Developing Variation: From Wagner to Boulez

 

(This essay was originally published as a programme note for the Salzburg Festival, 2015, for a concert given by members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim. How I wish I had gone, rather than suffering Claus Guth's Fidelio!)

 

RICHARD WAGNER • Siegfried-Idyll for Chamber Orchestra, WWV 103

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG • Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E for 15 Solo Instruments, Op. 9
PIERRE BOULEZ • sur Incises (1996/1998/2006) pour 3 pianos, 3 harpes et 3 percussions-claviers

Gwyneth Jones and Peter Hofmann in the 'Centenary' Ring, conducted by Boulez

 

Wagner-Schoenberg-Boulez: it is a teleology worthy of any of those three, highly teleologically-minded composers. Both Wagner and Schoenberg are composers who have featured heavily in Pierre Boulez’s conducting, compositional, and polemical life; all three are crucial figures to Daniel Barenboim too, and indeed to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. In this programme, however, we can hear not only inspiration but also the need to go beyond, even to disavow. ‘Schoenberg est mort,’ was Boulez’s celebrated, if, in all but the most literal sense, premature claim in 1951. Parricide, though, has long been a guiding principle of the Western ‘classical’ tradition.

 

Wagner had declared both his lineage in Beethoven’s example and the necessity of its overcoming by positing his music dramas as the successors, perhaps even the only successors, to the symphonies of his revered predecessor. An early, C major Symphony (1832), is a better work than detractors, or mediocre performances, permit, but is ultimately too imitative to stand entirely on its own two feet. There is also a fragmentary E major Symphony from two years later, and there are various sonata-form works for piano. The Siegfried-Idyll, however, remains in a different class. Moreover, for all Wagner’s ongoing worship of Beethoven, it is not an especially Beethovenian, or even sonata-principled work – and is probably all the stronger for that.

 

Thematic material is taken from the final scene of the third act of Siegfried, often considered the ‘scherzo’ – Beethovenian terms die hard – of the Ring. Composed in late 1870, the Tribschen Idyll with Fidi – the present title seems not to have been used until 1877, coined for a performance in Meiningen – is subtitled, on the autograph score, ‘Birdsong and Orange Sunrise, presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870’. Which is what happened on Christmas Day, in gratitude, as a short poem makes clear, for the birth of Siegfried Wagner the previous year. Beethovenian dialectics are largely eschewed in favour of a formal conception of development rooted in Wagner’s own musico-dramatic ‘endless melody’, albeit without words. If anything, it is Liszt’s symphonic poems – Liszt being Cosima’s father – that come to mind as progenitors, a poetic ‘idea’ made manifest in music.

Not only does this lullaby of peace, joy and world-inheritance, to employ conventional leitmotif references from the opera, present a (hopeless) spur to our imagination with respect to the post-Parsifal ‘symphonies’ Wagner often envisaged, yet was never granted time to write. It also shows how Wagner’s mature compositional method could, despite the claims of detractors and some admirers alike, adapt and even renew later-nineteenth-century symphonic form. Carl Dahlhaus, writing of Wagner’s music dramas, admirably described the composer’s leitmotif technique as ‘the binding together of a music drama through a dense web of motivic connections from within’. Such, in place of Beethoven’s symphonic goal-orientation, viewed by many modernists with suspicion, offered the prospect, subtly realised here, of instrumental music founded upon similar principles. Indeed, a gradual, if far from complete loosening of association between concrete objects and motifs in the music dramas – the Ring the high water-mark, Tristan and Parsifal freer in association – had already done part of Wagner’s work for him. Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg would be two of his, and Liszt’s, most important successors. Moreover, what Schoenberg would analyse in earlier music, particularly but far from exclusively that of Brahms, as ‘developing variation’ is certainly present in Wagner’s expansion – prophetic also for Boulez’s technique of ‘proliferation’ – of his opening motivic material.

Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, and Brahms certainly vie, most productively, for attention in Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, one of the composer’s sunniest, indeed life-affirming works. It follows the sonata-form example of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor for piano, radically integrating the traditional multi-movement sonata/symphony structure – Sonata Allegro-Scherzo-Slow Movement-Finale – into the traditional structure of a single sonata-form movement: Exposition-Development-Recapitulation. Another important predecessor is Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, which Liszt edited, re-wrote, and transcribed (both for piano and orchestra, and for two pianos). Equally important as such formal considerations, which undoubtedly help account for its exhilarating concision, are instrumentation and harmony. In the more commonly-played original version for fifteen solo instruments – Schoenberg would later arrange the work for full orchestra, as Wagner had intended to do with his Idyll – there is a significant shift away from the string-saturated, or at least string-founded, textures of the Romantic symphony (Brahms) or late Romantic symphonic poem (Strauss). At the same time, that technique of developing variation, which Schoenberg avowedly derived from Brahms, but which was also present in his Wagnerian inheritance, and an almost-but-not-quite Expressionist tinge upon Strauss’s harmonies contributes to the historical and formal struggle. The opening horn calls signal to the possibility of constructing harmonies upon the interval of a fourth: present in late Liszt in Mephistophelian guise, but perhaps more commonly associated with subsequent experiments by Bartók. 

And yet, a symphony this undoubtedly remains, far more so than Wagner’s Idyll. Schoenberg was always as much conservative as radical; indeed, it was, he would claim, to maintain the supremacy of German ‘tradition’ that he would soon feel compelled by historical necessity to take the fateful steps he did, first renouncing tonality (although he would, not unreasonably, reject the term ‘atonality’), and then developing his twelve-note method. We are not there yet; the tonality of E major remains a guiding principle, as do modulation and key relationships. Op.9 offers as inventive a solution to the problem of the twentieth-century symphony as Haydn had to a genre he may not have invented, but which he surely transformed into the force with which Beethoven, Wagner, and ultimately Schoenberg would have to reckon. With the Second String Quartet, op.10, however, Schoenberg – and we – would feel the air of another planet.

Boulez’s relationship towards much of Schoenberg has long been ambivalent, even prior to that article of 1951. That despite the fact that few, if any, performers can have consistently, persistently done so much for his music; perhaps Boulez’s only rival in that respect would be Schoenberg’s son-in-law, Michael Gielen. It is, Boulez has long insisted, a short period in Schoenberg’s œuvre, that of so-called ‘free atonality’, prior to the composer’s turn to dodecaphony, which most interests him; and yet, he has continued to perform, in most cases, highly persuasively, later as well as earlier works, remaining the only conductor to have recorded Moses und Aron twice. Brahmsian influence is, at bottom and somewhat to simplify, what most concerns Boulez in the work of the later Schoenberg. For him, at least, it is Wagnerian tendencies that remain more fruitful – hardly surprisingly, given the preponderance of Wagner in Boulez’s operatic repertoire, and the importance of both Wagner and Mahler for later works such as the orchestral Notations.

sur Incises, like many of Boulez’s works, has its seeds in an earlier work. Just as Wagner would take problems, whether musical, philosophical, or both, which had arisen in previous works as starting-points for subsequent explorations – and indeed, just as he used material from Siegfried for the Siegfried-Idyll – so Boulez has, sometimes repeatedly, returned both to material presented in earlier works, and in some cases, to earlier works themselves, in order to expand them. This exploration falls into the former category. Incises is a piano piece written (1994, revised 2001) for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition (with which Maurizio Pollini, long an advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, had a strong association), is a brilliant, toccata-like work, written with typical éclat. Boulez first intended, as he explained in an interview of 1998, to ‘transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. … Therefore, I produced a piece for three pianos, assuming that there already exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially in the modern age – take for example Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. (In my opinion, everybody would have been reminded of this world if I had also written a piece for two pianos.) I have also considered the possibility of four pianos as this constellation is very attractive and provides a good balance.’ Then, however, the siren call of Stravinsky – that great anti-Wagnerian, long also considered Schoenberg’s antipode – and especially Les Noces suggested another path. As Boulez remarked more recently, in 2010, ‘This is the reason why I ended up with three pianos - incidentally three pianists are part of our ensemble [Intercontemporain].’ There were likewise three percussionists in the ensemble, and subsequently, the idea of adding three harps occurred to him, an idea rendered more attractive by his use of the instrument in Répons.

It would be possible to say much more about its genesis, and indeed its different versions, but the work itself, even as work-in-progress – Boulez’s conception of serialism as ever-expanding, open-ended, means that many of his works remain in this state – requires more immanent attention. The spatial element is crucial: we hear solo lines but also different groups: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, considered horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. A startling aspect of the latter formations is to hear passages transferring spatially across, say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano, played, as it were, by the conductor. It is as if Boulez plays with a musical magical square, three rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet always adding up to the required total, even if we do not know what that should be. Then there are the beguiling sonorities: Boulez offers harmonies of Debussyan – again, one might say, post-Wagnerian – sumptuousness. Listen also for the Romantic tinge to the piano writing; Boulez has long admired the expansion of the instrument’s capabilities by composers such as Liszt and Chopin. A kinetic, rhythmic energy brings to mind Stravinsky and Bartók. Indeed, that distancing from the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion notwithstanding, Bartók’s ghost seems present in some of the piano writing, contagious for the other instrumentalists. Despite the sense – and, perhaps for some of us, the desire – that this universe might continue expanding forever, its material in perpetual proliferation, the conclusion, whose surprise I shall not reveal, proves decisive. At least for now.

Two reminiscences concerning the late Patrice Chéreau

 

 

Here speaks an opera director, that is, one as alert to the requirements of Wagner's music as to those of his poem:

... the orchestra pit [should] be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles – the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message. … Should one not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?

Indeed, writing in 1873 about his conception of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus then under construction, Wagner had expanded in similar terms upon his discussion nine years earlier with Gottfried Semper, concerning the abortive Munich Festival Theatre for Ludwig II. Between proscenium and audience would lie a ‘mystical abyss’, out of which the sounds of the concealed orchestra should emerge as an aural equivalent to the steam that once had risen from Gaia’s primæval womb, underneath the seat of the Pythia. Whether Chéreau knew that relatively obscure piece by Wagner, Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth, is in a sense immaterial. Either he had alighted upon the similarity by study or by musico-theatrical intuition; either way, it speaks of a directorial kinship rare indeed.

Equally important to the success of the ‘Centenary’ Ring was, of course, the collaboration with Boulez. The composer-conductor, a true successor to Wagner and Mahler, spent a great deal of time on the score with Chéreau. Boulez, however, clearly learned a great deal from his director too. The following observation was clearly derived – as Boulez acknowledges – from their discussions:

There have been endless discussions as to whether this conclusion is pessimistic or optimistic; but is that really the question? Or at any rate can the question be put in such simple terms? Chéreau has called it ‘oracular’, and it is a good description. In the ancient world, oracles were always ambiguously phrased so that their deeper meaning could be understood only after the event, which, as it were, provided a semantic analysis of the oracle’s statement. Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.

 

 

We rarely hear anything but praise for this production now, though there will doubtless always be a few irreconcilables. Yet it is salutary to recall how bitterly contested the Boulez-Chéreau Ring was at the time, especially in its first year, 1976. It is always worth asking ourselves whether we are likely to appear ridiculous, on the wrong side of history, in our fearful judgements, rejecting just that with which Wagner, Chéreau, and Boulez challenged us: 'a conclusion that remains shifting'.

 

The only time I saw Chéreau, a highly talented actor in his own right, perform was at the Proms five years ago. It was an unforgettable occasion both as a concert in itself, and on account of the connections between those involved: Daniel Barenboim, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Chéreau, and Boulez. I reproduce below my report on the concert:

 

Prom 39: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim, 14 August 2008

Royal Albert Hall

Boulez – Mémoriale (‘... explosante-fixe ...’ Originel)
Stravinsky – L’histoire du soldat (in French)

Guy Eshed (flute)
Patrice Chéreau (narrator)
Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

The genesis of Mémoriale is complicated and protracted even by Boulez’s standards. A simplified presentation would say that it emerged as a piece for solo flute, two horns, and six strings, as a memorial for Ensemble Intercontemporain flautist, Lawrence Beauregard, the material originating in the ‘kit’ for ‘... explosante-fixe’, itself intended as a memorial for Stravinsky and therefore especially apposite for the present programme. Electronics thus play no part, although they do in ‘... explosante-fixe ...’, yet an interesting aspect of this performance was how much the strings were suggestive of such means. They also produced a beautiful halo-like impression, albeit with a properly Boulezian sense of the febrile. The music, to which all instrumentalists contributed with great sensitivity, captured an equally Boulezian sense of the shimmering and ever-expanding, serial music – and that of Boulez in particular –being characterised by its unending possibilities for continuation, development, and liberation from fixed endings. Guy Eshed was an outstanding soloist, both musically and technically. None of the intricacies of Boulez’s exquisite, almost culinary line held any fear for him, but this was never virtuosity for its own sake. Inevitable reminiscences of Debussy added to the finely-honed, ineffable ‘Frenchness’ of this excellent performance. It was touching to have Boulez in the audience come to the stage in order to share in the applause.

Boulez and Barenboim have been close musical collaborators and friends ever since they performed Bartók’s First Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1964. Patrice Chéreau’s name will ever be linked with that of Boulez as a result of their collaboration on the legendary ‘Centenary-Ring’ at Bayreuth, the first production of the three-act version of Lulu, and more recently, a universally-acclaimed From the House of the Dead; Chéreau also once acted as narrator for a 1980 Ensemble Intercontemporain performance of L’histoire du soldat under Boulez. Links with Barenboim have also been strong, including productions of Wozzeck, Don Giovanni, and most recently Tristan und Isolde. These various interconnections added another layer of interest to the intelligent programming. It is fair to say that this was above all Chéreau’s performance. He threw himself with such gusto into his roles as narrator, soldier, and Devil, that one could almost see the missing puppets. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s text was not always adhered to word for word, but that did not matter in the slightest. One sensed the genius of Chéreau as a director, an animateur, and indeed he proved himself no mean actor. (He actually appeared on stage as Siegfried at Bayreuth on one occasion, whilst a replacement tenor sang from the wings.) This was a visual performance too, which made it seem such a pity that many members of the audience rarely looked up from the text and translation in the programme. I suspect that one would have discerned most of what was going on from Chéreau’s expressivity even if one understood not a word of French. As the work progresses, it becomes more musical in nature. Barenboim and his players proved fine exponents of this extraordinary score. Its potent mix of rhythmic insistence, thematic and colouristic economy and yet expressivity, and of course its instant, nagging memorability, was captured well throughout. Guy Braunstein returned, to play on the Devil’s own instrument; his performance was everything one might have expected. I was also especially impressed by Dan Moshayev’s contribution on percussion. But all of the players contributed a great deal, both in solo and ensemble terms. Barenboim clearly trusted enough in their abilities to permit them considerable leeway at times, whilst directing them strongly where required. More than once I thought of Busoni in terms of the harmonies and general ambience. Barenboim has considerable experience with Busoni’s music, so a sense of kinship between the Italian composer’s Junge Klassität and a work heading towards Stravinskian neo-classicism may not have been surprising; that does not make it any the less welcome. There might sometimes have been greater aggression to be heard in so polemical a score than one heard here, but this remained an excellent performance. It projected well into the capricious, cavernous expanses of the Royal Albert Hall too.

Happy Birthday, Richard!

Two years to go before the bicentenary...

A relatively rare nod to Leipzig's greatest son, at the site of his birth
(Good Friday, April 2011)

Almost everyone seems to have been at Glyndebourne yesterday for the new Meistersinger: not, alas I, though early reports tend to suggest a production somewhat lacking in Wahn and its darker implications. ('Riotous apprentices,' however, a friend approvingly remarks.) Though it looks as though I shall miss out on Wagner in Sussex, there will be a good few reports to come over the summer. Next month brings Götterdämmerung in Paris, to conclude the impressive new Ring there, and Pierre Boulez conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin in the Faust Overture and the Siegfried-Idyll (along with Daniel Barenboim at the piano for both Liszt concertos). Early August offers four nights in Bayreuth, from where I shall report on the new Tannhäuser, Lohengrin (Hans Neuenfels), Tristan (Christoph Marthaler), and the final outing for Stefan Herheim's extraordinary production of Parsifal.



With Wagner, there is of course always more than enough to think about. At some point, I should like to revisit and to develop my thoughts concerning the Immolation Scene, which anyone interested will find in the final chapter of my book, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner's Ring (click here for  details on the publisher's website). In the meantime, however, here is the very end of that chapter, which may, even out of context, be of interest to some readers...

The uncertainty of the watchers’ position precludes talk of a ‘happy ending’, yet they stand a little advanced upon us, as a beacon of hope to a world that has destroyed neither Valhalla nor Nibelheim. Art, in [Herbert] Marcuse’s words, ‘cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.’ The watchers’ emotional witness serves to remind us not only of the hopes we might invest in the future, but also of the condemnation we should pronounce upon the present: mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur. If we have rejected Mother Courage, what, then, of the ‘cloth-capped workers out of Brecht-Weill’ in [Patrice] Chéreau’s production? [Michael] Tanner acidly remarks that the centenary Ring was, ‘after all, a Ring to make us think. There is no evidence yet that it has succeeded.’ On the contrary: the debate ignited has still not died down. The watchers might be seen, if not to represent a particular social class, then at least to provide a crucial social element to the Ring’s denouement: a counterpoise to the ‘interior’ ending to Tristan, a return to words from 1849:

How should man create from himself a greater strength than he possesses? – We see that man is utterly incapable in himself to attain his destiny, that in himself he has not the strength to germinate the living seed distinguishing him from the beast. Yet that strength, missing in man, we find in overflowing abundance in the totality of men. … Whereas the spirit of the isolated man remains eternally buried in deepest night, it is awakened in the combination of men …

Hegel had pointed out that ancient movements inimical to worldly actuality – Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism – had brought only an abstract, inward reconciliation, incapable of satisfying living Spirit, which longed for a ‘higher reconciliation’. This, in conjunction with the depravity of Roman – Gibichung? – politics, had brought Christianity into the world. [Moses] Hess too had warned of the dangers of ‘philosophical egoism’:

Is the consistent Philosopher, as he appears in Bruno Bauer, not the self-satisfied egoist, the solitary who is blissful and all-powerful in his self-consciousness? … Is he not but as the pious Christian who has been elevated and consoled by his Communion feast and so separated from this evil and fallen world? Has he anything other to do in the world except – to learn to despise it? – Read Bruno Bauer! No Church Father and no statesman has ever more cynically expressed his scorn of the world of the ‘mass’ than this recent philosopher …

The watchers express sympathy for Brünnhilde and amazement at the flames of Loge, but what do Brünnhilde and Loge care for the survivors? Is Brünnhilde’s capacity for sympathy really universal, or is her separation from this evil, fallen world more cynical, or at least more selfish? More fundamentally, might Schopenhauerian rejection of the world actually, if unintentionally, provide ideological cover for ‘critical criticism’? Loge threatened to burn Valhalla in his Rheingold soliloquy; perhaps Brünnhilde, having passed through the illusions of love, is now, as his instrument, led astray by the critical illusions of nothingness. Do the watchers provide a counterpoise to such ‘egoism’, or to the nihilism it might engender in Wagner’s audience? It is possible that they retain something of [Max] Stirner’s free union of individuals, come together voluntarily and ever at liberty to disperse. Yet the wondrous events appear to provide a stronger communal bond than Stirner would allow.

Some of these suggestions are tentative, but that follows necessarily from the suggestive nature of the Ring, and in particular of its ending. Wagner, even in his theoretical writings, is vague as to what form any future political system might take – but this holds for many social and political critics, Marx included. In the introduction to the Zurich reform works for the 1872 edition of his collected writings, Wagner claims, ‘I believed in the revolution, in its necessity and its inevitability,’ but adds that it was never his intent to define the new political order. This would ‘emerge from the ruins of a mendacious world’. Eight years later, we read:

Questions as to how this or that shall be altered or eliminated, e.g., what to do with animals, how to distribute property, order sexual unions etc., are not to be answered in advance by speculative guidance; they answer themselves of their own accord through the consequences of the act, when this proceeds out of a great religious awareness.

Indeed, in Art and Revolution, Wagner had attacked the ‘utopia’ of Christianity, whose dogmas had ever been unrealisable. His move towards Schopenhauer lessened his hostility, yet reconciliation is never completed: not in the Ring, nor even in Parsifal. On the other hand, as Wagner lapped up Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, the increasingly preferential role played by music in the Gesamtkunstwerk itself provided a utopian vision. Wagner rejected even the ‘Schopenhauer ending’ as tendentious, resolving to let the music speak for itself – even if, perhaps especially if, it should ultimately resist translation into words. The final grandeur of Valhalla ablaze and the glorious – prophetic? – memory of Siegfried and the ‘act’ lead us into that enigmatic final motif. Its enigma is as intrinsic, as insoluble, as that of the ‘Tristan chord’. It provokes the dangerous, yet creative questioning of Wotan and Loge, and the malcontent and rebellion of the Volsungs; through Brünnhilde and the watchers, it tantalises us with ‘religious awareness’, the possibility of redemption. Falling short of absolute reconciliation – as even Hegel had done – returns us to the dialectical conflict between ‘absolute’ Romantic music and critical utopian ideas.

It seems fitting to turn one last time to the Centenary-Ring, which has proved quite an inspiration throughout this book. In his Performer’s Notebook, Boulez writes:

There have been endless discussions as to whether this conclusion is pessimistic or optimistic; but is that really the question? Or at any rate can the question be put in such simple terms? Chéreau has called it ‘oracular’, and it is a good description. In the ancient world, oracles were always ambiguously phrased so that their deeper meaning could be understood only after the event, which, as it were, provided a semantic analysis of the oracle’s statement. Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.

Chéreau himself wished:

… that the orchestra pit be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles – the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message. … Should one not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?

Writing in 1873 about his conception of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus then under construction, Wagner had expanded in similar terms upon his discussion nine years earlier with Gottfried Semper, concerning the abortive Munich Festival Theatre for Ludwig II. Between proscenium and audience would lie a ‘mystical abyss’, out of which the sounds of the concealed orchestra should emerge as an aural equivalent to the steam that once had risen from Gaia’s primæval womb, underneath the seat of the Pythia. Once again, Boulez and Chéreau point us toward the interpretive implications of Wagner’s vision.

Just as the explorations of the Ring had beckoned during Lohengrin’s concluding bars, so now do those of Parsifal: the work intended explicitly, indeed solely, for the Oracle of Bayreuth. If sexual love has become embroiled in games of power-politics and shown to be a force more of destruction than of liberation, such dark intimations of Freud will be more fully explored in that great second-act confrontation between Kundry and Parsifal, next to which the awakening of Siegfried and Brünnhilde might stand in danger of appearing superficial or naïve. Wagner’s final drama will build upon the riddles adumbrated in the Ring, and climax in the most oracular pronouncement of all: ‘Redemption to the Redeemer’. Solution to Wagner’s sphinx-like riddle of redemption will once again be postponed. Is the answer ‘man’? At any rate, Feuerbach remains a tangible presence. We must continue to listen carefully to the final bars of the Ring, which seem ‘to be telling us that the ultimate form of asceticism is to renounce easy illusion and create in ourselves the void from which a new genesis may spring’. Is this Feuerbach or Schopenhauer? If the question is ‘revolution or redemption?’ is the answer ‘revolution in redemption’? It is not that these questions have ceased to matter, nor that they have been transcended; it is certainly not the case that they should not have been asked, nor that they should cease to be asked. Chéreau’s mistrust and anxiety must remain at the hearts of present attempts if not to interpret then at least to suggest an illusory, momentary ‘solution’.

Adorno rightly feared the ‘Happy End’. Siegfried and even Hagen would have profited had they too been able to do so. We should remain vigilant, lest the tempting nihilism of phantasmagorical resolution should lure us from our path. A twentieth-century mind’s ear – but what of the twenty-first century? – might have found less perilous the tragedy and catharsis of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Ravel’s whirling post-war vortex of disintegration in La Valse, or the inconclusive halt to which Berg so chillingly calls his Wozzeck. On the other hand, the redemptive halo in which, echoing Wagner, Berg bathed the end of his last completed work, the Violin Concerto (‘To the memory of an angel’) has often proved more problematical. Whilst considering the concerto more successful than Berg’s other ‘late’ works, Der Wein and Lulu, the young Boulez could not conceal his distaste at ‘this same desire for reconciliation’. Yet Boulez would subsequently conduct Parsifal and the Ring at Bayreuth – not to mention the first three-act performance of Lulu.

Adorno was quite justified to claim that serious consideration of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis – perhaps the most enduringly enigmatic musical work yet written – could only result in its Brechtian alienation, in rupturing ‘the aura of unfocused veneration protectively surrounding it’. One of the greatest problems with respect to the Ring is that such rupture has become well-nigh impossible. To be aware of this is only a beginning, but better than nothing. We should remain grateful that the enigma of the Ring pales besides that of Beethoven’s work. If we could understand why Beethoven set the Mass, we should, Adorno claimed, understand the Missa Solemnis. Understanding why Wagner wrote the Ring and beginning to understand the work itself suddenly seem less forbidding prospects.

Wagner’s musical mastery should not render us deaf to problems, or indeed opportunities, which endure. We engage with those problems when we consider redemption not as something accomplished – which, for the most part, it patently is not – but as a possibility. We should do Wagner a gross injustice were we to consider the Immolation Scene as an attempt to return to Beethoven. No longer can a journey from C minor to C major, from darkness to light, enable a hero to burst open the portals of Heaven; the Fifth Symphony means something different after Feuerbach. The Ring might open in E flat, but to end in the flattened tonality of D flat, the key of Valhalla and the key in which Das Rheingold so unsettlingly concludes or fails to conclude, can hardly fail to provoke unsettling questions. Progressive – even ‘regressive’ – tonality did not fail to leave its mark upon Mahler, who at times appeared to speak to the later twentieth century more directly than any other composer.

Birtwistle, it may be noted, has continued to reject Beethovenian goal-orientation in his music, whilst benefiting greatly – for example, in Gawain (1990–94) – from his intensive study of the Ring and Wagnerian leitmotif technique. As Birtwistle’s dramatic œuvre, up to and including The Io Passion (2004), indicates, myth, whether Christian or pagan, has, with its dialectic between the linear and the cyclical, come to seem more fruitful for dramatic exploration than its Romantic roots might once have seemed to imply. Myth has proved far less sterile and dated, far more capable of renewal, than verismo or inter-war neo-classicism. Birtwistle himself composed incidental music – though the word ‘incidental’ does the depth of his labyrinthine invention no justice – in 1981 to Tony Harrison’s translation of the Oresteia for the Royal National Theatre. Boulez had plans to set a reduction by Heiner Müller of the Oresteia, frustrated by Müller’s untimely death. Xenakis pursued his own Æschylus-inspired ‘synthesis of the arts’ in Oresteïa (1965–66), a combination of incidental music and concert-piece, followed by the vocal works Kassandra (1987) and La déesse Athéna (1992). And Stockhausen, in his gigantic seven-part Licht myth of creation, would seem to court, even to crave, Wagnerian comparisons; the new purveyor of myths strives to see the world begin, if not end. (Lucifer may have other ideas, though.) Wagner’s oracle is of the nineteenth century, yet is no more confined to that century than that of Æschylus is to his. The Ring attempts to ‘make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’. Only a further revolution, it seems, will enable us fully to understand the oracle of Götterdämmerung; then, we may hope, shall the owl of Minerva once again spread its wings. In the meantime, the Ring’s final augury will keep us fruitfully occupied.