For the next 15 years Wagner was not to present any further new works. Until 1858 he lived in Zürich, composing, writing treatises, and conducting. Having already studied the Siegfried legend and the Norse myths as a possible basis for an opera, and having written an operatic “poem,” Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death), in which he conceived of Siegfried as the new type of man who would emerge after the successful revolution he hoped for, he now wrote a number of prose volumes on revolution, social and artistic.
From 1849 to 1852 he produced his basic prose works: Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Art Work of the Future), Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (A Communication to My Friends), and Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama). The latter outlined a new, revolutionary type of musical stage work—the vast work, in fact, on which he was engaged. By 1852 he had added to the poem of Siegfrieds Tod three others to precede it, the whole being called Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) and providing the basis for a tetralogy of musical dramas: Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold ); Die Walküre (The Valkyrie); Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried ), later called simply Siegfried; and Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death), later called Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).
The Ring reveals Wagner’s mature style and method, to which he had found his way at last during the period when his thought was devoted to social questions. He prophesied the disappearance of opera as artificial entertainment for an elite and the emergence of a new kind of musical stage work for the people, expressing the self-realization of free humanity. The new art form would be a poetic drama that should find full expression as a musical drama set to a continuous vocal-symphonic texture. This texture would be woven from basic thematic ideas, which Wagner called “motives,” but which have since come to be known as “leading motives” (German Leitmotive, singular Leitmotiv). The leading motives would arise naturally as expressive vocal phrases sung by characters and would be developed by the orchestra as “reminiscences” to express the dramatic and psychological development.
This conception found full embodiment in The Ring, except that the leading motives did not always arise as vocal utterances but were often introduced by the orchestra to portray characters, emotions, or events in the drama. With his use of this method, Wagner rose immediately to his amazing full stature: his style became unified and deepened immeasurably, and he was able to fill his works from end to end with intensely characteristic music.
By 1857 he had composed Das Rhinegold, Die Walküre, and two acts of Siegfried. But he now suspended work on The Ring: the impossibility of mounting this colossus within the foreseeable future was enforcing a stalemate on his career and led him to project a “normal” work capable of immediate production. Also, his optimistic social philosophy had yielded to a metaphysical, world-renouncing pessimism. The outcome was Tristan und Isolde (1857–59), of which the crystallizing agent was his hopeless love for Mathilde Wesendonk (the wife of a rich patron), which led to separation from his wife, Minna.
Wagner completed Tristan in Venice and in Lucerne, Switzerland. The work revealed a new subtlety in his use of leading motives, which in Das Rhinegold and Die Walküre he had used mainly to explain the action of the drama. The leading motives in Tristan ceased to remain neatly identifiable with their dramatic sources but worked with greater psychological complexity.
Richard Wagner: Early Life
