There is an article about the famous 'Tristan chord' on this website! This strange, yet fascinatingly haunting and beautiful discord resolves only at the very end of the opera, after Tristan and Isolde die. The chord takes us through the opera, representing Tristan's pain and unfulfilled desire, building and growing as the action continues.
It all ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, to quote Eliot. Wagner is unique from other composers in that his stories - all constructed by the man himself - attract genuine interest on the part of the listener.
I could write ten articles on each of these characters alone, internally discussing their decisions and their effect on the plot. To learn to fully appreciate Wagner, I urge you to go to the guide on this website and scroll down to the Wagner section. Wagner's brilliance is not just in the music, but in the Gesamtkunstwerk. The complete work of art. As for the argument that Verdi is performed more often, there is no reason to believe that that implies his superiority.
Wagner's operas are long and difficult to stage, and Wagner is generally even more difficult to sing and perform than Verdi. Verdi's operas, particularly the 'Big Three', attract more audiences - those without opera experience, as well as those with - than Wagner's, for people are generally scared to approach him due to the presumed difficulty of his music. True opera-fans appreciate both composers, whereas inexperienced opera-goers attend Verdi and Puccini performances. Unfortunately, this case will likely only be effective to someone who knows Wagner's work.
One concession to be made is that in order to fully appreciate Wagner, one must first learn Verdi. Hojotoho Richard! Fun Fact: Wagner said that his first three operas - Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi - would never be performed at Bayreuth because he believed them to be apprentice works!
Will this rule survive, or will fans' curiosity as to how they will sound at Bayreuth get the best of them? The latter should certainly be enforced today! So who is superior? Let me know in the comments section.
Here is a wonderful humorous video about this topic! Thank you for visiting Appreciate Opera,. Alkis Karmpaliotis. All Posts Opinion Informational Comparisons. Similarities between Wagner and Verdi are somewhat minimal from the point of view of their music, although slightly more numerous when considering the ethical side of their activities as composers. Both were men of the theater, albeit with major divergent concepts. Both were nationalistic in their aspirations of creating an art that would reflect their cultural milieu; their respective cultures, however, were different in substance, ways of life, expression and weltanschauung.
Both longed for the unification of their motherlands. Both wanted their fellow citizens to applaud and support them. Wagner often despised his audiences, while Verdi looked onto his public as part of divine judgment of his operas. Also, both were fighters, yet Wagner, the true musical revolutionary, fought against his time, paying dearly for it, while Verdi simply continued the ennobled ideal of Italian opera inherited from Donizetti and Bellini.
Differences between both can be outlined easily. Throughout history, some composers have altered or fully transformed the technical and aesthetic aspects of music making. Such composers expanded form concepts, created larger musical structures, pushed forward the boundaries of aural perception, renovated horizontal melodic and vertical harmonic procedures to invent a given new musical language, and increased instrumental forces while imposing novel dramatic concepts of the theater, now married to music.
Various other composers remained in history as followers of an evolutionary creed, never as radical and innovative as the revolutionary ones, inheriting a given style and carrying it to perfection without seminal or epochal changes. Easily, then, Wagner fits fully into the musical revolutionary category, while Verdi belongs to the category of cultivated traditionalists.
We have to wait until Debussy, who in his youth travels admiringly to Bayreuth to hear Parsifal , to finally witness the aesthetic breakage of the chains of Wagnerism. All of this, coupled with orchestral interludes within the acts, commented on the rationalistic undercurrents of German history, Nordic mythology and Christian beliefs. To properly implement his ideas, Wagner wrote his own texts, contrary to Verdi, who always used various writers for his libretti. On top of everything mentioned before, Wagner, as another of his revolutionary contributions, expanded the harmonic tapestry of the musical language, increasing chromaticism to the point where, like in many moments of Tristan und Isolde , tonality disappears.
There were no gods, no giants, no dwarfs, no underworld activities, no Amazons on flying horses, no extra-human curses, no metaphysical soul cleansing in his operatic vision. What made his music magical was the soaring melodies, his theatrical sense of time and space, his moving portrayal of characters, and his firm and effective use of the traditional orchestra.
Verdi, by contrast, the non-metaphysical composer, the portrayer of people that are always of this Earth, makes them sing at the same time mixing words and sentences, in a way that only when humans are mad with each other this simultaneity occurs. As incongruent as it may seem, we must remember that in Verdi this superimposition of terms happens in love duets, congenial trios and sympathetic ensembles. Another important difference between Wagner and Verdi is based on the Nineteenth Century romantic concept of art, interpreted so opposedly by both.
For Wagner, German instrumental music was most important; for Verdi, Italian vocal music reigned supreme. For Wagner, Verdi scarcely existed. Here we do not discuss the matter. To totally appreciate how the music of these two Nineteenth Century splendid composers came about, and to thoroughly comprehend the different ways by which they attained immortality, one must fully understand the inner nature of both men, their environment and their goals. He considered himself not as a pure musician but rather as a music-dramatist, like trying to emulate a combination of Beethoven and Shakespeare.
He envisioned the world as a recipient of his complex and new artistic-philosophical message. Even the Flemish deputies in Don Carlos can be read as stand-ins for the Italian people and their aspirations. For Wagner, the quest for a new, unified Germany was more complex. As he saw it, his nation struggled more with itself than with foreign forces. And his political views were a mishmash of right- and left-wing ideas that has no modern equivalent: part Tea Party, part Occupy movement.
Politically, the most concrete thing he ever did was to participate in the uprising in Dresden, building bombs for the revolutionaries. When the insurrection failed, he fled across the border to Switzerland. Like Verdi, Wagner made his art a vehicle for unified national identity.
Verdi and Wagner lived to see their imagined nations become reality, when the unification of Italy was completed in and the German Empire was established the following year. Neither composer was entirely satisfied with the outcome of events: Verdi had hoped for a republican form of government in Italy rather than a kingdom, and the utopian Wagner was inevitably disappointed with the new Germany.
Yet both found themselves on the winning side of history, benefiting from their close association with struggles for nationhood. In this, they were alike: two sides of the same coin. Yet even if their operas and characters can be identified with the striving of their nations, an equally strong case can be made for the pan-European origins of their works.
As artists, Verdi and Wagner laid claim to a whole continent as their cultural patrimony. Verdi was even more of a magpie, taking whatever suited his fancy, wherever he found it. His admiration of Shakespeare produced Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff. Un ballo in maschera is loosely based on a historical event in Sweden.
But what about their music? Nobody would deny that Wagner was a great innovator. He wrote his own librettos. He devised the leitmotif and filled his scores with complex chromatic ideas and structures. And when his vision exceeded the limits of a single opera, he wrote four and joined them together.
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