Wagner, Schumann, and the Lessons of Beethoven's Ninth

Wagner, Schumann, and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Wagner, Schumann, and the Lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth

Christopher Alan Reynolds

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reynolds, Christopher A., author.

  Wagner, Schumann, and the lessons of Beethoven’s Ninth / Christopher Alan Reynolds.

    pages  cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28556-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-96097-8 (ebook)

  1. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827. Symphonies, no. 9, op. 125, D minor.  2. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Influence.  3. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Criticism and interpretation.  4. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883—Criticism and interpretation.  5. Schumann, Robert, 1810–1856—Criticism and interpretation.  6. Symphonies—19th century—Analysis, appreciation.  I. Title.

  ML410.B42R49 2015

  780.943  09034—dc23

2014049385

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Joel, Ellen, Anne-Marie, Susan, and Martha

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Wagner’s Faustian Understanding of Beethoven’s Ninth

2. The Impact of the Ninth on The Flying Dutchman

3. Wagner, Thematic Dispersion, and Contrary Motion

4. Schumann, Thematic Dispersion, and Contrary Motion

5. Late Schumann, Wagner, and Bach

6. Brahms’s Triple Response to the Ninth

7. Wagner and Schumann

Appendix 1: Citations of Wagner’s Possible Allusions and Influences in The Flying Dutchman

Appendix 2: Contrary Motion Counterpoint in the First Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

Appendix 3: Contrary Motion Counterpoint in The Flying Dutchman

Appendix 4: Contrary Motion Counterpoint in the Fourth Movement of Schumann’s Second Symphony

Appendix 5: Contrary Motion Counterpoint in the First Movement of Brahms’s First Symphony

Abbreviations

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

When in fall 2007 I began to write this book, I had in mind something very different. My sabbatical-year plan was to take several projects that I had begun and bring them together by stressing a few of the themes they shared. Most obvious to me at that point was my interest in analyzing pairs of works, identifying the musical features they shared, and then using those observations to say something new about the works individually. I had just published my comparison of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and thought that perhaps that article could serve as both a chapter in the book and a model for how I would proceed with other pairings. My method in the Gershwin-Berg confrontation was a kind of musical-historical triangulation. There are the two works to compare, of course, but their reciprocal interpretation is guided by some biographically or historically relevant document. In my study of Porgy and Bess, Willi Reich’s analysis of Wozzeck from 1927 gave focus to the comparisons of music and drama; indeed, it made it possible to identify the many points in common in the first place.¹

My intention was to gather a series of confrontations that were to have included a chapter on how Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman can be understood as a free, but thorough, reworking of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; I also wanted to write on Brahms and how his exploration of various forms of rhapsodizing led him to compose the Alto Rhapsody, op. 53, and also the Schicksalslied, op. 54, works that deserve to be seen as expressive doubles of each other. Two other chapters included a study of the Ardo sì settings of Marc’Antonio Ingegneri and his pupil Claudio Monteverdi; and finally, not as far afield as one might think, a discussion of how certain rock songs ought to be understood as intentional compositional reworkings of stylistically distant Broadway songs from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Of all of these works, only the madrigals of Ingegneri and Monteverdi have resemblances that are easily audible. In the other cases, perhaps most notably in Gershwin’s response to Berg, the borrowed ideas resulted in new works that differ substantially from their models.

As much fun as I expected to have fitting all of these disparate works into a single volume, it is doubtless a good thing that I got sidetracked (each of the ideas that fell out of the book have been, or will be, published separately as articles).² I began with the chapter I expected would be easiest to write, since I had already presented my ideas, as they then stood, at a symposium on The Flying Dutchman of the Wagner Society of Northern California (2004). Those ideas followed the method that I had applied in comparing Porgy and Bess with Wozzeck. Thus to begin the new book, I used Wagner’s Faust-centered program for the Ninth Symphony as a means to analyze his Faustian opera, The Flying Dutchman, and its multifaceted debts to Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. In seeking to explain what musical details motivated Wagner’s narrative for the first movement as a struggle between good and evil, I gradually came to a conclusion that I had not anticipated; namely, that Wagner had found the seeds for his conflict narrative in Beethoven’s manipulation of counterpoint by contrary motion. With this discovery, the relatively contained chapter I had anticipated quickly expanded into a book of its own.

One discovery led to another. Many of the compositions that are confronted with each other in this book involve works that have already been recognized as related, such as Beethoven’s Ninth and Brahms’s First Symphony, and the Ninth and Schumann’s Second. But there are also several unexpected juxtapositions: Schumann’s Second Symphony and Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Bach’s Cantata 21, and Brahms’s First and Wagner’s Faust Overture, among them. My findings emerged more or less in the order they now have in this book, with one important exception. A late discovery affected the words I had been using in the first draft to describe contrapuntal voices moving against each other. Initially I coined the term oppositional counterpoint, but in the course of writing my final chapter, I realized that the centuries-old usage contrary motion was far more appropriate. In German the equivalent word, Gegenbewegung, has a double meaning. In addition to its musical significance, it is also the military term for lines of soldiers moving against each other, an action for which the English language often borrows from French for countermaneuver. The implications of this for Wagner’s analysis of the Ninth Symphony and his narrative of conflict are clear.

This project is an obvious outgrowth of my interest in musical allusion, but while occasionally I point out allusions between works, most of the shared ideas are not necessarily allusive. This is not a study of how Schumann and Wagner alluded to Beethoven’s Ninth. My argument is broader, that Beethoven’s successors discovered techniques Beethoven had used in the Ninth, and from the moment of discovery, began to apply these techniques in their own works.

Acknowledgments

Among my many debts to colleagues, friends, and family, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the following: in the past few years several people have taken on the responsibility of reading, critiquing, and correcting entire drafts of the book. First among these, both chronologically and for the extraordinary detail of his efforts is my colleague D. Kern Holoman, a masterful editor and dear friend. Stephen Hinton and Karol Berger both helped me greatly with their comments, as well as for the chance to discuss various issues that arose as I approached the finish line. For their efforts and the errors they spared me, I am very appreciative of David Brodbeck and my teacher, Lewis Lockwood. Early in the project Michael Tusa invited me to give a talk, and the discussion that arose in the course of the questions proved very helpful. And at University of California Press, I am indebted to Mary Francis both for her support and for her patience in listening to me discuss this project over several years, to Rose Vekony for her guidance, and to Mary Ray Worley for her editorial expertise. It has been a privilege to work with them all. In the preparation of music examples, I was very fortunate to have the professional skills of Bryce Cannell. Thanks to assistance from Chris Castro and Spencer Iascone, he was able to ready the examples in remarkably short time.

I have been buoyed in numerous ways by the transcontinental friendships and generous encouragement of my friends Anna Maria Busse Berger and Pablo Ortiz. We are all fortunate to work in the most collegial of departments, and so it is a pleasure to thank Christian Baldini, Ross Bauer, Carol Hess, Katherine In-Young Lee, Beth Levy, Sam Nichols, Jessie Ann Owens, Mika Pelo, Kurt Rohde, Laurie San Martin, Henry Spiller, and Jeffrey Thomas for many years of stimulation and camaraderie. Although they are not so fortunate as to be members of my department, I am not less thankful for Ana Peluffo, Alan Taylor and Emily Albu, Annabeth Rosen and Silvano Sole, and Ewa and Zbyszek Stachniak, all of them paragons of friendship.

Many years of annual returns to Göttingen have allowed us to establish a second home in that beautiful city. The friends who have greeted us warmly each time and who have in various ways made it possible for both me and my wife to conduct our research there include Andreas and Sabine von Tiedemann, Tom and Chris Crozier, Gret Dietrich and Willi Ege, Martin and Elisabeth Staehelin, and Salvatore Ciniglio.

The many and far-flung members of my family have been aware to varying degrees about my progress on a book about the Ninth. One of the most excited of all was my father-in-law Donald Johns, who is sorely missed. His infectious enthusiasm in discussions of matters musical and familial was always an inspiration, and I am sure there will be a few typos in this book that his keen eye would have spotted. He and my mother-in-law, Jorun, who has helped translate several difficult passages over the years, have been wonderfully supportive. Likewise, for decades my life has been enriched by my amazing passel of in-laws: Edward Goetz, Thomas Hall, Jennifer Jay, Andreas Johns and Frank Messina, Karl Johns, and Steven Laitz. And to my wife and partner in life, Alessa Johns, I am grateful for so many things, including, in the particular case of this book, for her getting a fellowship from the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen. They furnished her (us) with a large apartment that included a beautiful study that she graciously let me take over. For Alessa and our son Gabriel Reynolds, I am so very fortunate.

This book is dedicated to my five remarkable siblings and first musical companions, Joel, Ellen, Anne-Marie, Susan, and Martha. I wish only that the counterpoint of our busy lives allowed us to come together more frequently.

Introduction

As Richard Wagner’s star began to rise, and Robert Schumann’s peeked before beginning its slide downward, their paths crossed for a few years in Dresden. With good reason, no one thinks of them as friends, much less as composers who helped each other develop their own mature styles. By the end of his career, Wagner routinely derided Schumann, especially late Schumann, whom he portrayed variously as mentally weak and too much under the influence of Jewish music, meaning primarily Mendelssohn. This was the argument of his essay Judaism in Music (Das Judenthum in der Musik), which he had initially published anonymously in 1850, and then in 1869 under his own name, in an expanded form that included a discussion of Schumann. Wagner here distinguished between an early, brilliant, and healthy Schumann, the genius who composed remarkable piano works, and a late, unstable, and uninspired composer of second-rate instrumental music. Even that division between the good Schumann and the pathetic had disappeared by 1879, when Wagner helped his henchman Joseph Rubinstein prepare and publish the attack Über die Schumannsche Musik in the Bayreuther Blätter. In this rabid diatribe, even the early music received scorn.

Yet earlier in their lives they had encountered each other on numerous occasions. Twice they had lived in the same cities, in the early 1830s in Leipzig, where both of them knew Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father, and much more consequentially from 1845 to 1849 in Dresden. From the beginning Schumann may have seen Wagner as an adversary. A thirteen-year-old Clara Wieck unwittingly fanned competitive flames by writing to Schumann that Herr Wagner has outdistanced you; a symphony of his was performed; it is as like Beethoven’s A-Major Symphony as it is possible to be.¹ Wagner, though three years younger than Schumann, had written a C-major Symphony that was performed in January 1833 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus; Schumann had already drafted his juvenile G-minor Symphony, a movement of which was performed in 1832 in Zwickau. Subsequently Schumann published some of the reports Wagner wrote from Magdeburg (1836) and Paris (1841–42) in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.² Both by the examples of his own critical writings and by the availability of an opportunity to publish in his journal, Schumann helped Wagner to become a writer.³

Wagner’s 1842 return to Germany—to Dresden, an easy train ride from the Schumanns, who lived a hundred kilometers away in Leipzig—did not bring them closer personally. As Ulrich Konrad has documented, after two visits from Wagner in spring 1842, Schumann ignored at least four invitations from Wagner to come to Dresden to witness a performance of Rienzi. Although Wagner chose not to invite him the following year to the premiere of The Flying Dutchman, his offer to pay Schumann’s expenses for him to attend the third performance was again in vain. When he then actually sent Schumann the score of his new opera, Schumann’s negative reaction greatly offended Wagner (as discussed below).

The opportunity for an actual friendship between the two composers increased considerably in fall 1844, once Robert and Clara Schumann decided to leave Leipzig for Dresden. That this was an opportunity that neither man was capable of seizing is well known. But the most often cited account of their interactions, Wagner’s autobiography, My Life, is misleading on several accounts, two of which can be raised here. As Wagner told it, from Schumann’s arrival in late 1844 to Wagner’s hasty departure in summer 1849, he and Schumann met from time to time, and he didn’t get any real stimulation from his company. In fact, in the four years between fall 1845 and New Year’s Day, 1849, they met at least twenty-four times, and quite possibly more, since Wagner occasionally took part in evening gatherings hosted by Ferdinand Hiller that Schumann and others often attended. The density of meetings between Schumann and Wagner varied greatly, including only once each in 1847 and 1849. During the fall and winter of 1845–46 and the calendar year 1848 they saw each other frequently. Because the vast majority of these encounters were at Wagner’s instigation, his claim that he got no stimulation from them seems typically self-serving, especially since by the time he wrote his autobiography he was well into his habit of denigrating Schumann.

The meetings they had with each other over a period of six months in 1845–46 occurred at a time of particular stylistic growth for both Schumann and Wagner. Independently, studies of both composers have long identified this year as a time in which they developed more contrapuntal approaches to composition. Schumann brought to a close months of intensive studies of counterpoint and began composing his Second Symphony, a work that critics then and in the generations to come have heard as particularly indebted to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; Wagner premiered Tannhäuser, made substantial progress on Lohengrin, and conducted the Ninth for the first time. The extent to which their compositional styles changed in a common direction, toward a style that was both more contrapuntal, more densely motivic, and engaged in processes of motivic/thematic transformation, has for the most part gone unexamined. Until recently, discussions of Wagner’s stylistic development and Schumann’s have been pursued without reference to the other. Comparative studies of Wagner and mature Schumann are few in number and largely deal with Schumann’s opera Genoveva.⁴

My aim in the chapters that follow is to show that the stylistic advances that Schumann and Wagner both made in Dresden in 1845–46 stemmed from a deepened understanding of Beethoven’s contrapuntal techniques and strategies in the Ninth Symphony. Whether the original insights were Schumann’s or Wagner’s, the evidence provided by their compositions from this pivotal year and the years to come suggests that they discussed Beethoven’s Ninth with each other in the months preceding the performance of this work that Wagner conducted on Palm Sunday, 1846. What appears to have interested them both was Beethoven’s use of counterpoint that involved contrary motion, and the way in which the Ode to Joy melody was developed gradually in the preceding movements, so that the appearance of the theme in the finale was dramatically and musically motivated.

By the later decades of his life, Wagner’s interest in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had become proprietary. He was Beethoven’s worthiest heir, the only one of his generation to have advanced music beyond what Beethoven had accomplished, the pinnacle to which Beethoven’s music naturally led. Wagner’s diverse writings about the Ninth Symphony took many forms. They ranged from broad statements—at times cast as historical narrative, at times as artistic polemic—about how his own music had boldly gone beyond the initial combination of word and tone that Beethoven had pioneered in the Ode to Joy, to narrowly focused essays such as his conductor’s notes about the infelicities of Beethoven’s score, in which he offered the solutions he had devised to realize Beethoven’s true intentions. Similar in scope are the didactic program notes that he wrote to accompany his 1846 performance of the Ninth. The historical and polemical writings immediately spurred a critical debate on the division of absolute music from programmatic that continues to the present day, and the essay on performing the Ninth has influenced conductors ever since; while in contrast, his program notes, which matched Beethoven’s movements with quotations from Goethe’s Faust, have had comparatively little impact.

Wagner wrote and spoke about Beethoven’s Ninth throughout his career, often to emphasize his special connection to the work. No work was more central to the construction of his personal myth. In his 1840 novella, A Pilgrimage to Beethoven, he first staked a claim for having a privileged bond with this work, imagining that he had met an elderly Beethoven and become the first person other than the composer to see a score of the Ninth Symphony. After Beethoven confessed the inadequacy of Schiller’s words (noting the incompetency of poetry in general), Wagner waxed euphoric: "Still today I can scarcely grasp my happiness at thus being helped by