Page 230 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Listening Cue
Richard Wagner, “Ride of the Valkyries,” from Die Walküre (1856; first performed, 1870; Download 38 orchestral version 1870)
Characters: The Valkyries
Situation: With music that pushes continually forward for more than five minutes, the warrior maidens, carrying the
corpses of fallen heroes to Valhalla, the house of the gods, arrive at a mountaintop.
what to listen for: How the hard-charging motive pushes the music continually forward, nonstop from beginning to end. Notice that the voices in the Valkyries vocal leitmotif have been replaced by violins in this purely instrumental version by Wagner.
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reAD . . . a detailed Listening Guide of this selection online. LiSTeN TO . . . this selection streaming online.
WATCH . . . an Active Listening Guide of this selection online. WATCH . . . a sung version of this selection online.
DO . . . Listening Exercise 13.2, Wagner, “Ride of the Valkyries,” online.
Nineteenth-Century Realistic Opera
Romantic opera, much like contemporary film, is largely an escapist art. The stage is populated by action heroes or by the well-to-do, people of leisure un- troubled by mundane concerns or financial worries. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a contrasting type of opera developed in Europe, one more in tune with the social truths of the day. First, the “start time” for opera moved from late-afternoon to early evening. Why? Because people had to work during the day: opera was no longer only for the leisure class. And when the populace arrived, it often witnessed realistic opera, a new genre treating issues of everyday life in a realistic way. Poverty, physical abuse, industrial exploitation, and crime—afflictions of the lower classes in particular—are presented on stage for all to see. In realistic opera, rarely is there a happy ending.
Realistic opera was part of an artistic reaction to the ill effects of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, an economic transformation that brought with it great prosperity for some, but oppressive factory conditions and social disintegration for others. Science played a role here, too, for the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the theory of evolution. First popularized in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), evolutionary theory sug- gests a dog-eat-dog world in which only the fittest survive. Painters such as J.-F.
chapter thirteen romantic opera
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