Wagnerian Music Drama

Wagner's music drama (Musikdrama) is his term for his mature operas after 'Lohengrin' (1850), distinguished from conventional 'number opera' by continuous musical flow rather than discrete arias and ensembles, by a unified Gesamtkunstwerk ('total work of art') integrating music, poetry, staging and visual design, and by the systematic use of leitmotif — short musical ideas associated with characters, objects, emotions or ideas, which return transformed across the work as the drama develops. The orchestra is large (with custom Wagner tubas in the Ring), the harmony chromatically advanced (especially the famously unresolved Tristan chord), and the texts written by Wagner himself in his own archaicized German.

Wagner (1813-1883) outlined his theories in the prose works 'Opera and Drama' (1851) and 'The Artwork of the Future' (1849), then worked them out in 'Tristan und Isolde' (composed 1857-59, premiered 1865), 'Die Meistersinger' (1868), the four-opera 'Ring' cycle ('Das Rheingold,' 'Die Walkure,' 'Siegfried,' 'Gotterdammerung,' composed 1853-74) and 'Parsifal' (1882). To stage his works as conceived he built the Bayreuth Festspielhaus (opened 1876), a theater with the orchestra pit hidden under the stage and the auditorium designed for total acoustic and visual immersion. His political views (German nationalism, antisemitism) and the later appropriation of his work by the Nazi regime remain inseparable from how the music is received.

Don't try to extract memorable arias — they aren't the point. Instead listen to how a leitmotif first appears (the Valhalla theme in 'Das Rheingold,' Siegfried's horn-call in 'Siegfried') and then returns transformed by harmony, scoring or rhythm to comment on the action. The 'Tristan' Prelude's opening chord refuses to resolve for the entire opera — that suspension is the work's center of gravity. Brass and low strings carry the architectural weight.

The Prelude to 'Tristan und Isolde' (1865) — about ten minutes — is the most concentrated statement of Wagner's harmonic language. For the world-building, try 'Die Walkure' Act 1 (especially the Spring Song duet); for the lighter side, the 'Meistersinger' Overture.

Wagner designed the Bayreuth Festspielhaus's hidden orchestra pit specifically to keep musicians and music stands from breaking the audience's view of the stage. The darkened auditorium — a Wagner innovation eventually adopted everywhere — was meant to focus the audience's attention. The 'immersive' cinema-style theater experience descends in part from these reforms.