Wagner and Rossini go up the stairs
I’ve settled lately into a new evening routine: while cooking dinner, I put on the Met Opera Radio channel on SiriusXM (a trial subscription for which came with my car, see previous). At 6pm every evening they play a complete opera from the Met’s vast library of live recordings, a different work each night, so when I start dinner preparations I usually tune in sometime during Act I. The concept of “what’s on right now” has nearly disappeared from modern media consumption, so something about this is pleasantly nostalgic. It’s also comforting, sometimes, to listen to music chosen for me by something other than a singular value decomposition algorithm1.
The night before last, I listened to The Barber of Seville by Rossini. This opera made Rossini perhaps the most broadly popular composer who ever existed up until then, and only a few minutes of listening makes clear that his knack for catchy tunes and sheer bounciness was unrivaled. He built his reputation on a particular musical-dramatic technique for getting people worked up: take a jaunty motif, what we might now call a riff or a vamp2, and repeat it over and over, gradually getting louder and louder before eventually finishing with some big exciting chords. It turns out that audiences love when you do this! It pleases people on such a visceral level that when a pop musician does it in a concert people are compelled as if by some magical force to start clapping along (I hate when they do this) or cheering (this is okay). You can hear an example in the Barber overture: the buildup starts at 4:02, and then he does pretty much the same thing again starting at 6:02, because he rightly thinks that the audience won’t mind hearing it again.
Rossini built his whole career on this! This version of the technique was named the Rossini Crescendo because he relied on it so heavily, although I have to believe that musicians have been doing things like this for thousands of years. They certainly continue to do so (the last few minutes of “Stairway to Heaven” are basically this same technique but with guitars).
Then the next night, last night, the opera on the radio was Siegfried. If you know Siegfried, you know it’s about as far away from The Barber of Seville as it’s possible to get, at least within the standard operatic repertoire. Instead of peeling garlic during Act I, I was tuning in towards the end of the opera — I can only assume because its weighty length meant that they had to start the broadcast much earlier in the day. The composer, Richard Wagner, would have been scandalized and insulted to be compared to Rossini, but standing in the kitchen listening to the nearly overwhelmingly beautiful love duet that concludes Siegfried, I was struck by the way the two composers have the crescendo in common.
At a time when many canonical works are being re-evaluated (a lot of opera companies will have to think hard about staging Madame Butterfly when their seasons resume), Wagner occupies an interesting position. He has, in effect, been pre-cancelled: he was such a reprehensible human being on just about every level3 that it’s long past debate, and has been for almost a century. The Israel Philharmonic boycotted his music from 1938 onward and didn’t lift the ban until 2000. All discussion of his operas has been preceded for so long with acknowledgements of his loathsomeness that they have become essentially pro forma. Interestingly, this seems to mean that there’s very little fury for him left. Anyone listening to Wagner isn’t agonizing about separating the art from the artist; they’ve already done so, and likely long ago.
Wagner was also a master of the slow build, although not in a way that would compel anyone to start clapping along. The opening of his monumental four-opera work, the Ring Cycle (of which Siegfried is the third), lingers for four minutes over a single chord, starting with the lowest, deepest, quietest E-flat, then slowly adding instruments and arpeggios and textures, getting louder and richer until the whole orchestra is bursting with that single chord. It’s meant to represent the birth of the world.
I’m tempted to say that you can judge whether you’re likely to enjoy Wagner’s operas by whether you can listen with enjoyment to the whole four minutes of this introduction. The musical ear usually doesn’t like to hear a single chord for too long; it craves movement and starts to tire. But for the Wagner fan, it’s one of the most exciting four minute stretches in all of opera.
In his other powerful buildups, rather than lingering in one place, he shifts and keeps shifting and shifts again. He’ll supply a long, unfurling melody that seems to be building towards some kind of climactic finish, and then just as it’s about to resolve, he pulls back and switches keys — and then he does this again and again, sometimes spending more than an hour without letting the music come to rest. The ear doesn’t like this either if it goes on for too long; it loses its bearings and becomes exhausted. Some key changes — and here I think especially of Mozart — can feel like a door to a garden has suddenly opened, and you can step outside into new fresh air. When Wagner does it, it feels like climbing a spiral staircase in a tall building, seeing the view change through the windows, and wondering with each new twist if you’re about to reach the top.
But Wagner’s climbs can represent states of near-hallucinatory ecstasy that Rossini would never have imagined. To me the most powerful has always been the Liebestod from his opera Tristan and Isolde. It builds and pulls back, repeating its motif, until it finally reaches a climax that makes you believe it might actually be possible for a person to die of happiness. Filmmakers have used it liberally when a mood of doomed revelation is called for. Listen for it in Melancholia, in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, in Promising Young Woman and The Artist and even in an episode of The Crown. In movies, it’s some mood music with a job to do4; at the opera, it comes after five hours of climbing Wagner’s spiral staircase, and the audience is likely to be half-delirious with some combination of hunger and boredom and exhaustion and rapture by the time they see the vast, beautiful view from the top.
Click on that link if you want, but only if you want to be reminded that you’ve forgotten all your math.
My “research” for this piece included watching this video of a man with a thick Scottish accent demonstrating the difference between a lick and a riff.
He was a proud anti-Semite (which seems to have been largely fueled by professional resentment) and held various other racist views. In addition, he had no scruples when it came to borrowing money, verbally abusing his partners, sleeping with other men’s wives, insulting the people who helped him, and so on. He was also Hitler’s favorite composer, and opera companies staging his works have since been very careful to avoid any whiff of mythic nationalism in the production. His misdeeds get their own Wikipedia article.
And usually they use an instrumental version because most people don’t like listening to Wagnerian voices.