 1869. I'm not talking about the librettos, mind you. For you non-opera folks, a libretto is to an opera what a screenplay is to a movie. Wagner wrote the four Ring librettos consecutively, and backward to boot. He originally intended it to be one opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), which ultimately became the fourth and final Ring opera. Then he realized a lot of backstory was missing, so he wrote Siegfried. And so on, doing the libretto for Das Rheingold last. Then he set to composing the scores. Yes, in proper sequence this time. He polished off Das Rheingold and Die Walküre soon enough, but after composing the first two acts of Siegfried, dude was burned out. He'd been working nonstop on the Ring for years at that point. So he spent the next dozen years working on two masterpieces, Tristan as well as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Not bad for a hiatus, eh? Simon said the break was worth it. By the time he resumed Siegfried's score in 1869, Wagner's creative juices were fully recharged for the Ring. He came back with a vengeance, Simon said, and it's readily apparent right away when the curtain goes up for act three.
Simon played four excerpts to illustrate his point about tone contrast: The beginning and end of act one, and the beginning and end of act two. The start of act one is dark, brooding, slow. The end of act one did indeed sound raucous, like something from a vaudeville. Act two kicks off in Fafner's cave. Remember, he's somehow become a dragon since the end of Das Rheingold. The tone is once again somber. Simon described it as "total inertia." You've got a lot of deep brass and these quivering strings underlying it the whole way. And then the end of act two is where Siegfried kills Fafner and runs up the hill to rescue everyone's favorite Valkyrie, Brünnhilde. The music once again bursts with excitement. This was Wagner's last hurrah before calling it quits on the Ring for a while. I forget if it was Simon who told us or Dr. Edmiston, but Wagner was convinced the Ring Cycle was destined to be a failure. Dude had no confidence in it at all, which contributed to his throwing up his hands and moving on to other stuff for a while. When he came back to it, Simon said he was at the pinnacle of his talent. The beginning of act three represents Wagner at his best. Simon couldn't emphasize that enough.
Simon said it wasn't all bad that Siegfried was a comedy. Some of it was certainly intentional. Wagner inserted a lot of comic brio that worked well, if only sometimes. Not only is it the most cheerful of the four operas, Siegfried is also more in tune with nature than the others. It has the best portrayal of Wotan, the god of gods. In Siegfried Wotan has made himself human, known only as the Wanderer. The title character is Wotan's grandson, and the big man has come down to earth to see how he grows up. More than that, he wants to study how humans in general behave. He just doesn't get us. I know how he feels. Anyway, Simon said that the fullness of Wotan's character ties into one of the best musical things about the opera, that of the contrast between the comedy of Siegfried's adventures and the tragedy of Wotan's wandering. Wagner struck a perfect balance.
At this point Simon talked about the biggest problem with Siegfried: The title character. First, he gave us some context. In creating this character, Wagner drew from a whole bunch of myths. We're talking Hercules, Heracles, Achilles, Osiris, and Baldr. When the Ring first came out in the 1870s, people loved the character Siegfried. George Bernard Shaw compared him to Nietzsche's Übermensch (literally the overman, although we'd just say superman). Friedrich Engels positively loved Siegfried, said he was a good guy and that he fought for the good of the people. Funny how times change, isn't it? Seriously, in this day and age, being endorsed by Engels or compared to Nietzsche isn't something most artists would shoot for. But whatever. It's all about the context of the age, right?
Anyway, once he set up that context, Simon said that over time audiences have tempered their views of Siegfried. A more recent critic called him an "exuberant boy scout." Others have said Siegfried not only doesn't fight for good, he's a totalitarian bully who stomps all over people's rights. And because Wagner was an anti-Semite, people have said that Siegfried by default must be anti-Semitic as well. When Hitler came along, some fifty years after Wagner's death, he became Wagner's biggest fan. That could not possibly have helped people's rosy views of Siegfried. Other than that, Simon didn't go into the political baggage Siegfried has racked up over the years.
Even without unfavorable associations, Simon said the Siegfried character still had issues. The main issue is a technical one. In the story, Siegfried stands for good, but you can't be all good and still be a dramatic character at the same time. A dramatic character should do two things. First, he needs to be a character in action. He needs to show us someone we recognize, someone we can relate to, someone who could live down the block from us. Could anyone say that about Siegfried? Uh, no. At least I sure as heck hope not. Secondly, a dramatic character should symbolize something greater than the story, something the writer or composer wants to convey organically via the dramatic action. Dramatic characters should ideally have some friction within them that stems from these two aspects, the action and the symbolism. As Simon said, these two sides should not "quite dovetail." Hamlet is a good example of a character who pulls off this balance nicely. Simon cited some Ring characters who pull this off as well: Wotan, Alberich, and Brünnhilde. If you have a character who is purely symbolic, that could only mean there's nothing, ya know, human about them. No chance for sympathy. Characters who are pure action aren't very human either, and therefore once again make it hard for you to sympathize with them. One example of the latter is Othello. That guy didn't seem to stand for anything. He just did what he did.
After talking about these technical issues of character, Simon arrived at the title of his piece, the problem of fear. First he read us a letter Wagner wrote to a friend of his named August Merkel. Not sure if I spelled the last name right. Anyway, it was a letter he wrote after wrapping up Das Rheingold. In it he said that besides corruption and materialism, he wanted the Ring to be just as much about death. The problem of dying. Not just death as in people biting the dust. But death as in the end of something. In the letter Wagner went on about how it's the fear of the end that gets in the way of our love. And this fear of the end includes fear of change, fear of the unfamiliar. Wotan embodies this in Das Rheingold. I can sort of confirm this myself, having just seen Das Rheingold for the first time earlier this year. It's clear his marriage to Fricka is on the downslope. Those overly proud gods fight all the time about everything. Why don't they just get the divorce over with? Well, Wotan's too scared to. The divorce would be a sort of death, per Wagner's letter to August. It would be a change too great for Wotan to deal with. This whole fear thing goes even further in a way I didn't discern when I saw Das Rheingold, but can sort of see now that Simon mentioned it. The ring itself, the chief cause of all the mess that unfolds, wouldn't mean anything if Wotan and the other gods weren't so greedy to attain power, and accordingly weren't so afraid of losing the ring. In other words, the curse Alberich places on the ring isn't really a curse in the magical sense. At no other time does he display magical abilities. No, the curse is more a state of mind. If you buy into the ring being able to give you power, then you'll be afraid of losing it. The curse is more a "blight of fear," Simon said. Here he played an excerpt from scene four of Das Rheingold, when Alberich "curses" the ring and all those who desire it:
Doomed to die
may the coward be fettered by fear
as long as he lives
let him pine away, languishing
lord of the ring
as the slave of the ring:
till the stolen circlet
I hold in my hand once again.
Heavy stuff, huh? Well there you go. I'm not sure Alberich could've illustrated Simon's point any more about, as his lecture is called, the problem of fear. What's more, Wotan sees himself in the so-called curse. Check out this other excerpt from the same scene. This is Wotan talking now:
Night draws on;
from its envious sway
may it offer shelter now.
(very resolutely, as though seized by a grandiose idea)
Thus I salute the stronghold
safe from dread and dismay.
Poor god, huh? That's Valhalla he's referring to, by the way, the stronghold. One of the subplots of Das Rheingold is Wotan trying to get Fafner and Fasolt to help him build Valhalla. One thing that got everyone chuckling was when Simon asked us if we, too, weren't a bit "touched" by Alberich's curse. Two operas before we see him as a human in Siegfried, we can already see some humanity in Wotan. Who wouldn't want just a little bit of the power and wealth represented by the ring?
And therein lies a big reason why Wotan's a better character than his grandkid Siegfried. We can relate to Wotan, right? His marriage is rocky, he feels things like fear and frustration. Siegfried feels no fear at all. Simon called it his "unification." Drama implies conflict and division, both within people and between them. Right? If there's no conflict in the story, why tell the story? The Devil's a juicy character. God? When was the last time you saw him in a movie, those George Burns comedies notwithstanding?
Simon now played us an excerpt from act two of Siegfried, the birdsong from the "Forest Murmurs" scene. The music carried a light air to it. Siegfried is happy at this point. In stark contrast to his grandfather, he has no worries at all. Unlike most adults, he's not bothered by anything in his past. Therefore the past doesn't determine who he is and what he does and will do. Simon said we're told repeatedly throughout the opera that Siegfried feels no fear.
Simon agreed with some of the more contemporary critics with the idea that Siegfried is kind of a bully. Here he played the Forging Song from act one, where Siegfried forges his sword Notung. It is during the forging that you could argue Siegfried seems downright totalitarian, each blow of the metal like a blow on our shoulders. Here Simon said how interesting it was that Siegfried is the only character in the Ring Cycle who doesn't tell any stories, with the exception of the last opera. That's a pretty stark illustration of Siegfried having no concern with the past.
Simon talked about the character Mime, Alberich's brother. Like Alberich, Mime's a pretty rotten guy. Unlike Alberich, though, he's not a very well-drawn character. Alberich you can at least somewhat relate to and understand. Mime? Not so much. Going by Simon's definition above of a dramatic character, he's all action, no symbol. Alberich is someone you love to hate. Since Mime doesn't have a third dimension, liking or not liking him feels pretty pointless. And this is why Simon called Siegfried's killing of Mime the worst moment in the entire Ring Cycle. Siegfried kills him without any sense of consequence. Just kills 'im and moves on. It's true that Mime had to die for the story to move forward, but Wagner could've made it feel more significant. What's more, it's not even represented musically. Seriously, Simon went on and on about how Mime's death scene bugged the heck out of him. He called it--get this--"apocalyptically insensitive."
This is in contrast to Siegfried's killing of Fafner in act two. You've got something that offers plenty of action as well as some symbolism. Fafner is the last of his kind. No more dragons after Fafner, right? He even says something to this effect while he's in extremis. Therefore this duel represents a passing of generations. Fafner represents the earlier age, the beforetimes. Again, like Mime, he had to die, but unlike Mime, you feel a certain sadness, or at least a sense of loss, for an age that has passed forever.
Simon went back to Wotan, continuing the contrast between Siegfried as flat and Wotan as well defined. He discussed the idea of resignation as it was espoused by Arthur Schopenhauer. You heard of him? He was a German philosopher and writer from the 1800s who became renowned for being a four-alarm bummer. Seriously, Schopenhauer basically said that humans were doomed never to get what they want, no matter how hard they bent their will toward it. Oh, and that was another thing he was noted for, dissecting this whole issue of willpower. Anyway, Simon mentioned him in the context of Wotan's resignation. Erde tells Wotan, just as Schopenhauer told the world, that letting go and resigning himself to fate will make him happier.
And this takes us to act three. Remember, by the time Wagner started composing this part, he'd been away from the Ring for twelve years. First, Simon played us the beginning. The music is dark like the beginning of the first two acts, but this is even more so if you can imagine. "Titanically dark" was how Simon put it. Nice, I agree. And as Simon also pointed out, it's beyond amazing that Wagner had this music in the back of his head for all that time, while he worked on material like Tristan and Meistersinger.
Enter Wotan. The Wanderer. Cutting a very impressive figure (partly because he's the god of gods, yet someone we can relate to), Wotan is walking around earth to see how humans, and especially Siegfried, grow up. He wants to see if his grandson can create the utopia he tried and failed to create with Valhalla. He's also looking for Erde:
O unwise woman!
I call on you now
to sleep forever, free from care!
Fear of the end of the gods
no longer consumes me
now that my will wishes it so/What I once
resolved in despair
in the searing smart of inner turmoil
I now perform freely
in gladness and joy;
though once, in furious loathing/I bequeathed
the world to the Nibelung's spite,
to the lordliest Wälsung
I leave my heritage now...
And so on. Wotan says some more, but you get the point. It's all about letting go of your fear so you can love again, exactly what Simon said at the start of his lecture. After playing this excerpt, he said this "fearlessness of love" is Wotan's leitmotif. He eventually does find Erde. Only this time, instead of saying resignation is good, like she did the last time they spoke, she says that all she sees in the world is chaos. Resigning won't bring happiness because happiness just isn't possible in the human realm. She's downright nihilistic, in other words.
The final excerpt he played was from later on in act three. Wotan's on the mountain trail to block Siegfried from reaching Brünnhilde. Like the Fafner scene, this is very poignant. It's the end of Wotan, his final appearance in the Ring Cycle.
Simon then talked a bit about the next scene, the last one of the opera. Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing a thirty-minute duet on the mountaintop. Simon called this duet the single most "energetic" song in all of Wagner's oeuvre. That's a pretty huge claim, but he'd know much better than me. He said the next time we see the opera, while they're singing that duet at the end, we should ask ourselves: Are the two sides of Siegfried's character balanced, or does one outweigh the other? It's an open-ended and interpretive question. While he stressed there is no one right answer, he did say our answer would inevitably influence our attitude toward the character of Siegfried as well as the drama as a whole.
Simon finally couldn't help himself. He had the audio assistant, the guy who sits in the back and plays all the excerpts, put on the very end of the duet. It's quite rousing and hammers home his point about the similarities to vaudeville. And yes, it's also energetic. When it was over, we couldn't help applauding. You'd understand if you heard it. Simon said he's normally the type of person who doesn't like to clap too much at the end of operas. He prefers exiting the auditorium discreetly. One exception he makes is with this piece. It makes him "positively jump up and clap."
This lecture marks the first time I've ever heard someone use the word "splendiferous" in a sentence. Simon said when Siegfried's over, you won't leave with any sense of the satisfaction that comes with closure, but you'll still leave smiling because of the "splendiferous" music. As I'm sure you can tell by now, Simon's got a flair for dramatics that few other lecturers, in my experience anyway, can rival.
Certainly the second lecture today, as fun and informative as it was, couldn't rival it. Don't get me wrong. I've become sort of a fan of Mitchell Morris. I've seen him talk at one or two other Opera League seminars. Plus, he was one of the lecturers at the Getty Center's day-long seminar on German art and opera this past March. Read that post if you haven't already. Fascinating.
The Music of Siegfried - Mitchell Morris
Mitchell's a music professor at UCLA. A musicologist, as they say. By the time he came on, there was barely an hour left. Not even. Nowhere near enough time to do justice to the music of a Wagner opera. Nonetheless, he was a good sport and did what he could. It must've been tough. During Simon's lecture, Mitchell was sitting directly behind me. I could hear him preparing and revising his notes.
He kicked things off in a tone quite the opposite from Simon. Whereas Simon started out by saying Siegfried was fundamentally flawed, Mitchell said Siegfried occupied the most fascinating position of the tetralogy. It's the pivotal piece. And yes, Mitchell, like Simon and I'm sure every other scholar and expert on the subject of Siegfried, couldn't resist talking about the (in)famous twelve-year hiatus Wagner took between the second and third acts, which only makes this opera all the more fascinating. It's not every day you come across a piece of art that has a gap of that size in its creation. One thing he said that Simon didn't mention was that Wagner originally called this piece Der junge Siegfried (The Young Siegfried), and then called it Jung-Siegfried (Young Siegfried). He also mentioned that the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung, was originally called Siegfrieds Tod (The Death of Siegfried). Despite the hiatus, he said that although you can see Wagner coming back with a creative vengeance, the opera still doesn't feel disjointed.
Mitchell talked about Wagner's deal with Romantic heroism. As someone born and raised in the Deep South, Mitchell has no patience with what he called the "impulse of heroism." He cited the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a philosopher and writer from the 1700s. His whole deal was about humans getting in touch with the state of nature. The way Mitchell said it, people from the Deep South like himself would think, well, if Jean-Jacques and his ilk want to go to the zoo and watch monkeys hurl shit at each other, they were welcome to it.
He compared Siegfried to the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. For starters, you've got the violence. Don't forget that Little Red Riding Hood and her grandma were eaten by the wolf before they were cut out of his gut. And in the original Snow White, the evil queen was forced to wear glowing hot iron shoes. Also, Grimm's fairy tales don't have any character development. Siegfried himself doesn't have an arc, as Simon made abundantly clear above.
Mitchell pointed out that Siegfried has more singing than the other three Ring operas, although Götterdämmerung has more formal song. People lying to each other, in other words, as Mitchell only half-joked. This is when he walked over to the piano and talked about various musical concepts, starting with harmony. Bear with me here. A lot of what he talked about was technical stuff. Some of it went over my head. Yes, I was taking notes, but Mitchell was flying right along. Pressed for time, he wasn't allowing for the fact that some of us may have been among the lay masses. Anyway, with harmony he talked about the idea of triads, three chords that are variations of the same thing. One variation would be an inverted triad, when the bass is not the same as the root. What, confused already?
Then he talked about how you can create a sense of expectation in music, where the last note is dragged out. With the piano you achieve that with your foot on the pedal, right? Hey, I used to take lessons once upon a time. I remember how that works. Anyway, that sense of expectation can reach unbearable proportions. In other words, you can really drag out that last note. He related a story about a house party Felix Mendelssohn threw one time. He went to bed early, which put off some of his guests. One of them sat down at the piano and hit one key and kept their foot on the pedal to drag it out. Apparently the note was dragged for fifteen minutes before Felix came down and pressed another key to finish it off.
This led to deceptive cadence, which is pretty much what you'd think it is. It's where you have a chord that leads you to believe you'll be progressing to the next logical chord, only you end up somewhere completely different. Bach did it. Beethoven and Shubert did it. Wagner did it in the first two Ring operas as well as the first two acts of Siegfried. From an opera's standpoint, deceptive cadence is helpful if you're trying to create an atmosphere that's rich and mysterious. One example he used was if you used a flat six-chord system (e.g. B flat, C flat, etc.) instead of regular six.
With Tristan, Wagner used deceptive cadence to create a theme both overdetermined and underdetermined. It's not stable, yet it is, as Mitchell said. It was Wagner's work on Tristan where the idea of expanding a temporal span in opera using deceptive cadence came of age. And it was a real struggle for Wagner apparently, writing Tristan. Coming to grips with moving forward the evolution of deceptive cadence was at least partly why. When he went back to Siegfried to write act three after wrapping up Tristan, you can hear the evolution. The harmony in act three is more subtle and indeterminate. Mitchell cited parlor music as a more mainstream example of where you can find deceptive cadence.
Next up was the idea of key and scale, how you can have a minor scale, a minor side in a major scale, and a major side of minor. One example he cited here was the Plato cadence, the scale that sounds like how they sing "amen" at the end of church songs. And again he talked about Tristan. In that opera, after a while, major and minor no longer matter. Each key has more than seven pitches. Act one has two keys: A and C, both major and minor. Tristan is less about leitmotifs and more chromatic. It was during Wagner's twelve-year gap between acts two and three of Siegfried, when he toiled over Tristan and Meistersinger, that he sought ways to be more flexible with his music while trying not to create hash. It would still be organized, only more creatively.
Then Mitchell talked about meter and how Wagner helped change that convention as well. Human brains think in terms of twos and threes, Mitchell said, and to demonstrate this, he had everyone snap their fingers. No matter how complex the chain of sounds, you naturally break it down into pairs and trebles. As far back as the fourteenth century, music would have two layers that would demonstrate meter. The end of Beethoven's Fifth (the Die Hard song) is an example of hyper-meter. It's resolutely quadratic, four plus four. But Beethoven as well as Haydn played around with hyper-meter, sometimes making it five plus three.
Then Wagner showed up to break all that down and create real musical ambivalence. The first excerpt Mitchell played here was act one, scene three of Siegfried, when the title character forges his sword Notung. It starts strophic, but then it turns into a different musical genre altogether. It's as if Wagner composed a second forging song. But wait. He's fooled you. By the end, you are musically taken back to the beginning.
Mitchell talked about how the songs in Siegfried tend to start in a very generic, conventional way, as if Wagner were purposely alluding to folk music just to set up an expectation in the audience. Again, in the forging song this is reflected in Siegfried singing the refrain:
Hoho! Hoho!
Hohei! Hohei!
Hoho! Hoho!
Hohi! Hohei!
This song also has what Mitchell called an augmented triad. This basically means you'd have chords whose relationships to each other were lengthened or widened. Wagner already employed this technique in his famous Die Walküre song. Mitchell's not entirely convinced Wagner meant to do that with the forging song. At any rate, this song owes a lot to Beethoven with its symphonic qualities: Giant octave leaps, rugged tone, peculiar choice of rhythm. It also requires a lot of work from the tenors who play Siegfried and Mime, the two characters in the forging scene. Mitchell said they're most likely going to be Heldentenors, who have especially dark and powerful voices. "Classy baritones," Mitchell called them. The forging song doesn't really end so much as evolve into something else. It shows Wagner as anti-numbers, musically speaking, going back to the four-plus-four/five-plus-three meter concept above. Mitchell even piggybacked, cleverly I thought, onto Simon's whole thing about Mime being a shallow character. Not only is that the case dramatically, but musically as well. His sections of the forging song are a simple comic kind of music.
Next Mitchell played an excerpt from act three, scene three, the duet between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Like Simon, Mitchell's a big fan of Brünnhilde. She's a more interesting character. In fact, Mitchell cited more recent criticism that says Siegfried is more about Brünnhilde than it is about Siegfried himself. Siegfried's heedlessness isn't valued as much as it used to be. Mitchell did say, though, that Brünnhilde's apostrophe in Götterdämmerung is embarrassing. He wasn't specific about that. Was he referring to when she orders invisible forces to build a bonfire for her, upon which time she rides into it on her horse? Is it embarrassing to Wagner or to her as a character?
The last scene of Siegfried is a series of three apostrophes. You've got Brünnhilde singing to the sun, gods, the world, the "resplendent earth." And so on. Mitchell said this is a good example of the aesthetic of the sublime, although he said that in Wagner's time, sublime and beauty were not synonymous like they are today. He cracked me up. Nowadays, he said, sublime made him think of a North San Diego County land developer. "Improve it now. Make it more beautiful." But no, here I think he meant sublime as in giving you a sense of grandeur.
The song starts with tiny trilling strings which ostensibly seem unrelated to the arpeggios. Brünnhilde comes in. We hear the same melody from the end of Die Walküre. But then it changes and continues developing per the new style of music at the time, which Wagner helped pioneer. The very end of the song has a lot of "lachende." Laughing. Especially by Brünnhilde. Which is fitting, as the name of the duet is "Laughing love, laughing death." This reinforces the comedy aspect of the piece. It's a frenzy that ends, as Mitchell said, in an "amphetamine high." Siegfried is the only Ring opera to do this. It was funny. While the song was playing, Mitchell stood there at the podium looking down at the same handout with the lyrics that we all had. He was smiling at it and shaking his head, as if the handout had done something naughty. I can back up his claim about the song reaching a high. Brünnhilde in particular reaches great heights with her voice. The song has an amazing ability to expand in an arc. Mitchell called it Tristan by accident. And then he added that this song really is informed by Tristan. It's more than a coincidence. And it also musically predicts Parsifal.
That was about it for Mitchell's lecture. I know it ends kind of abruptly, but he didn't have much time. Plus, dumping all that terminology on us up front only cut into the time he had to talk about the opera itself. After those two excerpts, it was time to go. I hope you were able to keep up and learn something. Me? I learned a ton.
