Was Mendelssohn necessary for Wagner?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Berlioz and Liszt were influences on him as well as Beethoven, although those influences are perhaps rather more apparent than that of Beethoven.

Wagner's chromatic harmony - brought to such influential perfection in his post-1860 works - is the result of decades of development towards such a language by many diverse composers. I don't know if RW ever heard Schubert's Dass Sie Hier Gewesen (written in 1823), but so much of it sounds like something from those Wesendonck "sketches for Tristan" - dissonance "resolving" onto another dissonance. The seeds (and more) of Wagner's achievement were in the air around him, for all his self-deceptive attempts to re-write history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQZFJss8uY

... hell! There's even a distant air from the Hanging Gardens there!

RW's real "achievement" was to create a coherent "language" in which these "delayed resolutions"/"deferred tonalities" could work powerfully over huge spans of time and Musical space. (And that was some achievement!)

[visualnickmos]

Very absorbing thread, this one. My own thoughts (which don't really mean much to anyone except me!) are:

1 Wagner was a total "git" of the first order.

2 Mendelssohn's chamber music is splendid - the early works through to the later works.

3 The piano trios must surely be amongst the very best of that genre (trios) EVER written.

4 Mendelssohn's two excellent piano concertos are only done justice by the wonderful recordings by Peter Katin. All others that I've heard (including Peraiha) don't even come close.

[gradus]

I've pointed this out before and can't anywhere that anyone else has ever spotted it but there is what seems to me to be a quote from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music at the very opening of the Prelude to Act 3 of Die Meistersinger. It is just a short transitionary phrase in the MND Entr'acte but interesting because both are set in the very same evening.

27' 11'' into this clip from the LSO/Previn recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUKj6tdXtS0

See what you mean, how intriguing.

[Serial_Apologist]

Wagner's chromatic harmony - brought to such influential perfection in his post-1860 works - is the result of decades of development towards such a language by many diverse composers. I don't know if RW ever heard Schubert's Dass Sie Hier Gewesen (written in 1823), but so much of it sounds like something from those Wesendonck "sketches for Tristan" - dissonance "resolving" onto another dissonance. The seeds (and more) of Wagner's achievement were in the air around him, for all his self-deceptive attempts to re-write history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQZFJss8uY

... hell! There's even a distant air from the Hanging Gardens there!

RW's real "achievement" was to create a coherent "language" in which these "delayed resolutions"/"deferred tonalities" could work powerfully over huge spans of time and Musical space. (And that was some achievement!)

Well, not that far, ferney, I'd assert!

One of the fascinating things in Schoenberg's early music, up to the Hanging Gardens, consists in the ever growing distances between the chromatic dissonances he was evincing from around the time of the 1905 string quartet and their possibility for immediate resolution - this eventually reaching the point at which it becomes almost too much "trouble" to resolve the damn things! By which point we find the lesser irresolutions becoming relative points of rest, half resolutions - this facet of his language even being found in some of the later 12-tone works - so that, in the Hanging Gardens, and certain other works of that time, Berg's string quartet and even brief passages in Webern, any actual resolutions, whether or not onto some putative "tonic", actually come as shocks to the brain that's been acclimatizing itself to the new harmonic expressive world.

This is what fascinates me and still makes me fundamentally a faithful "Schoenbergian", feeling that certain composers' return to pre-atonal means of expression treat tonality and tonal relations implies a certain glibness, as if tonality has become just one type of expressive colouring, rather than the bearer of what brought Schoenberg - and many others in that pre-WWI period - to that critical Hanging Gardens juncture. I keep going back to it, whilst of course respecting the work of other composers' lesser concert (obsession?) with such matters.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

S_A -

Especially:

This is what fascinates me and still makes me fundamentally a faithful "Schoenbergian", feeling that certain composers' return to pre-atonal means of expression treat tonality and tonal relations implies a certain glibness, as if tonality has become just one type of expressive colouring, rather than the bearer of what brought Schoenberg - and many others in that pre-WWI period - to that critical Hanging Gardens juncture. I keep going back to it, whilst of course respecting the work of other composers' lesser concert (obsession?) with such matters.

So much of what is described as "tonality" in the work of some contemporary composers is a feeble effort in comparison with the rich, flexible, complex Tonality systems in such works as, say Mozart's Prague Symphony. This richness and flexibility was what created the conditions for Wagner's own treatment of chromatic Tonality, and further into the Second Viennese School ... and beyond!

[ahinton]

Wagner's chromatic harmony - brought to such influential perfection in his post-1860 works - is the result of decades of development towards such a language by many diverse composers. I don't know if RW ever heard Schubert's Dass Sie Hier Gewesen (written in 1823), but so much of it sounds like something from those Wesendonck "sketches for Tristan" - dissonance "resolving" onto another dissonance. The seeds (and more) of Wagner's achievement were in the air around him, for all his self-deceptive attempts to re-write history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQZFJss8uY

... hell! There's even a distant air from the Hanging Gardens there!

RW's real "achievement" was to create a coherent "language" in which these "delayed resolutions"/"deferred tonalities" could work powerfully over huge spans of time and Musical space. (And that was some achievement!)

I'd be surpirsed if Wagner had been unaware of that particular Schubert song and, let's face it, its first two harmonic iterations are nothing if not two transpositions of the Tristan chord (albeit laid out somewhat differently but still in the same position). "I breathe the air of a Hanging Garden", anyone?...

[ahinton]

S_A -

Especially:



So much of what is described as "tonality" in the work of some contemporary composers is a feeble effort in comparison with the rich, flexible, complex Tonality systems in such works as, say Mozart's Prague Symphony. This richness and flexibility was what created the conditions for Wagner's own treatment of chromatic Tonality, and further into the Second Viennese School ... and beyond!

Spot on; indeed, one could almost argue that the manner and matter of such composers' recourse to "tonality" undermines it more than Schönberg ever did!

[gurnemanz]

It might have irked Wagner a bit to know all too well how important and successful Mendelssohn had been while only four years older than him and that Mendelssohn had not lived long enough to see how successful he, Wagner, was to become. He wrote friendly letters to Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus (recently published by the Mendelssohn family - link) and as far as I know, he did not start running Mendelssohn down until after he was dead. Maybe he was being opportunistic when writing to him in a friendly tone but it is reported that he described Mendelssohn as "das größte spezifische Musikergenie, das der Welt seit Mozart erschienen ist" (the greatest musical genius since Mozart), praised the Hebrides overture and kept the "Lieder ohne Worte" on his piano right to the end, playing them often.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'd be surpirsed if Wagner had been unaware of that particular Schubert song and, let's face it, its first two harmonic iterations are nothing if not two transpositions of the Tristan chord (albeit laid out somewhat differently but still in the same position). "I breathe the air of a Hanging Garden", anyone?...

I've always wondered - but, given that the first chord in Tristan is a half-diminished seventh (F, G#, B, D#) [as is, as you say, the first chord in the Schubert, up a whole-tone (G, Bb, C#, F)] it is possible that RW just discovered the specials qualities of that inversion of the chord - together with its "resolution" onto a "B7, flattened 5th" (as opposed to Schubert's more conventional diminished seventh in the second half of the first bar) - whilst doodling with seventh chords at the piano.

The point I think needs to be made is that these chromatic, added-note chord progressions were part of the "scene" in 19th Century Germany - any "influence" on Wagner need not necessarily have been through direct contact with individual works. But that he needed the work of those previous composers in addition to those of Beethoven is unquestionable, I'd say.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

It might have irked Wagner a bit to know all too well how important and successful Mendelssohn had been while only four years older than him and that Mendelssohn had not lived long enough to see how successful he, Wagner, was to become. He wrote friendly letters to Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus (recently published by the Mendelssohn family - link) and as far as I know, he did not start running Mendelssohn down until after he was dead. Maybe he was being opportunistic when writing to him in a friendly tone but it is reported that he described Mendelssohn as "das größte spezifische Musikergenie, das der Welt seit Mozart erschienen ist" (the greatest musical genius since Mozart), praised the Hebrides overture and kept the "Lieder ohne Worte" on his piano right to the end, playing them often.

- many thanks, gurne!

[ahinton]

I've always wondered - but, given that the first chord in Tristan is a half-diminished seventh (F, G#, B, D#) [as is, as you say, the first chord in the Schubert, down a semi-tone (F, Ab, B, D)] it is possible that RW just discovered the specials qualities of that inversion of the chord - together with its "resolution" onto a "B7, flattened 5th" (as opposed to Schubert's more conventional diminished seventh in the second half of the first bar) - whilst doodling with seventh chords at the piano.

The point I think needs to be made is that these chromatic, added-note chord progressions were part of the "scene" in 19th Century Germany - any "influence" on Wagner need not necessarily have been through direct contact with individual works. But that he needed the work of those previous composers in addition to those of Beethoven is unquestionable, I'd say.

Agreed on all counts!

[LeMartinPecheur]

"Some of the early quartets are nearly as bad.."?! (Pass us the brandy, Edge my fellow Mendelssohnian, as if I haven't had enough excitement for one day).

Do you really want to get me started on defending Mendelssohn, whom I worship as one of my all-time musical Gods?
Those early Quartets (I presume you refer to Op.12 & Op.13) are highly original rapprochements with that late-quartet Beethovenian inheritance, with startlingly precocious, confident and innovative use of cyclical sonata-forms....
They also happen to be supremely memorable, lovable masterpieces, entirely in Mendelssohn's own so beautiful voice. Concise too with scarce a bar wasted. (Desert Island Alternatives for me, anytime anywhere).

(Oh I've got pages to paste in....but I'll show restraint as it isn't really the subject here...).

OK Jayne, I may just possibly have been a bit hard on the quartets. But I note that you haven't called me out about the piano sonata!

[EdgeleyRob]

OK Jayne, I may just possibly have been a bit hard on the quartets. But I note that you haven't called me out about the piano sonata!

Ok ok the first movt owes a huge debt to LvB Op 101 but there is some lovely pure Mendelssohn in this Sonata.
I have the recording of all 3 Sonatas played by Frederic Chiu and it's a treasured disc here.
Make sure you're not sitting on your (high ) horse when you hear the opening of Op 106,yes even the Opus is the same
Maybe he just didn't know how to start a piano Sonata without help

[jayne lee wilson]

OK Jayne, I may just possibly have been a bit hard on the quartets. But I note that you haven't called me out about the piano sonata!

I simply don't know them (I ration out my solo piano listening, due to hyperacutic aural sensitivities similar to those that largely keep me away from operatic/vocal) so I'm glad that Edge has spoken up....

I note that Sonatas 2 & 3 are Op. Posthumous..... maybe he felt differently about them compared to the early chamber and orchestral masterpieces.

[richardfinegold]

allow me to put in a good word for the Scottish & Italian Symphonies and the Violin Concerto, besides the ever popular Songs Without Words, in addition to the beauties of the Chamber Music and MSND cited previously.
His Oratorios have their moments.
His Sonatas on balance are no worse than those of Brahms