Review Summary: After the Symphony in C Major, Wagner made the wise choice of never returning to the form again.
Disasterpiece Series No. 3
If one were to have a discussion about the reverence which Richard Wagner felt towards Ludwig van Beethoven, s/he wouldn’t be able to beat that horse dead enough. In Wagner’s late autobiography,
My Life, he affectionately mused over his first impressions of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and its implications on his musical aspirations, “I had been driven by the mystical influence of Beethoven’s 9th to plumb the deepest recesses of music.” So deep was Wagner’s admiration for The Master that Beethoven quickly assumed the most exalted, if not a bonafide divine, position in Wagner’s pantheon of musical minds.
In fact, Wagner was incapable of conceptualizing his place in musical history as intrinsically separate from Beethoven’s. To illustrate, Wagner considered himself and composers of his ilk, but mostly himself, as the sole proprietors of Beethoven’s musical lineage. With his cohorts supporting him, Wagner formed an eponymous school of thought which posited that had Beethoven been alive during the Romantic era, he would have turned his eyes askance from self-contained music such as the piano sonata or symphony and focused his talents on music with a programmatic background such as the opera. Per Wagner, then, programmatic music was the only music worth composing.
That Wagner’s school of thought is so obviously erroneous is not at issue here; I only point it out to bring attention to the piece at hand, Wagner’s only completed symphony, No. 1 in C Major WWV 29. I found it strange that after all his decades of vicious literary and in person attacks against those with whom he disagreed, namely Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and Antonin Dvorák, that Wagner had actually written a symphony, a genre clearly out of line with his school of thought. Well, not exactly. Wagner wrote the C Major symphony at nineteen years of age, and so it’s easy enough to assume that his self-proclaimed musical purpose hadn’t yet crystallized in his ego.
That said, Wagner couldn’t compose absolute music worth a damn. But I’ll start with the positives. WWV 29 is harmonically and orchestrally quite rich. The lushness of movement one’s opening four chords, bursting with color, are a thing of beauty. And with the symphony being scored for a large orchestra, there’s a rich latitude of aural space running throughout its 35 minutes. In other words, there’s that quintessential romantic depth of sound that so often leaves you marveling at the muscle of the symphony.
Now for the negatives. Everything else. The main issue, which becomes ever more clear as the symphony progresses, is just how static and one dimensional it is, and the introduction to the first movement presents us with a microcosm for the failures of the whole. While the first movement takes approximately thirteen and a half to fourteen minutes to perform, the opening introduction, even for a fast performance, takes up four and a half minutes of playing time. In it of itself an introduction of this length relative to the length of a movement isn’t an issue, but frankly this introduction, without gaining any traction, spins its romantic wheels in the mud, and so goes nowhere and says nothing. Even the opening series of chords can present you with a microcosm for the failures of the symphony. I mentioned the beauty of the first four chords. Unfortunately, Wagner spins these chords in the same tempo and texture, largo and monophonic, again and again for nearly thirty excruciatingly long seconds, ruining whatever beauty and power they had.
More flagrant is the introduction’s B section which nauseatingly repeats its opening six note diatonic ascending gesture in every harmony, every register, and every group of instruments ad nauseam. Sit down at a piano, if you will, and play the first six notes of any major scale, hold the first note for a dotted quarter and the rest for 8ths. Now play them again in exactly the same manner in a different octave. Now again in a different octave. You can even change the key if you’d like. Now do this for four straight minutes. You’ll be like a kid again, way back when you were in social studies class staring at the minute hand of your watch, anxiously waiting for it to hit double zero.
Once we’re finally in the sonata, you can quickly tell that it suffers from the same maladies as the introduction. Composers of the Common Practice Period typically abide by the general rule that a gesture of music, no matter how big or small, shouldn’t be repeated more than three times in a row without some form of variation. Here, however, Wagner doesn’t know how to treat the boisterous dotted note descending gesture of the first theme without almost exact repetition. The first theme also presents us with another issue: there’s no meaningful division of labor between the parts of the orchestra. Although the treatment is clearly one of a melody supported by a harmony, the texture feels monophonic, which is to say that somehow it feels as if the orchestra is playing vertically instead of horizontally. I’ll try to put it more simply. Music’s only medium is time, therefore for music to be effective it must travel. Wagner’s treatment feels as though it is jumping up and down and in the same spot.
The third and final issue movement one presents us with has to do with tension. The first movement is dark for the sake of aesthetic, not for the sake of emotional catharsis. There’s a lack of emotional inspiration, and you can tell in Wagner’s questions and answers. In other words, Wagner’s motivic answers in theme one lack musical sense, and the rising diatonic run in the strings speaks to this idea. It’s as if Wagner either didn’t know what to say and/or how to say it, and so he composed with his head rather than his heart. Does this sound Beethovinian enough?
Theme two does little to alleviate the movement’s ailments. This time the sonorities are bright, but its dotted rhythm is over utilized and the calls and responses, whether in the winds, horns, or strings, flounder. To make matters worse, with their constant droning, a faux dread in the lower strings underpins the melody. Ultimately, Wagner is utilizing compositional techniques he doesn’t yet know how to handle. Instead of being unified, the parts of the orchestra seem drastically out of sorts. It’s as if they're attempting a dialogue through shouting.
There’s not much to say about movement two that’s different from movement one, although it’s clearly better than the first. Here, Wagner showcases some talent at melody composition, even if the tempo and texture stagnate. Movement three is very clearly the best of the bunch. It’s quite lovely. Written as a Scherzo and in a tempo “very fast” (allegro assai), the themes are clearly defined, have personality, move horizontally, and the orchestra works together. As far as the music goes, the A section is bubbly with a hint of wit. One even senses a hint of Joseph Haydn and late Mozart, a compliment any composer would be thrilled to receive (unless you’re Brahms who shamefully destroyed his first piano sonata after a critic called it “The Little Mozart”), as the first theme bounces in dynamic call and response bursts between the horns and winds. An effective contrast to the A section, even if it isn’t outstanding, the trio is characterized by a calm and lyrical melody.
Written as a sonata and in a tempo
allegro molto e vivace, the fourth movement is better than the first, but suffers from stagnation and a lack of definition. Here, Wagner presents good thematic materials but again fails to develop them into a meaningful narrative. What results is a sonic smattering of ideas that don’t tell a story. The movement starts out promisingly enough with a clearly defined theme that bursts dashingly out of its gates. But, just as in movement one, Wagner beats you to death with its rhythmic gestures until you grope for the skip button. Finally, in an aping of Beethoven’s fifth, the finale hammers home the key with extended dominant-tonic action to no cathartic effect.
Before I conclude I will say this, to even attempt a symphony at nineteen years of age is noble. Not everyone can compose a sound symphony at sixteen years old like Schubert, fifteen years old like Mendelssohn, or eight(!!) years old like Mozart. And I mean, hey, Beethoven himself didn’t attempt to write symphony until his mid/late twenties, the first of which is universally considered to be his worst, (it is). Nevertheless, the music doesn’t lie, and Wagner’s C Major symphony suffers from a host of maladies, most of which is the discernable lack of effective treatment of its thematic material. One even wonders if the symphony’s failure subconsciously factored into Wagner’s, who saw everyone and everything in this world as a reflection of himself, ideas about Beethoven. Regardless, after the Symphony in C Major, Wagner made the wise choice of never returning to the form again.
