Is Mozart Greater Than Wagner in Opera ?

[(poco) Sforzando]

Turning to Wagner libretti; they are often tedious with things stated three times, as though the listener is stupid;

I disagree with this as well. One of Wagner's great innovations in the Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal is that his characters live largely in their minds. If Wotan takes a huge chunk of time in Act Two of Die Walkuere to review events we have already experienced the night before in Das Rheingold, he does so not because he's afraid we missed the earlier opera but to re-evaluate these events in light of his subsequent experiences. Wagner's dramatic technique serves not only to get the stories told, but to follow the psychological journeys his characters take to understand themselves and develop. Perhaps the outstanding example of this is Tristan's long monologue in Act Three of his opera, where he develops from being nearly suicidal to serenely accepting his choice to pursue his illict love with Isolde.

[M forever]

That the rampant materialism of a rising capitalist middle-class would wreak spiritual havoc in the world as the new Golden Rule supplanted the old ("He who has the gold makes the rules"), and that the end of the rule of the Gods and their Valhalla (how did Ludwig see Neuschwanstein, by the way?) would eventually come to pass, seems like a pretty straightforward and self-evident reading of the text, even without any knowledge of the creator's life or intentions.

Nice try, but you are totally overlooking that Wagner was very anti-authoritarian and therefore did not exactly celebrate the rule of the old classes. That's why he had to go into exile, remember? He just used the mentally ill Ludwig as a cash cow.

the end of the rule of the Gods and their Valhalla (how did Ludwig see Neuschwanstein, by the way?)

He wanted it to be "like a true old German fortress". That doesn't have much to do with Walhalla. I think the design is based on the Wartburg. Ludwig proved to be much more visionary in that than Wagner, after all he predicted Disneyland.

The mythological material of the Ring lives is an ever living reality,  and the Ring may have hinted at the future political  conditions which would overtake germany.
Refer to longears introspection on the subject matter involved in the Ring, speaking about the effects of the industrial age upon modern society.

Longears' introspection about the effects of industrialization, whether he is right or not, has nothing to do with "future" political conditions in Germany. Nothing of what happened decades after Wagner's death is "predicted" in his work. That is just a totally simplistic way of looking at history and the history of art. I like to watch the History Channel, too, but it shouldn't be your only source of information about history.

[bricon]

The passage I was refering to was in Jenufa, where the 3 main characters come together and sing in unison, like in Puccini's Turandot.
Does Janacek get the idea from Puccini.

Jenufa was composed about 20 years before (Puccini's) Turandot.

[uffeviking]

Interesting thread, isn't it, Brian! I am so glad it brought you actively back to GMG. Stick around a bit, please. Missed you! 

[PSmith08]

I know you want to make a distinction between "opera" (as apparently practiced by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, et al.) and "music drama" in the Wagnerian sense, but I prefer to use the word "opera" to refer to the works of all the above composers. Yes, Wagner attempted a synthesis in which music, words, and staging were to be co-equal, and he turned away from the spectacular grand operas of Meyerbeer and the coloratura warblings of the Italian bel canto composers like Bellini. But remember that the terms "music drama" and "Gesamtkunstwerk" were Wagner's own, and we are in no way bound to accept Wagner's terminology at face value. As D.H. Lawrence said, "never trust the teller, trust the tale." My problem with ascribing music drama only to Wagner while other composed produced only "opera" is that this implies that drama can be achieved only through Wagnerian methods. But the idea of "dramma per musica" was present in opera from the beginning; and there are other means of achieving music drama than the Wagnerian synthesis with its Leitmotivs and orchestra-as-commentator. Gluck, too, conceived of himself as a reformer, reacting against the vocal excesses of the 18th-century opera seria. And Gluck even anticipated some of the devices most characteristic of Wagner. Certainly as well a proto-Wagnerian use of the orchestra can be found in Oreste's arioso, "Le calme rentre dans mon coeur" from Iphegnie en Tauride, where Gluck's orchestra with its pulsating viola syncopations demonstrates that Oreste's heart is in fact anything but calm.

I take your point, and I suppose it is both an occupational hazard and a personal choice to adopt the Wagnerian program of music-drama as the only (or, at least, the primary) valid source of dramma per musica. I think the problem with ascribing full-blown music-drama status to those other works, as opposed to mere precursor rank, is that they do what they do struggling against the conventions of the form. That is to say, Gluck (to some degree, though I am less familiar there) and Mozart (to a much greater degree) are so extraordinary in their ability to affect this sort of quintessentially Wagnerian fusion of music and text to create drama because they were fighting the conventions of their time. Indeed, Mozart's oeuvre shows us that he still had to grapple with audience expectations. Don Giovanni and Die Entführung aus dem Serail both have pretty big solo numbers, which were likely dropped in for the sake of appeasing star tenors and sopranos as well as what the audience wanted. To my mind, they might have achieved dramma per musica, but they did so in spite of their form, not because of their form, if you follow me. Wagner achieved his ends not only through his own work but because his form lent itself to those ends.

The other point to consider is whether Wagner in fact remained true to his own theories, as expostulated primarily in "Opera and Drama." I would say that in some respects he did not. Although among Wagner's innovations were to dispense with choral singing, ensembles, and separable numbers, Wagner quite obviously relaxed these strictures as he came to compose Tristan and Die Meistersinger. Already in Tristan and Act 3 of Siegfried we find Wagner allowing his tenor and soprano to sing together, and Meistersinger (with its glorious quintet) also returns to the role of the chorus as commentator and has many numbers that can be easily extracted from the whole. Shaw enjoyed pointing out that Goetterdaemmerung returned to many of the conventions of Meyerbeerian grand opera, and in his "Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts" (1960), Jack Stein of Harvard University argued that in the later theoretical writings Wagner reverted to a concept of opera in which music was no longer co-equal but the dominant element.

As to Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, I view them as symptomatic breakdowns in the Wagnerian program, as opposed to failures of the program. The argument has been made (not by me originally, but subscribed to by me) that there is a dramatic flaw at the heart of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Siegfried is the theoretical (de jure, for lack of a more felicitous phrase) hero of the cycle. He is not, however, the de facto hero of the cycle. That is Wotan. Between the two, Wotan is a classical Greek tragic hero with a hamartia, who suffers - in a series of blows worthy of Sophocles or Aeschylus - a major reversal. Those reversals add up to a figurative and literal (in the Ring-world) katharsis. What does this even mean? Well, my argument is this: confronted by such a major flaw, which is to say that the hero isn't the hero anymore, and isn't even interesting in the same way that the 'new' hero is, Wagner's music-drama breaks down a little bit. It's actually broken down quite a bit, but Wagner had enough talent to carry it through to the conclusion. So, when you find slips in the music-drama form in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, you're seeing symptoms of the larger problem at the heart of the story. As to Tristan and Meistersinger, as there are no such large-scale errors, I can only suppose that Wagner didn't conform to his own rules because he recognized that, for different reasons in both cases, the action required the rules to be broken. A love story without some sort of love-duet is a bit of a problem, owing to the expectations of his audience, and Meistersinger is just weird, if you'll pardon the infelicity, placed in Wagner's oeuvre. He also wasn't working with the same sort of cosmic drama as he was in some other works.

I would not assume either that "dramma per musica" can be achieved only through Wagnerian means, and is absent in the work of non-Wagnerian composers. Mozart's operas are predominantly comic rather than epic as in Wagner, and he uses the vocabulary of late 18th-century classicism. Yet within this vocabulary he is able to create stunning dramatic characterizations (as for example in the distinctions he draws in Don Giovanni between the haughty and aristocratic Donna Anna, the intense and slightly unbalanced Donna Elvira, and the peasant minx Zerlina), and he is able to develop deft shifts in relationships between characters - an outstanding example of this being the sextet in Act 3 of Figaro, where he uses a miniature sonata form to construct a dramatic action in which the relationships among all six characters are permanently transformed. And in much less time than it would have taken Wagner in one of his music dr operas.

Again, I take your point, though I would still assert that the Wagnerian program is the most consistent by which you can hope to achieve music-drama without straining the limits of form.

[Rod Corkin]

  Oh my, excuse me for laughing, I really should feel pity for you but this statement is just...too...damned...funny! Mozart--melodically weak and unmemorable--ROFL!

edited to dismember unmemborable typo

I've said this many times, and it is true, that there is more memorable music in the first act of Giulio Cesare than all of Mozart's put together. This is not a radical position, I know quite a few CM fans who find Mozart's operas weak.

[Rod Corkin]

  LOL  ...on a more serious note I think you were on to something with that whole "twin peaks" comment.  I am not sure though if the poster of this thread meant to imply that Wagner and Mozart are the only two towering peaks in opera.  I am sure Verdi, R. Strauss and Handel just turned in their graves if this was the implication behind this thread!

  marvin

I was being deadly serious Marvin! But only superfans of Mozart and Wagner would regard them as the twin peaks of opera, and I doubt there are too many people who are superfans of both of these composers. For me Handel and Beethoven are the twin peaks, and Beethoven isn't even an opera composer compared to the others. But B and H are much closer artistically than M and W!

[longears]

Nice try, but you are totally overlooking that Wagner was very anti-authoritarian and therefore did not exactly celebrate the rule of the old classes. That's why he had to go into exile, remember? He just used the mentally ill Ludwig as a cash cow.

Nice try but that has no bearing on the allegorical nature of the work.

He wanted it to be "like a true old German fortress". That doesn't have much to do with Walhalla. I think the design is based on the Wartburg. Ludwig proved to be much more visionary in that than Wagner, after all he predicted Disneyland.

Did you ever see a TV game show called Family Feud?  "Good answer!"

[longears]

I've said this many times, and it is true, that there is more memorable music in the first act of Giulio Cesare than all of Mozart's put together. This is not a radical position, I know quite a few CM fans who find Mozart's operas weak.

Absolutely not a radical position--it doesn't address the root of anything.  As for visitors to your website who think Mozart's operas are weak:  it just goes to show that you get what you pay for!    (And confirms the suspicion that there's little of interest or merit to be found there.)

[(poco) Sforzando]

I take your point . . .

But I don't think you truly do, having locked yourself into assumptions that favor the Wagnerian approach above all and downplay the successes of other composers who have created valid musical drama without all the Wagnerian baggage. What matters are not the conventions in play at any point in history, but the individual composer's ability to structure a dramatic action and create memorable characterizations within the language available to him. And these successes have been realized by such "precursors" to Wagner as Monteverdi, Handel (yes), Rameau, Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven, each in their own way. Compared to some of the postings on this thread, yours are considerably more articulate and knowledgeable, but you still seem to be falling into the same kinds of traps exemplified by Mssrs. ___ and ___ and ___  - namely, a kind of "my composer can lick your composer" attitude that sacrifices flexibility of outlook and substitutes rigid dogmatism.

[paulb]

I was being deadly serious Marvin! But only superfans of Mozart and Wagner would regard them as the twin peaks of opera, and I doubt there are too many people who are superfans of both of these composers. For me Handel and Beethoven are the twin peaks, and Beethoven isn't even an opera composer compared to the others. But B and H are much closer artistically than M and W!

To contradict this idea that Mozart has weakness in his operas, you could assemble just about any level of casting and come forth with a performance that would delight any crowd. The operas possess charms, delights, surprises throughtout, ner a  lull or dull. Very listener-friendly, performer-friendly.
Now Wagner, especially the 4 Ring operas, require high such a  high standard to bring about results that hold the attention. The vocalists do not have the strong support from the music as Mozart provides for his performers. The singers in the Ring are pretty much on their own. man thats SUPER-high art when you hear a  grand performance/recording of The Ring. You are in the presence of genius, something rare now-a-days.


Interesting about Handel and Beethoven as related, I'm not fond of either. Now I do believe Bach and Mozart are related as spiritual father to son.
So this is all making sense, what Bach is to Mozart, Handel is to Beethoven.

Wagner though taking on influences from Beethoven first, then later on in his life from Mozart, yet his operas rise above both to become something totally different from either. Well i am refering to his late phase only, His early phase has too much Beethovenish modalites for me to ever like them.

It seems that the subject matter of myths , the legends of The Great Ring Cycle, have so griped the soul of Wagner that the life blood of the germanic soil rushes up and overtakes Wagner to the point that the muisc itself is now dictated by the stories themselves. This is obvioulsy true in all high art, but especially when folk inspired stories are involved.

[(poco) Sforzando]

But only superfans of Mozart and Wagner would regard them as the twin peaks of opera, and I doubt there are too many people who are superfans of both of these composers.

Quite the contrary. The easiest refutation to such a statement is to look at what operas are most often performed in actual opera houses. Of course we all know that Handel's operas were not seriously revived until several decades ago, but if one looks at the database of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, one sees that the most performed composers of opera include Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, and Wagner. The notion that there are only a few "superfans" of these super-popular composers will not stand up to any scrutiny.

http://66.187.153.86/archives/frame.htm
(click Repertory Report)

[PSmith08]

But I don't think you truly do, having locked yourself into assumptions that favor the Wagnerian approach above all and downplay the successes of other composers who have created valid musical drama without all the Wagnerian baggage. What matters are not the conventions in play at any point in history, but the individual composer's ability to structure a dramatic action and create memorable characterizations within the language available to him. And these successes have been realized by such "precursors" to Wagner as Monteverdi, Handel (yes), Rameau, Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven, each in their own way. Compared to some of the postings on this thread, yours are considerably more articulate and knowledgeable, but you still seem to be falling into the same kinds of traps exemplified by Mssrs. ___ and ___ and ___  - namely, a kind of "my composer can lick your composer" attitude that sacrifices flexibility of outlook and substitutes rigid dogmatism.

Well, my position is neither normative nor intended to convince in the sense that, after reading it, I expect you "to see the light." Once again, I find the Wagnerian program the most consistent in achieving dramma per musica; indeed, as I have said, I believe that Wagner's form leads to that music-drama naturally in a way that a traditional operatic form does not. YMMV.

[Haffner]

I voted "no", but I have to take it back. Wagner's "Operas" really aren't operas are they? More like how he described them, "Music Dramas".

Unless one wishes to count the pre-Ring Wagner works as "Operas". In that case, Mozart and Verdi both have Richard beat, in my most humble opinion.

I always felt that Wagner both transformed and advanced what was known as "opera" at the time because he had greats like Monteverdi, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as past phenomenons to be inspired by.

Not to mention the fact that having Verdi around (writing the greatest Italian Operas ever) probably made Wagner push even harder toward breaking completely from Italian Opera.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I voted "no", but I have to take it back. Wagner's "Operas" really aren't operas are they? More like how he described them, "Music Dramas".

Asked and answered already in my post #123. I would strongly suggest a reading of Joseph Kerman's "Opera as Drama" for anyone convinced that operatic drama is limited to the mature works of Richard Wagner.

[Haffner]

Asked and answered already in my post #123. I would strongly suggest a reading of Joseph Kerman's "Opera as Drama" for anyone convinced that operatic drama is limited to the mature works of Richard Wagner.

Ah.

[Rod Corkin]

Absolutely not a radical position--it doesn't address the root of anything.  As for visitors to your website who think Mozart's operas are weak:  it just goes to show that you get what you pay for!    (And confirms the suspicion that there's little of interest or merit to be found there.)

Who was talking about my website (but thanks for promoting it for me)? That's only been going 3 months, I'm talking about my experience over 20 years. But contrary to what you say there is plenty of merit and things of interest at my site, but unless you register you will only have access to one of the nine forums. So your current review can hardly be judged as a well considered one.

[PSmith08]

Who was talking about my website (but thanks for promoting it for me)? That's only been going 3 months, I'm talking about my experience over 20 years. But contrary to what you say there is plenty of merit and things of interest at my site, but unless you register you will only have access to one of the nine forums. So your current review can hardly be judged as a well considered one.

I don't know about that.

In any event, some substantiation for your claims that there are a number of serious music fans who do not appreciate Mozart's opera would be nice. What am I saying? An argument of any sort concerning Mozart's style from any person would be nice, and I don't mean "more memorable music"-type arguments. You can argue clear fallacies from a subjective foundation.

Maybe we'll compare 30 second clips of various works.

[Rod Corkin]

I don't know about that.

In any event, some substantiation for your claims that there are a number of serious music fans who do not appreciate Mozart's opera would be nice. What am I saying? An argument of any sort concerning Mozart's style from any person would be nice, and I don't mean "more memorable music"-type arguments. You can argue clear fallacies from a subjective foundation.

Maybe we'll compare 30 second clips of various works.

I have never compared 30 sec clips, not once. but whole arias etc yes, but that is not allowed here. If you think Mozart's music can stand it you know where to go for a showdown. Actually I've already got a baroque opera showcase topic at my site with lots of Handel tracks, I'm going through them chronologically, I'm up to Flavio at the moment, Gulio Cesare, Rodelina etc next in line. Mozart was not a 'hit' writer like Handel, nor as good a dramatist, but regardless I think Handel's method was perfect for this form of music.

[Gustav]

I have never compared 30 sec clips, not once. but whole arias etc yes, but that is not allowed here. If you think Mozart's music can stand it you know where to go for a showdown. Actually I've already got a baroque opera showcase topic at my site with lots of Handel tracks, I'm going through them chronologically, I'm up to Flavio at the moment, Gulio Cesare, Rodelina etc next in line. Mozart was not a 'hit' writer like Handel, nor as good a dramatist, but regardless I think Handel's method was perfect for this form of music.

dude, Seriously, say you love Handel all you want, why do have to dis Mozart? Especially after that we all know that you obviously know nothing about Mozart's music. So please, stop. Aren't you even a little embarrassed about what you have said?