On the eve of The Ring's 150th anniversary, let me state something absolutely shocking.
Siegfried is Wagner's greatest opera.
It's a realization I came to just a few days ago. I realize I'm the only person in the history of opera who believes this, but it is the opera where Wagner truly became himself and extended to his full plumage. Even in Rheingold and Walkure he was still developing: Rheingold is a spectacle, and like a lot of spectacles, it has elements of clunk even as large parts are just as magnificent as they seem. Die Walkure is literally the most iconic opera ever written. So why is that not where Wagner became himself? Listen to Wotan and Fricka nattering on in Act II, listen to Wotan and Brunnhilde natter on in Act III. For all the great set pieces in Act III, for all the perfection of Act I, he is still, even this late, figuring out the differences between the singing of arias and the declamation of music drama. Die Walkure is a towering achievement, a tour-de-force where myth and human feeling are held in an impossible balance. Walkure and Aida are the culmination of 'grand opera,' but in both you hear it ascending to the peak of an olympus atop everything which came before: so much in Walkure clearly owes itself to Der Freischutz. You can furthermore hear the storm of Beethoven's Pastroral in the Prelude, you can hear the opening movement of the 7th in the Ride of the Valkyries, For all the darkness and the way Wagner uses chromaticism in Walkure, the chromaticism is a tool, not a fabric. At base its figures are still a dark diatonic.
But from the very beginning of Siegfried, we have arrived in a harmonic and coloristic language so much stranger than anything which came before. It's a kind of chromaticism, but it's not the pre-atonal chromaticism of Gotterdammerung, nor is it the undefinable chromaticism of Tristan. It is chromaticism grounded in the 6/3 chord so important to Debussy, and yet the orchestration is anything but Debussyian. The orchestration is so sharp and spiky that I always thought it sounded like Schoenberg.
There are surely moments in Rheingold that have this strangeness, particularly among the Niebelungen, but they are passing moments in an opera that begins in 4 minutes of E-Flat and ends in the full blaze of D-flat brass ostinatos. Siegfried operates from a base of chromaticism: the chromaticism is so omnipresent that we take it for granted--it's a forest rain that only begins to lift when the bird points Siegfried toward Brunnhilde.
Is the harmony and orchestration of Siegfried a metaphor for a new sort of hero? I never put anything past Wagner, but so much of the artistic imagination happens in the subconscious that not having read Wagner's letters I'm not even sure he was aware of it (there are some people whose company you don't want too much...). There is no real precedent for this language: perhaps a lot of the orchestral color comes from Berlioz, but I would have to listen more deeply to find exactly where. Surely a few of the harmonies must come from Liszt. There's even a place in Walkure Act II where Wagner is surely quoting the opening of the Faust Symphony, but whereas the beginning of the Faust Symphony spells out a full twelve-tone row, Wagner makes it diatonic again.
But Siegfried, like Otello, is the beginning of something entirely new: opera as high drama, not music with dramatic accompaniment. Music becomes declamed, not sung. Perhaps Mozart already did it in a very different way, but Mozart is higher than drama--he is the only dramatic creator who can match Shakespeare, and like the Bard he makes his own rules to capture the whole human story. Wagner may not be playing the full Shakespearean keyboard for which he clearly aims to master, but beginning in Siegfried, he does achieve the ecstatic grandeur of Aeschylus and high play of Aristophanes.
Beginning in Otello, Verdi achieves as much grandeur as Shakespeare in his second tier plays (which are still better than everyone else's.); but poor Verdi only got there in his dotage. Wagner got there by his mid-40s, and managed to write four full music dramas at this level: a total of something like 17 hours of a concentrated new artform against Verdi's 4. It would be left to Strauss, Janacek and Berg to take their mantle and create a canon of opera possessing an uncanny sublimity beyond grandeur.
Siegfried is the most unloved of Wagner's most mature operas. It is unloved because of Wagnerians who don't understand that it's supposed to be funny. It's an adventure comedy, an 18th century picaresque novel where Siegfried goes on bizarre adventures, full of crude, cruel jokes. It is much easier to find forerunners of Siegfried in literature than music: Pantagruel, Tom Jones, Quixote and Sancho Panza, and especially that ultra-violent comic novel of the thirty years war: Simplicius Simplissisimus (if you wanted to find a historical setting for The Ring, the Thirty Years War is ideal).
The root of Siegfried is crude, brutal comedy, almost sadistically so. If it doesn't sound like the forerunner of Till Eulenspiegel and the descendent of Beethoven's 8th, the musicians have missed the point. The Bayreuth sound, god bless it, is so organic for Wagner, but then you hear a great performance of Siegfried (and there aren't many) and you realize that there are elements of Wagner which it can't possibly capture.
Siegfried needs a great comic opera conductor who can mine that score for every obnoxious sound implicit in the texture: Kleiber, Fricsay, Cluytens, Gui, Harnoncourt, Mackerras. I'd like to hear it done with half an orchestra and get a bunch of Rossini musicians to do it in Italian: Luigi Alva, Gabriel Bacquier, Fernando Corena... It would sound much more modern than Rossini, perhaps even like Stravinsky, but everybody would recognize that effervescence. Everybody in Siegfried is ridiculous, every situation in Siegfried is absolutely ridiculous.
Until you get to that ending...
The Ring is not four works, it's two. The first is a light to darkness to light journey that begins in Das Rheingold and ends in Act II of Siegfried. It is a piece full of magic, but the magic exists on this plane: it is not the music of transcendence. The second is a series of transfigurations, the first is when the hero who knows no fear sees a woman for the first time. Siegfried begins in a fog of B-Flat Minor, but when Siegfried kisses Brunnhilde, what key is it? E-Major, pure E-Major, the most distant key for the most distant journey traversed.
But that is not the only transcendence. The Ring begins in E-Flat, and here, it reaches E. The hero has the Ring, balance will supposedly be restored soon: but the world can never be quite the same. The hero has ascended to a new wisdom, and therefore so has the world. E-Flat must then become E.
I used to think Wagner put down The Ring because he got tired of it. But then I realized, not even Wagner could come up with that transfiguration music. He wasn't ready to find that musical metaphor, and out of Siegfried were birthed two new ideas for how to create drama utterly unlike any precedent. After two acts of Siegfried's 6/3 based chromaticism, he had to pass through the fire of Tristan and Mathilde Wiesendonck to advance, and then in the wake of his affair with Cosima von Bulow, he had to (lovely human he was...) confront the possibility that Cosima might leave him for someone more appropriately her age.
Tristan to Meistersinger is a journey from the ultimate chromaticism someone could think of in the mid 1850s back to the ultimate diatonicism. And in that tension, I think Wagner found the solution to Siegfried's transformation. One music critic I like once put the idea like this:
A I/III progression in music has always evoked nostalgia, the longing to return. Wagner reverses it: III/I is a progression that came to mean the longing for something new. Siegfried ends in a blaze of C-Major, The explorer has landed in the new world.
Tristan is perhaps the ultimate opera of love. Die Meistersinger is perhaps the ultimate opera of love renounced. Siegfried is perhaps the ultimate opera of love discovered. It was during the composition of these three operas that he experienced his Wiesendonck debacle, and then the debacle of the Bulows. I wonder if it took Wagner the experience of both before he realized how easily love can be lost and that even for genius, the presence of love is in no way guaranteed.
This is obviously not a perfect Siegfried, and yet it is my favorite official recording I've heard in years and years. Rattle gets the comedy, he gets the melos, he gets the profundity, and he's particularly great at finding those odd, odd sounds which populate Siegfried like poisonous plants in a witch's garden. He does not make the opera as dangerous as someone who can unleash the full mass of Bayreuth forces like Barenboim, but there is so much right here. The Bavarian Radio Symphony, my favorite modern orchestra in garb either Kubelik or Jansons, is sounding more like their Kubelik years. They can switch on a dime between their blended old world sound and aural spikes that stab, and dart back and forth split second to second.
What of the singers? Well, it's modern Wagner....
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