Search Results

Using geometrical projections from the distance algorithms in the previous chapter, this chapter develops the notion of pitch-space paths in sequences of events at multiple prolongational levels. Pitch-space paths are traced in two Chopin preludes through contrasting spatial representations, including regional, chordal/regional, scale-degree, and pitch-class/chordal spaces. The exposition moves to the treatment of regional prolongations and to parallel mixture, the latter causing a collapse in regional space, with examples taken from Schubert and Wagner. An extended discussion ensues of narrative paths in Wagner's Parsifal. The chapter concludes with historical references to pitch-space paths in the music of Schubert and Schumann, and to an analogy to semantic paths in linguistic theory.

Chapter 7 considers how to integrate dissonant tetrachords into a model that focuses on triads. In order to disable the requirement that an analytic approach to dissonance must be internally consistent, the chapter begins by showing that Rameau’s theory of dissonance is based on four partly incommensurate principles, each of which is present in current classical theories of dissonance. The chapter then develops two incommensurate ways to integrate dissonance into pan-triadic syntax. The first way, proceeding by extension, involves reducing a chord to its consonant subset, if the latter is unique. The technique enriches a motivic and hermeneutic analysis of Wagner’s Parsifal by enlarging its scope. The second way, proceeding by analogy, groups dominant and half-diminished-seventh chords into a single Tristan genus, on the basis that they are minimal perturbation so the perfectly equal fully-diminished seventh chord. Geometric layouts (Douthett’s Power Towers) and transformations, analogous to the triadic case, are developed for charting progressions within the Tristan genus. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of Chopin’s e-minor prelude.

Chapter 8 develops an integrated model of classical and pan-triadic syntax. It begins by reviewing and evaluating earlier models of Lewin, Hyer, Cohn, Rings, and Brower. It then proposes a new model whose central feature is the convertible Tonnetz. Under diatonic tonality, a region of the Tonnetz is encapsulated by a parallelogram, and a set of familiar semantic qualities are activated, such as “magnetism,” “summoning,” “desire,” etc. Local chromaticism involves rapid visits to adjacent extra-mural regions; modulation involves dismantling the capsule and reassembling it at a different location. Pan-triadic syntax replaces the parallelogram with alleys along an axis, or a hexagonal capsule, or transforms the Tonnetz into an open field without walls. Liszt’s Db Consolation is an analytic touchstone throughout the chapter. Concluding analyses are the Faith Proclamation from Parsifal and an excerpt from the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony.

The section of the drama to which the title of this chapter refers is Act III, measures 933–93. This section begins with the change to a D-minor key signature and the first entrance of the new Weihegruβ motive, as Titurel's coffin is opened and all break into a woeful cry. There follow two Stollen in D minor and an Abgesang in D major. The musical Bar Form sets an equally formulaic prayer in the text. This chapter draws attention to the idea of transformational substitution in both text and music. Richard Wagner has informed us, via bracket 4, that the A♭ that substitutes for A-as-dominant is in fact the very A♭ that is the tonic key of the drama. When this A♭ appears in a dominant role, it suggests tonicizing a subdominant D♭ from which one might build a final plagal cadence for the opera. Amfortas does not know how to use his plagal D, but Parsifal does, and that relationship legitimizes Parsifal's takeover from Amfortas as much as does his possession of the D-ish spear.

This chapter analyzes the total work as symbol. Wagner’s Parsifal, one of the most important inspirations for the European symbolist movement, stands as the paradigm of the restoration of the symbolic function of art and of the will to the resacralization of the stage. It discusses how Wagner’s path from the festival of the revolution to a renewal of art religion takes us from the unique celebration of the revolution in a temporary theatre constructed for the occasion, as envisaged by Wagner in 1851, to the establishment and institutionalizing of a festival theatre, a temple of art, intended as a site of pilgrimage and sacred performances. It also argues that Parsifal is the pivot on which Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of music turns, forming the bridge between the history of music, which culminates in Wagner’s last work, and the theory of music, which takes the form of a speculative aesthetics.

Richard Wagner's Parsifal has always fascinated critics who have seen it either as a “superior magic opera” that “revels in the wondrous” or as a “profoundly inhuman spectacle, glorifying a barren masculine world whose ideals are a combination of militarism and monasticism.” This chapter explores the notion of a racist strain in Parsifal in relation to Wagner's racist views and their inseparability from the experience of supposed cultural decay he wanted to share in Parsifal, and not just in a series of seemingly madcap polemics in his late writings. It brings the dramaturgy of Parsifal into sharper focus and suggests that, contrary to what both the left and right flanks in the Western cultural establishment think, a closer look at the way its structure has been entwined with the web of ideas inside it, the less are the concerns about it likely to disappear.

The last opera of Giuseppe Verdi, the master of Italian tragic opera, was his only successful comedy, Falstaff (1893). This chapter argues that this work was written to offer a model of renovated musical italianità to the younger Italian composers of his time, seduced as they were by the Germanic “symphonism” of Richard Wagner. Verdi’s turn to a late style of irony and parody in Falstaff was his way of simultaneously incorporating (but distancing) the past and moving forward in new directions. Analysis of Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (1882), alongside Falstaff reveals the very different resolutions offered by these two tales of age and generational crisis. Wagner’s obsession with social degeneration and his worries about his own creativity were countered by Verdi’s healthy ironic laughter at his own as well as Wagner’s expense. This was his pedagogical lesson to young composers about how to be progressive, modern, and still Italian.

Moving from the concert hall to the opera house (familiarly associated with elitism and expense), this chapter aims to uncover the character of opera as popular theater, not least Wagner’s. An evocation of the experience of Parsifal in Bayreuth in 2012 leads to a discussion of Italian opera, often scorned in Germany in the nineteenth century for its vulgarity and crowd-pleasing aspects. Puccini's Suor Angelica is considered as an emblematic late-romantic opera, whose subtlety, tragic power, and magical climax might help us better understand and reevaluate its composer's claim to want to “make the world weep.”

Parsifal (1877-81), Wagner’s testament, offers a vision of ethics that might be viable in the wake of Tristan, a vision derived from Schopenhauerian, Buddhist, and Christian inspirations that suggested a turning away from the nihilistic self-obsessed Eros toward the other-directed Agape.

Chapter 2 describes the geography of Sorrento and gives an overview, drawn from letters and notes, of the daily life led by Nietzsche, Meysenbug, Rée, and Nietzsche's young student Albert Brenner, at the villa they lived in, the Villa Rubinacci. We follow several accounts of this carefree and idyllic lifestyle, so suited to Nietzsche's thinking process. We learn about the complex relationship between this small group and the Wagners, who were staying nearby—just as Nietzsche was distancing himself from them, Meysenbug, a self-proclaimed "Idealist," was growing ever fonder of them. We also hear Cosima Wagner's side of things; as she and her husband, depressed and disheartened by the failure of Bayreuth, were turning to Christianity for consolation, a measure which would result in Wagner's Parsifal, and Nietzsche's contemporaneous break with him. The chapter provides a multilayered exposure and analysis of Nietzsche's desire, during this time, to found a "School of Educators" on the model of his Sorrentino life in perfect harmony with his friends. This school, he proclaimed, would be a place where the educators would educate themselves, rather than instilling dead knowledge into their pupils, the tenet of the project being that the educators themselves needed to be educated.

Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites frequently agreed at least in this: that the novelty of Wagner’s art was that it was directed first and foremost at the nerves. And it was not simply audience members who understood Wagner’s music dramas as essentially neural; it was also Wagner himself. Critics have long appreciated the importance of Wagner’s Beethoven essay of 1870, an essay that theorizes Wagner’s late movement toward “inner drama” and toward the dominance of music over text. Largely unappreciated, however, is the central importance of the neurological sciences in this transition; what Wagner aimed at in this essay was not simply the inner drama of the psyche but also—and inextricably—the inner drama of the body: that is, the drama of the brain and the nervous system. It is this profoundly neuropsychological understanding of art that drives Wagner’s late work—above all his final music drama, Parsifal.

This chapter investigates Ruth Berghaus’s rethinking of the canon in her post-Brechtian stagings of Der Freischütz, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal. Invoking Brecht’s call for historicity, Berghaus exposed the totalizing romantic ideologies that underpinned both the socialist canon and the reception of opera in the twentieth century more generally. Rejecting coherence as a dominant principle, she separated text from author, she divested the canon of its positive heroes and unconflicted teleological narratives, and she shattered the myth of the total work of art. Her semiotic approach was symptomatic of the wider shift from content to form that Alexei Yurchak identifies as a defining characteristic of late socialism. As the chapter explores, her stagings had resonances beyond the GDR’s borders. Her Wagner productions at Oper Frankfurt offered audiences a theatrical experience that encoded the irony and alienation of late modernity.

How do genesis, structure, and interpretation relate to each other? This chapter first examines the structure of the Seventh in five movements, beginning with an overview of its tonal trajectory, before outlining its inner connections. The five movements of the Seventh are not unified by a program, but the subtle links that relate these movements to each other challenge the idea that the work lacks coherence. These inner connections are counterbalanced by a centrifugal force, pointing toward other works, inside and outside the Mahlerian corpus (Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal). The second section presents the web of interpretive leads pursued in this study. It concludes with some reflections about what constitutes the genesis of a work and how the genetic history relates to issues of interpretation.