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now called endless melody. In his vocal writing, Wagner avoided repetition, symmetry, and regular cadences—all things that can make a melody “catchy.” He instead wanted his melodic line to spring forth directly from the rise and fall of the words. Third and finally, as Wagner decreased the importance of the traditional aria, he increased the role of the orchestra.
With Wagner, the orchestra is everything. It sounds forth the main musical themes, develops and exploits them, and thereby plays out the drama through purely instrumental music. As had Beethoven and Berlioz before him, Wagner continued to expand the size of the orchestra. The orchestra he requires for the Ring cycle, for example, is massive, especially with regard to the brasses: four trumpets, four trombones, eight horns (four doubling on tuba), and a contra- bass (very low) tuba. If Wagner’s music sounds powerful, it is the heavy artillery of the brasses that make it so.
A bigger orchestra demanded, in turn, more forceful singers. To be heard above an orchestra of nearly a hundred players, large, specially trained voices were needed: the so-called Wagnerian tenor and Wagnerian soprano. The voice types that typically dominate the operatic stage today—with their powerful sound and wide vibrato—first developed in Wagner’s music dramas.
Wagner’s Ring and Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, 1856; first performed 1870)
Richard Wagner conceived his Ring cycle not only as a timeless fantasy ad- venture, but also as a timely allegory for nineteenth-century German society. Through his libretto, Wagner explores themes of power, greed, heroism, and race. These were then important issues in Germany, which was striving to be- come a unified nation (unity came in 1861) and which was rapidly industrial- izing. The curse-bearing “ring” at the center of the cycle, for example, repre- sents (capitalist) power; characters fight to possess it, for whoever wears the ring rules the world.
The plot of The Ring is long and maddeningly complicated. To simplify greatly: Wotan, the chief god, rules over a fantasy world of heroes and villains, of natural and supernatural creatures. Wotan is well intentioned, but suffers many human foibles. Like some politicians today, he lies, cheats, and breaks prom- ises in an attempt to maintain traditional values as well as his personal power. Although married, he has sired many children of uncertain maternity, among them the Valkyries, nine high-flying, hard-riding women warriors. Wotan’s fa- vorite offspring is Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie after whom this drama is named. Her exploits and those of her future lover Siegfried provide the dramatic thread of the Ring cycle.
Wagner’s best known music is the Wedding March (“Here comes the bride”) from his opera Lohengrin (1848). Next in our aural consciousness is “Ride of the Valkyries,” which opens Act III of Die Walküre. Riding furiously upward, the Valkyries carry the bodies of fallen heroes to a mountaintop. Wagner’s music pushes them forward. The hard-charging main motive (Example 13.1) is triadic in construction, rising as it proceeds.
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