Number 8: Wagner

Yes, Wagner. It's true, Wagner was quite possibly a wretched person. Even his early admirer Nietzsche tired of his egomania and antisemitism. Nonetheless, I couldn't leave him off the list, his music is just too powerful, both in the effect it had on classical music and the effect it still has on the receptive listener. Without Wagner you would have no Bruckner, no Mahler, no Strauss, no Sibelius (all composers I deeply love and had to leave off my top 10 list because of space--Wagner must stand in for them in their absence). He even created new instruments--the Wagner Tuba--in order to develop the rich bassy brass sound he needed to hear his thoughts realized. Actor Stephen Fry, a Wagner devotee, recently starred in a documentary attempting to salvage Wagner's music from his reputation. I'm not quite sure it was successful, but I found the sheer enthusiasm Fry (who is Jewish) had for Wagner convincing enough to not leave Wagner off my list out of a sake of decorum.

And truly, what music! For me Wagner boils down to three great works: Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, and the Ring Cycle (which of course is four operas in and of itself). Much has been written about the opening chords of Tristan, which prefigure the adoption of atonality in music; this is music without a key, without a sense of home.

 But for me it is the end of Tristan worth talking about. Her lover dead, her world in shambles, our heroine Isolde seems utterly spent. For hours the soprano tasked with the part has sung line after line of such emotive richness that the opera seemingly has to no choice but to end by gracefully petering out. But no, Wagner spends the last half hour building up achingly slowly to the most extraordinarily thick, kaleidoscopic climax, where Isolde imagines her dead lover arising, and then, finally, falls dead herself, her heart shattered. When done well, this ending is the ultimate portrayal of musical ecstasy, the operatic equivalent of Bernini's Ecstacy of Saint Theresa. Here, in a stand-alone performance, is the legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson (who was a simple farm girl before being discovered in the Swedish countryside). As you listen to her voice, you can see why one director of Tristan and Isolde cast three different Tristans to accompany her Isolde. Just one man couldn't possibly keep up the energy necessary to match her intensity and depth of expression the whole Opera through, so a new Tristan was subbed in for each act. Damn what a voice.

Parsifal was the last opera Wagner wrote. There are no great arias like in Tristan, and the music never gives you an unforgettable tune like the Ride of the Valkyries from the Ring Cycle. But its score might be the most beautiful of them all. It has a strange otherworldly quality to it, appropriate accompaniment to a rather bizarre plot involving a quest for the holy grail. There is a humbleness, even gentility, to much of the score, almost as if Wagner needed a tonic after the hubris of the Ring Cycle. It comes across strongly here in the Good Friday Music from Act III:

Which brings us to the most amazingly over-the-top statement in all of music:
Der Ring des Nibelungen. Four operas, each some four hours long, brimming with musical inventiveness, imaginative orchestral textures and some mighty fine tunes. The use of musical motifs (short little recognizable snippets of music) to represent nearly every character and theme of the opera has been widely copied by composers and in particular film score composers up until the present day (listen to the movies Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings for examples). Everyone has heard the Ride of the Valkyries, which now seems almost synonymous with the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now. But if you can listen to only one other part of the thing, make it the beginning, a pure distillation of the power of music. The whole thing is one grand unfolding of a rich warm e-flat major chord. The actual musical idea is almost boring, but Wagner's brilliant scoring of it, and the sustained majesty of it, makes it the perfect opening for such an enormous undertaking as 16 hours of Wagnerian Opera. This is the music to accompany the start of all things, the organic evolution of tonality itself.

Wagner. Number 8.