Wagner in Pieces: Opera, the Fragment, and Acoustic Totality

The phrase "Wagner in pieces" might sound like a call for liberation: the monumental statue pulled down, its shattered remains strewn across the town square, and public jubilation. Wagner destroyed at last and music set free. Nothing could be further from the operatic truth. We live in Wagner's shadow: Wagner is always present among us, whether we are jubilant about that fact or not. No post-Wagnerian operatic work is innocent of Wagnerian knowledge, even if a century and a half of music saturated by Wagner's ideas is also a century and a half of music resisting those same ideas. From Nietzsche and Shaw to Adorno and Schlingensief, "Wagner"—made visible to us in the composer's writings and even more powerfully in stagings and performances of his works—has had a lot to say about modernity. Yet the theorist of the Gesamtkunstwerk holds a strange place in that modernity. The master of the whole has become the servant of the part.

The fragmentary nature of the modern world, inflected in so many ways by the German composer, becomes a mirror for the fragmentary nature of our encounters with Wagner himself.¹ For to hear Wagner is to fragment him, to inscribe him within the technological apparatus of daily life, or simply as a means of resisting his insistent urge to control us.² Does any composer seem a worse candidate for being cut up into pieces? A passage from Die Walküre, removed from its surround, demands that we complete it; an aria lifted from Don Giovanni is by comparison merely decontextualized. Mozart might have accepted with good humor a commission for a recital album, but it's hard to imagine Wagner playing along.

Which is not to suggest that Wagner would have shrugged at commercial opportunity. A practical man of the theater, Wagner knew that the fragments of his masterpieces were his calling cards. Franz Liszt arranged piano selections from his son-in-law's operas for the ambitious amateur, and the piano brought Wagner into the nineteenth-century drawing room. In 1862 Wagner was preparing for a concert in Vienna at which he was to conduct excerpts of his work, including Siegfried's forging scene. The score was subjected to necessary alterations, so that the passages might come to a resting point, something they would never do during a staged performance of the work.³ The composer was, in effect, altering the Ring to make it a usable object. As modern listeners we have been doing the same ever since—turning off a CD player, catching an aria on the radio, putting favorite passages onto an iPod, walking out of the theater when we feel a cold coming on—altering Wagner to fit our own needs and purposes, breaking Wagner into pieces.

In the era of digital recording, the totality of Wagner's work is available to us at a moment's notice and in hitherto incomparable variety. We can summon up our Wagner anywhere, anytime, and in portions as small as we may want. Like most artworks, however, the operas resist limited display. When offered in reduced format, strange things can happen to Wagner's music. In the worst cases, the music's power can be neutralized, its aura domesticated, something thrilling turned into a dried relic, a musical rabbit's foot. And yet we have a battery of these partial views: "The Immolation Scene," "The Ride of the Valkyries," "Forest Murmurs," "Daland's Narrative," "The Good Friday Spell," "The Liebestod," all concert and recital favorites that seduce us into accepting their autonomy. The fragment can spell trouble, but opera invites just such fragmentary encounters.

Let me begin then with the obligation to the operatic partial. We would be hard-pressed to imagine opera without its fragments. But it then becomes the listener's burden to relocate the fragment, to reinsert it into the continuity of musical production. Doing so involves so many things—including textual responsibility, or really understanding the words—all so we can resituate the emotional and dramatic context that can make sense of a single...