Last years in Bayreuth of Richard Wagner

In 1869 Wagner had resumed work on The Ring which he now brought to its world-renouncing conclusion. It had been agreed with the king that the tetralogy should be first performed in its entirety at Munich, but Wagner broke the agreement, convinced that a new type of theatre must be built for the purpose. Having discovered a suitable site at the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, he toured Germany, conducting concerts to raise funds and encouraging the formation of societies to support the plan, and in 1872 the foundation stone was laid. In 1874 Wagner moved into a house at Bayreuth that he called Wahnfried (“Peace from Illusion”). The whole vast project was eventually realized, in spite of enormous artistic, administrative, and financial difficulties. The king, who had provided Wahnfried for Wagner, contributed a substantial sum, and mortgages were raised that were later paid off by royalties. The Ring received its triumphant first complete performance in the new Festspielhaus at Bayreuth on August 13, 14, 16, and 17, 1876.

Wagner spent the rest of his life at Wahnfried, making a visit to London in 1877 to give a successful series of concerts and then making several to Italy. During these years he composed his last work, the sacred festival drama Parsifal, begun in 1877 and produced at Bayreuth in 1882; he also dictated to his wife his autobiography, Mein Leben (My Life), begun in 1865. He died of heart failure, at the height of his fame, and was buried in the grounds of Wahnfried in the tomb he had himself prepared. Since then, except for interruptions caused by World Wars I and II, the Festspielhaus has staged yearly festivals of Wagner’s works.

Achievement and influence

Wagner’s single-handed creation of his own type of musical drama was a fantastic accomplishment, considering the scale and scope of his art. His method was to condense the confused mass of material at his disposal—the innumerable conflicting versions of the legend chosen as a basis—into a taut dramatic scheme. In this scheme, as in his model, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the stage events are few but crucial, the main part of the action being devoted to the working out of the characters’ motivations.

In setting the poem, he used his mastery of construction on the largest scale, which he had learned from studying Beethoven, to keep the broad outlines clear while he consistently developed the leitmotifs to mirror every shifting nuance of the psychological situation. Criticism of the leitmotifs as arbitrary factual labels shows a misunderstanding of Wagner. He called them “carriers of the feeling,” and, because of their essentially emotional character, their pliability, and Wagner’s resource in alternating, transforming, and combining them, they function as subtle expressions of the changing feelings behind the dramatic symbols.

The result of these methods was a new art form, of which the distinguishing feature was a profound and complex symbolism working on three indivisible planes—dramatic, verbal, and musical. The vital significance of this symbolism has been increasingly realized. The common theme of all his mature works, except Die Meistersinger, is the romantic concept of “redemption through love,” but this element, used rather naively in the three early operas, became, in the later musical dramas, a mere catalyst for much deeper complexes of ideas. In The Ring there are at least five interwoven strands of overt meaning concerned with German nationalism, international socialism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Christianity. On another level there is a prophetic treatment of some of the themes of psychoanalysis: power complex arising from sexual inhibition; incest; mother fixation; and Oedipus complex.

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Tristan stands in a line of symbolism extending from the themes of “night” and “death” explored by such German Romantic poets as Novalis (1772–1801), through the Schopenhauerian indictment of life as an evil illusion and the renunciation of the will to live, to the modern psychological discovery of a close connection between erotic desire and the death wish. Die Meistersinger stands apart as a work in which certain familiar themes are treated on a purely conscious plane with mellow wisdom and humour: the impulsiveness of youth and the resignation of age, the ecstasy of youthful love, the value of music itself as an art. In Wagner’s last work, Parsifal, the symbolism returns on a deeper level than before. He has been much criticized for this strongly personal treatment of a religious subject, which mingles the concepts of sacred and profane love; but in the light of later explorations in the field of psychology his insight into the relationship between religious and sexual experience seems merely in advance of its time. The themes of innocence and purity, sexual indulgence and suffering, remorse and sexual renunciation are treated in Parsifal with a subtle intensity and depth of compassion that probe deeply into the unconscious and make the opera in some ways the most visionary of all Wagner’s works.

Wagner’s influence, as a musical dramatist and as a composer, was a powerful one. Although few operatic composers have been able to follow him in providing their own librettos, all have profited from his reform in the matter of giving dramatic depth, continuity, and cohesion to their works.

In the purely musical field, Wagner’s influence was even more far-reaching. He developed such a wide expressive range that he was able to make each of his works inhabit a unique emotional world of its own, and, in doing so, he raised the melodic and harmonic style of German music to what many regard as its highest emotional and sensuous intensity. Much of the subsequent history of music stems from him, either by extension of his discoveries or reaction against them.