Wagner, Schumann and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth by Christopher Alan Reynolds (review)

It is a received commonplace that in the essay The Artwork of the Future (1849) Wagner famously and self-servingly declared that in his last symphony Beethoven had brought the genre to its highest point of development: ‘Beyond it no further step is possible.’ This has generally been taken as a starting point for an evaluation of the impact Beethoven’s legacy in general and the Ninth Symphony in particular had on the subsequent trajectory of symphonic and operatic genres in the nineteenth century. In this carefully researched and perceptive study Christopher Reynolds takes a step back from Wagnerian myth-making by suggesting that in the cases of Wagner and Schumann their respective stylistic advances in Dresden in late 1845 and early 1846 ‘stemmed from a deepened understanding of Beethoven’s contrapuntal techniques and strategies in the Ninth Symphony’ (p. 3) and shared more common ground than has hitherto been supposed.

Reynolds begins by systematically investigating what is described as Wagner’s ‘Faustian understanding of Beethoven’s Ninth’ (the chapter’s title) and the extent to which the character of Faust as portrayed by Goethe may have provided Wagner with a metaphor he could elaborate in his opera Der fliegende Holländer (1841). There is an obvious connection between the two protagonists in that both Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s Dutchman enter into a satanic pact; furthermore, Reynolds points out that at the time he was composing Holländer Wagner was ‘steeped in both Beethoven’s Ninth and Faust through the composition of an unfinished Faust symphony’ (p. 22). Reynolds supports his assertion by consideration of specific musical links between Holländer and Wagner’s Goethe-inspired reading of the symphony, written some five years later in preparation for a performance to be given on Palm Sunday 1846. This retrospective attribution of Wagner’s 1846 reading of the symphony to his earlier compositional practice of 1841 is problematic. The hypothesis rests on the assumption that Wagner’s view of the Ninth in 1846 had not essentially changed in the five years since the composition of Holländer in 1840/41. Given the rapid pace of Wagner’s development during his Dresden years (1842–9), this seems unlikely.

Reynolds continues this investigation of influence by considering what is described as Wagner’s technique of thematic dispersion in Holländer. This amounts to a rereading of the oft-cited claim in A Communication to my Friends (1851) that ‘the thematic idea I had already conceived began to spread itself like a complete net over the entire work’. If the notion of the ‘thematic idea’ is interpreted in the narrow sense of a musical theme then this claim is not sustainable; if, however, the thematic idea is interpreted more broadly as a network of musical events derived from Beethoven’s Ninth and informed by Goethe’s Faust, then it is more plausible. A significant and welcome feature of this chapter is the focus on Wagner’s Faust overture (WWV 59), a work often overlooked in Wagner studies. The general claim, however, that the absence of contrary-motion counterpoint in the original version of the overture (1840) and its presence in the revision of 1855 suggests that Wagner ‘was not aware of the element of the Ninth’s first movement in 1840’ (p.72) does seem to oversimplify Wagner’s understanding of the symphony. There is ample evidence to prove that Wagner was deeply engaged with Beethoven’s Ninth from the very beginnings of his musical experience. Between the summer of 1830 and Easter 1831 he made a two-hand arrangement of the work for piano (WWV 9); his first extant letter, written on 6 October 1830 (SB1, 117), is to the publisher Schott, saying how he had made Beethoven’s last symphony ‘the object of my deepest study’ and enquiring about the possibility of the publication of his arrangement. Even at...