Classical Principle Weekly
May 2, 2023
Tragedy in Opera: Classical or Romantic?
Part One: Verdi's Rigoletto & Wagner's Lohengrin
In the Classical Principle of June 7, 2022, we discussed some of the fundamental differences between the romantic and classical outlooks. A quick review of that article would be very helpful in appreciating this one.
Today, we look at two contemporaneous operas—Wagner's Lohengrin was premiered in 1850, and Verdi's Rigoletto in 1851. Operas are, of course, large works, so we shall limit ourselves to a single aspect: the question of tragedy and its role and meaning.
The reviewer's task is a difficult one. We cannot pretend to be neutral, and treat the operas as equals. But, to present a mere bias as truth also does no good. The discovery of the difference between the two operas is only meaningful if the listener discovers that difference for his or her self. For that reason, the reviewer has to go back and recreate his or her own process of discovery, even if it were long ago.
If Johannes Brahms himself said that he was not such a fool as to not see the beauty in some of Wagner's better moments, we shall follow suit. Brahms however, knew what the problem with Wagner was better than most, as did Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and many others. Rossini's quip summed up one aspect..
"Wagner has some great moments, and some bad quarters of an hour."
...but there was a lot more than that amiss.
THE ROMANTIC NOTION OF TRAGEDY
Why do we study tragedy? Is it because we like to feel sad? The Romantics, in the late 18th century, found themselves in the midst of global revolutionary movements, and disliked the modern world and its science, rationality, free societies and republics. It also disliked the effort to eliminate class distinctions and promote growing equality amongst the people. They longed for magic, superstition, empires and kingdoms, and the strict fixed class divisions of feudalism. They preferred dreams to reality, choosing to set their stories in the fairy-tale world of dragons, castles, magic rings, and knights in shining armor, as in the legends of King Arthur, and the Knights of the Holy Grail. For them tragedy often came when the real world sadly intervened to upset these fantasies.
LOHENGRIN
Wagner himself referred to this opera as a fairy-tale. The story of Lohengrin, the swan-knight, was first written in about 1200 A.D. by Wolfram von Eschenbach in his story "Parzival". Parzival and his son Lohengrin, were Knights of the "Holy Grail", the "Sacred Cup", which had caught the blood of Jesus at His Crucifixion. Later in that century, Konrad von Würzburg wrote Schwannritter, the story of the Swan Knight, Lohengrin. Wagner read them, but as usual, wrote his own Libretto.
In the Overture, Wagner attempts to capture the image of the Holy Grail slowly descending to earth, escorted by an Angelic Host, which it did yearly, with all the elegance and gracefulness of a swan. It opens with four violins playing in harmonics, up in the stratosphere. A regular string section comes in below, and later the full orchestra, all on a single theme. No-one played it better than Wilhelm Furtwangler, so we will hear him perform it. You, the reader, must bring your own aesthetic judgement into play, so we urge you to listen carefully. On its own, it is beautiful. But, it is only the Prelude to an opera. We urge you to think about it, then come back and listen again after having studied both operas. at least a bit.
The opera opens in 10th century Antwerp, with Elsa being accused by Count Telramond of the murder of her brother, the child-Duke Gottfried, so that she might become Duchess of Brabant. She could be saved, should someone in the court defend her honor in a duel, but there are no takers. When a visiting King Henry demands she answer the charge, she refuses, and goes into a dreamy state about an unknown champion, while singing a beautiful aria:
https://youtu.be/xyeAJkQk_LQ
ELSA
Lonely, in troubled days
I prayed to the Lord,
my most heartfelt grief
I poured out in prayer.
And from my groans
there issued a plaintive sound
that grew into a mighteous roar
as it echoed through the skies:
I listened as it receded into the distance
until my ear could scarce hear it;
my eyes closed
and I fell into a deep sleep.
In a short interlude, Wagner quotes the Overture, as Elsa's visage is transformed from dream-like detachment to frenzied transfiguration (Wagner's words), when she envisions, literally, a knight in shining armor.
Einsam in trüben Tagen
hab ich zu Gott gefleht,
des Herzens tiefstes Klagen
ergoss ich im Gebet. -
Da drang aus meinem Stöhnen
ein Laut so klagevoll,
der zu gewalt'gem Tönen
weit in die Lüfte schwoll: -
Ich hört ihn fernhin hallen,
bis kaum mein Ohr er traf;
mein Aug ist zugefallen,
ich sank in süssen Schlaf.
ELSA
In splendid, shining armour
a knight approached,
a man of such pure virtue
as I had never seen before:
a golden horn at his side,
leaning on a sword -
thus he appeared to me
from nowhere, this warrior true;
with kindly gestures
he gave me comfort;
I will wait for the knight,
he shall be my champion!
In Lichter Waffen Scheine
ein Ritter nahte da,
so tugendlicher Reine
ich keinen noch ersah:
Ein golden Horn zur Hüften,
gelehnet auf sein Schwert, -
so trat er aus den Lüften
zu mir, der Recke wert;
mit züchtigem Gebaren
gab Tröstung er mir ein; -
des Ritters will ich wahren,
er soll mein Streiter sein!
Lo and behold, a knight in shining armor does appear, and as it turns out, he has been sent to rescue the damsel in distress. What's more, he is in a small boat, drawn by a swan. Could the lady ask for more? The knight, Lohengrin, promises to defend her in the duel, and even marry her, if she fulfills only one condition, that she never ask his name, his origin, or from whence he came.
Huh?
The Knights of the Holy Grail (like comic book superheroes), could never reveal their secret identities. Wagner himself, compared it to the philandering Greek God Zeus.
"The god is in love with a human woman and approaches her in human form. The lover finds that she cannot recognize the god in this form, and demands that he should make the real sensual form of his being known. Zeus knows that she would be destroyed by the sight of his real self. He suffers in this awareness, suffers knowing that he must fulfill this demand and in doing so ruin their love. He will seal his own doom when the gleam of his godly form destroys his lover."
Wagner's fantasy ignores the fact that the ever-concupiscent Zeus could not reveal his true identity, largely because his dalliances consisted of violation. Love never worked out too well for Nietzschean comic book superheroes (most of whom never married), the Gods, wenching Kings, or the romantics (see Classical Principle-Jan 17th 2023, on Berlioz).
Eduard Hanslick was a protege of Robert Schumann as a music critic, and was a friend of Johannes Brahms. Both Hanslick and Brahms were much harsher than today's critics. To them, Art was not mere entertainment, but part of the advancement of civilization and the human mind. In his review of Lohengrin, Hanslick wrote:
"Can we be moved to joy and sorrow by his love of Elsa, knowing that his only real emotional problem is the safeguarding of his secret? Can his insistence that his "beloved wife", Elsa, may never ask his name, or his origins, strike us as anything but inhuman? The bond of love is fashioned by confidence, not by secrecy."
CLASSICAL TRAGEDY
Classical tragedy proceeds from a different standpoint. Why do we study tragedy? Is it because we like to suffer? Schiller thought that the audience should leave the theater as better people than when they went in. Suffering, therefore, has the purpose of revealing the degree of courage shown in overcoming it. How does that work? The essence of classical tragedy lies in what is not there. It does not give answers. You, the audience, have to conceptualize the answers.
It is often said that tragedy is about the tragic flaws of the hero, or protagonist. Not quite! The tragedy is that of a person lives in a tragically flawed society. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, something was indeed "rotten in the State of Denmark."
The protagonist has to rise ABOVE that rotting society, at great personal risk, including that of becoming UNPOPULAR. To many, that feels like death. It certainly did to Hamlet. Yet, to avoid it, he rushed towards his death. From his famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy:
To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
RIGOLETTO
Verdi revered Shakespeare and called him "Papa." His Rigoletto is based on a play by Victor Hugo, "Le Roi S'Amuse" (The King Amuses Himself). Verdi was not allowed to make it about a King, so the subject became a lesser entity, the Duke of Mantua. Unlike Wagner's unreal fairy-tale world of anonymous avian knights travelling incognito, the opening of Rigoletto is set in a very real, and very ugly world. The Duke of Mantua is a profligate, licentious and dissolute rake, whose main joy in life is seducing innocent women. In the opening scene, he essays to seduce the Countess Ceprano, right in front of her enraged husband, who dare not complain, lest he face death.
Rigoletto, the deformed Court Jester, is a most unlikely protagonist. For him to rise above this degeneracy, and by opposing, end it, seems even more daunting than it did for Hamlet, who was, after all, a Prince (although Rigoletto might have seized upon the example of the fool, who could tell King Lear truths that no-one else dared to). Instead, Rigoletto resorts to adopting a dual identity. In court, he eggs the Duke on in his seductions, even going so far as to suggest beheading Count Ceprano, in order to gain access to his wife.
At home, he insists that he is a different person. He despises the court, and loves his daughter Gilda.
You are my life!
Without you, what would I have on earth?
Ah, my daughter!
In order to protect Gilda from the degenerates at Court, and especially the Duke, he has hidden her away, not allowing her to leave the house, except to go to church. In a strange resonance with Lohengrin, he will not tell her his name, or any family history:
GILDA
You sigh! What makes you so sad?
Tell your poor daughter.
If you have secrets, share them with her:
let her know about her family.
RIGOLETTO
You have no family.
GILDA
What is your name?
RIGOLETTO
What does it matter?
GILDA
If you are unwilling
to tell me about yourself...
RIGOLETTO (interrupting)
Never leave this house.
GILDA
I only go out to church.
RIGOLETTO
Oh, that is good.
GILDA
If you will tell me nothing of yourself
let me know at least who my mother was.
Rigoletto is doing this for very different reasons than Lohengrin. He seeks to protect his daughter by denying her all knowledge and access to the degenerate world she lives in: He does not want her to know what he does for a living! The results are disastrous. YOU CANNOT LIVE A DOUBLE LIFE. YOU CANNOT KOWTOW TO EVIL IN YOUR PUBLIC LIFE, YET BE MORAL AND LOVING IN YOUR FAMILY LIFE. IT WILL ALWAYS FAIL!
Rigoletto has himself turned Gilda into a sitting duck for the degenerate Duke.
IS TRUTH TO BE FOUND IN IRONY AND PARADOX, OR IN LITERALISM?
While irony is severely lacking in Lohengrin, it is the key to Rigoletto. When the Duke sings his famous aria, " La Donna e Mobile", about how fickle (mobile) women are, he is really describing himself:
DUCA
La donna è mobile
qual piuma al vento
muta d’accento
e di pensier.
Sempre un amabile
leggiadro viso,
in pianto o in riso
è menzognero.
La donna è mobile, ecc.
È sempre misero
chi a lei s’affida,
chi le confida
mal cauto il cor!
Pur mai non sentesi
felice appieno
DUKE
Women are as fickle
as feathers in the wind,
simple in speech,
and simple in mind.
always the loveable,
sweet, laughing face,
but laughing or crying,
the face is false for sure.
Women are as fickle, etc.
If you rely on her
you will regret it,
and if you trust her
you are undone!
Yet none can call himself
fully contented
We, the audience, a-muse ourselves, as we see that the Duke really believes his own delusions, and Verdi gives him the music to express it. In fact, Verdi, like Mozart in his Don Giovanni, gives the "cad" enough swagger that many male listeners are easily drawn into it, and even ask what is so bad about what the Duke is doing.
In Act Two of Lohengrin, Count Telramund (Friedrich), and his Lady MacBeth-like wife Ortrun, who are secret pagans (followers of the Norse Gods who Wagner later presented so positively in his Ring cycle), seeking to undermine the happy couple. Their main ploy is using every trick in the book to force the knight's secret identity out into the open, including the subversion of Elsa.
The next excerpt is optional, and illustrates what Rossini meant by some bad quarters of an hour, (though we have mercifully limited it to 3 and 1/3 minutes). We hear Wagner using dissonances such as the Lydian interval for purely arbitrary effect.
Hanslick wrote of this effect:
"In order to match every turn of the dialogue with a surprising musical coloration, he has recourse to perpetual modulation. I know of nothing so fatiguing as these half-recited songs in Lohengrin that never stay more than four measures in the same key but, with infinite evasiveness, carry from one deceptive cadence to the next, until the ear, exhausted and resigned to its fate, lets them go where they will...the listener soon reaches the point where he is incapable of further astonishment.”
Listen to as much or little as you like. The German is in the video's captions.
FRIEDRICH
(suddenly standing up)
Arise, companion of my shame!
Daybreak must not find us here.
ORTRUD
(without changing position)
I cannot go, I am bound here as if by a spell.
From the splendour of this our enemy's feast
let me suck a terrible, dearly poison
that will end our shame and their joy!
FRIEDRICH
(moving over to Ortrud, darkly)
O fearful woman, what spell binds me
to you still?
Why do I not leave you be
and run away, away
to where my conscience might find peace again!
Through you I lost
my honour, all my glory;
never again shall praise adorn me,
my knighthood is but shame!
I am condemned as an outlaw,
my sword lies smashed,
my coat of arms broken,
and cursed is the house of my fathers!
Wherever I turn
I am shunned, condemned;
lest he be defiled by my countenance,
even the robber flees me!
Would that I had chosen death,
for I am so wretched!
I have lost my honour,
my honour, my honour is no more!
That is only a portion of that section. It goes on for much longer. One might say that this is no different than the role of recitative in any other opera, but Mozart, Verdi, and others were capable of integrating arias, recitative, duets, etc. into a single coherent dramatic flow. Ironically, Wagner's "Music Dramas" often lose that dramatic flow and become static.
There is a problem with literalism. The characters in Lohengrin are stick figures. Worse, their motivations are not human. The Holy Grail is literally giving them their marching orders.
IRONY-CLAD CAUSALITY
Despite accusations by Telamund and Ortrun that Lohengrin is an imposter, practises sorcery, and that an anonymous dueler cannot claim victory, Lohengrin and Elsa are married, in one of the world's most famous, beautiful, and most utilized wedding marches. Please hear how superior the original is to what you are used to:
https://youtu.be/5C5FOW2ekHo
What can possibly intervene?
The opera sees Elsa as under the spell of Ortrun, when she caves in to the demand to know her husband's name:
ELSA
Ill-fatedly noble man!
Hear the question I must ask you!
Tell me your name!
LOHENGRIN
Stop!
ELSA
Whence did you come?
Hanslick however, sees it not as sorcery, but as only human:
"We find ourselves on Elsa's side as she succumbs to 'culpable curiosity' and loses her husband. In vain she pleads at Lohengrin's feet that he remain as 'witness of her penance.' He has no other answer than: "I must go, I must; the Grail will be angry with me if I remain."
Hanslick then invokes Schiller's "On the Sublime":
"A person who must, is no hero of a drama, for he is not of our kind. He is a 'seraphic soldier', whose will and consciousness repose not in his own bosom, but in the furrows of his divine field commander's brow.
“Our first requirement of a drama is that it present us with real characters, persons of flesh and blood, whose fate is determined by their own passions and decisions. We wish to witness the reaction of free will to great conflicts, and to volunteer our own emotional and intellectual participation. What does Lohengrin know of such things? ... The Holy Grail ...alone commands and occupies their thoughts, their feelings, and their deeds.”
Hanslick had earlier referred to this as: "armed ecstasy." The irony however, lies in Hanslick's commentary, not the opera.
A far more beautiful irony is attained in Gilda's aria, "Caro Nome." Due to her father's over-protection, she has never really met a man, and falls head over heels for the first man to come along. After the Duke briefly meets her, Gilda tells her nurse, Giovanna, that she might love him even more if he were a poor student. The Duke then introduces himself, as, guess what?- A poor student named Gualtier Maldè. What biting irony lies in Gilda's recitative (Scena) that fauns over the name:
Gualtier Maldè...nome di lui sì amato,
Walter Maldè...name of the man I love,
ti scolpisci nel core innamorato!
be thou engraved upon my lovesick heart!
She is swooning over a name that is not real! The Duke made it up in order to seduce her! Gilda is incredibly naive, but we know why. She was raised in a bubble. She is not so much lovesick as love-starved. Verdi could have easily been a cynic, and let you laugh at her, but instead he presents the listener with a great moral paradox. Her aria is beautiful! It captures the purity of innocent, and untainted love, not of a first lobe, but of a first being in love. She is not at fault for anything happening.
But, it also captures her naïveté, although it does not do that in a timid voice. She sings in a full, full adult voice. This ambiguity of meaning, brings a tear to even the most jaded eye. Please listen to the entire recitative and aria, and if you can, follow the score in the video.
Gualtier Maldè...nome di lui sì amato,
ti scolpisci nel core innamorato!
Caro nome che il mio cor
festi primo palpitar,
le delizie dell'amor
mi dêi sempre rammentar!
Col pensiero il mio desir
a te ognora volerà,
e pur l' ultimo sospir,
caro nome, tuo sarà.
Gualtier Maldè, name of the man I love,
be thou engraved upon my lovesick heart!
Sweet name, you who made my heart
throb for the first time,
you must always remind me
the pleasures of love!
My desire will fly to you
on the wings of thought
and my last breath
will be yours, my beloved.
As the aria ends, do you notice a sinister note creeping in? The Duke's creeps are there, ready to abduct her, while she returns to praising his name.
Stay tuned for Part 2, to find out not "how" both operas turn out, but "why" they turn out as they do.