OPERAWISE: Music Drama

In this series of podcasts, Seattle Opera Dramaturg Jonathan Dean gives listeners a taste of nine different types of traditional opera. Music Drama was the personal solution to the problems of presenting opera in nineteenth-century Europe developed by composer/librettist Richard Wagner, opera’s ultimate mad genius. These long, loud, big works challenge artists, audiences, and the art form itself. Their complex music and unique spins on old stories continue to attract, repel, and provoke all who encounter them. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865) serves as an example of the genre, as does the Richard Strauss opera Elektra (1909).

A Lexicon of Wagnerian Gibberish

Wagner considered himself first a writer and poet, and secondarily a composer. So far as he was concerned, he only wrote music because his words made a stronger impression when sung. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote all his librettos himself. Thanks to the curiously dual nature of his genius, his words and music, united, are much stronger than either by itself. When pontificating about his art (a favorite pastime), he loved to speak of a ‘marriage’ between words and music, sense and sound, with the masculine word planting a seed in feminine music, who then brings to bear glorious fruit.

Curiously, despite Wagner’s own bias towards words and ideas, some of the liveliest moments in his operas come when his characters stop singing words and start singing nonsense instead. In The Flying Dutchman, for example, the maritime setting and sea-shanty-soaked score calls for lots of “Yo Heave Ho” sailor/pirate jabber.