Wagner's Themes: A Study in Musical Expression (review)

The compulsion to explain Wagner's works in words is as old as the works themselves. Yet there are those who remain convinced that this compulsion represents nothing more than a misguided pedagogical belief that creations of such size and intensity cannot possibly be adequately comprehended directly, immediately, and comprehensively during performance; and those who think like this might even conclude that all attempts at verbal explanation are likely to do more harm than good.

A less extreme approach regards critical commentary on Wagner as of genuine value, not least in providing a counterweight to the Master's own sinister desire to seduce passive audiences as they experience the Gesamtkunstwerk in the theatre, and become vulnerable to dangerous, deluded beliefs and actions. It could well be concluded, therefore, that such commentaries are most useful when they openly aspire to confront the significance of the works through questioning and interpreting all aspects of their materials as fully as possible. To the extent that a single attitude can be abstracted from them, present-day Wagner studies seem to subscribe to this view, the principal exception being theoretical accounts of harmonic identities and procedures. Yet, as the work of David Lewin, David Kopp, and others has shown, even theory-based investigations can, without too much stress and strain, be linked to those pluralities and ambiguities of signification on which interpretations of the works as dramas most commonly depend.

Even during the earliest phase of Wagner interpretation there was a difference to be observed between the relatively 'user-friendly' character of Hans von Wolzogen's 'thematic guides', aiming to re-create the lived experience of performance—'The Prelude ushers us into the sanctuary of the Holy Grail'—and the kind of harmonically oriented motivic analysis pioneered by Karl Mayrberger, which, as Ian Bent has noted, is 'carried out with the single mindedness of the true theorist, eschewing all reference to dramatic purpose or aesthetic effect' (Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, ii: Hermeneutic Approaches (Cambridge, 1994), 92). Early commentators began with thematic elements, as the works themselves did, and by way of considering what those elements signified, expressed, symbolized, or represented, they laid the foundations for critical interpretations and analyses in which matters of form, and especially of the role of periodic structures within the through-composed continuum, were shown to bear the burden of sustaining the drama's evolution, and ultimate significance. Identifying themes or leitmotivs could therefore only be a preliminary phase to the main interpretative task, and that position has strengthened of late as musicological engagements with hermeneutics and cultural practice have provided rich, contentious stimuli for much recent writing about Wagner.

It is clear from his text that F. E. Kirby would not deny any of this. He has read a certain amount of this newer material, and although he could have produced a very different book if he had set out to respond to it in depth, his position is that a discussion focused on motifs, far from being merely preliminary, and even rather primitive, is desirable 'to resolve the mystery of [what Thomas Mann described as] Wagner's "magic of association" (Beziehungszauber). . . . As far as I know, but few writers have done this for individual works of Wagner, and no-one for their totality. I hope that this exposition may provide a point of departure for further investigations, not only of Wagner, but for nineteenth- and even twentieth-century music in general, for which I think it is possible to construct at least a rough equivalent of a "theory of affections"' (p. 214).

Here Kirby claims a degree of originality for the actual extent of his own work, and he is keen to affirm that 'in Wagner's hands the leitmotivs come to symbolize a universe of diverse meanings, which comprehend physical motion in the world of nature, ideas, concepts, ethical values, as well as irony, deceit, satire...