Wagner’s Götterdämmerung

By the time his 10 years as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory were over, Sergei Prokofiev had established a reputation for being a dangerous modernist composer. He was also known as a brash performer on piano, with a taste for violent, percussive sounds. His first two piano concertos, both performed in St. Petersburg, aroused the alarm of critics.

Prokofiev’s encounters with the ballet scores that Stravinsky created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — The Firebird, Pétrouchka, and The Rite of Spring — brought out even more modernistic tendencies. The ballet he wrote for Diaghilev in 1915, Chout, and his 1916 opera The Gambler reinforced this energetic, impulsive, and propulsive “bad boy” image.

Taking a summer break in 1916, Prokofiev decided to try writing in a style as different as he could imagine from that of his recent music. He worked with pencil and paper, rather than sitting at his piano as he was accustomed. Utilizing an orchestral ensemble similar in size to Haydn’s symphonies from more than a century previous, he came up with four short movements. The music’s harmony and rhythm are surprisingly Classical, a certain grace — hitherto missing in his music — predominant.

Prokofiev expected to be derided for “contaminating the pure Classical pearls with horrible Prokofievish dissonances,” but also knew that his true admirers would see that the style of the symphony was “precisely Mozartian Classicism.”

In the chaotic months after the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Prokofiev managed to put on a concert in what was then called Petrograd (and would soon be renamed Leningrad), in which he appeared as conductor for the first time. The new “Classical” Sympho­ny was a great success. (Though when Prokofiev later conducted his symphony in New York, he was bewildered — as anyone might be — when critics complained that it lacked “grace and melody.”) A month later, Prokofiev traveled east across Russia to Japan and then to the United States, quite unaware that he would not go back to Russia for 18 years.

The instruments in the “Classical” Symphony may be the same as those Haydn used, but Prokofiev writes for them with much more freedom, for example, in his showcasing of the top range of the flute and in the intricate writing for strings.

The first movement is more or less obedient to Classical form, set in a tight sonata form, but musically, the Larghetto second movement reminds one of Borodin’s Nocturne when the violins enter with a soaring melody that Haydn and Mozart could not have dreamed of. On the other hand, the Gavotta third movement is a throwback to the Baroque era, though the gavotte as a dance was already obsolete by the time Haydn started writing symphonies. (Listeners familiar with Prokofiev’s output will recognize that he later reused this short dance movement in Act I of his ballet Romeo and Juliet, when the guests are leaving the Capulet ball.)

The Finale is a virtuoso piece that taxes the most expert orchestras, especially at top speed — the tempo is marked Molto vivace — but it is hard to imagine that its scintillating exchanges between wind and strings could ever be seen as anything other than exhilarating.

Though his “Classical” Symphony was intended as a spoof and commentary, Prokofiev unwittingly unleashed a popular style of modern music that endured for half a century, now referred to as “Neoclassicism” and spearheaded by Stravinsky once he had turned his back on the excesses of The Rite of Spring. Not only did Prokofiev inspire others to invoke the discipline and moderation of the Classical style, he drew out of himself a vein of charm and simplicity that leavened many of his youthful, brutalist inclinations. Here, in prototype, he created a new idealism or personal voice, from which he would achieve a perfect balance of old and new in such works as his future ballets Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet.

— Hugh Macdonald 

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year. 

Jazz is awash in shades of blue — fittingly, since the Black American art form known as the blues was among the chief components in its making. The lexicon of jazz titles follows suit, from “Fats” Waller’s “Black and Blue” through John Coltrane’s Blue Train, right up to Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Light ’til Dawn. And prior to even the earliest of those cited examples, there was Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s 1924 fusion of jazz verve and European classical music.

Zones of Blue, a new rhapsody for clarinet and orchestra by Austrian com-poser Olga Neuwirth, is not explicitly derived from jazz, yet jazz is foundational to the work. At its core, it is an elegy honoring Neuwirth’s late father, Harald Neuwirth, an eminent jazz pianist and composer who died in March 2023. An accomplished pianist who was performing Mozart concertos by age 12, Harald performed regularly with some of Europe’s leading improvisors and collaborated with American artists like Art Farmer and Lee Konitz. He also played a prominent role in education, teaching in the Institute for Jazz at the Graz Academy of Music from its founding in 1965.

Olga, for her part, played trumpet in her youth, claims Miles Davis among her chief inspirations, and created an opera inspired by the iconic jazz singer Billie Holiday. She composed Zones of Blue for Jörg Widmann, the German composer, conductor, and clarinetist to whom it is dedicated.

Despite quoting nearly outright the signature rising clarinet glissando of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue just before the two-minute mark, Zones of Blue alludes to jazz fleetingly and obliquely. The ambiguity and tension that result are qualities that permeate the oeuvre of Neuwirth, a feverishly inventive composer whose surreal, even macabre works position her as spiritual kin to uncompromising visionaries like Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, and David Lynch, whose feature film Lost Highway — which Neuwirth adapted into an opera — centers on an avant-garde jazz saxophonist.

Opening with the spare sound of human breath rising and falling, Zones of Blue proposes a fantastical soundscape, across which the solo clarinetist murmurs, growls, and shouts as if embroiled in internal debate and emotional turmoil — effects Neuwirth notates and describes in exacting detail. A piano tuned in microtones provides another striking sound texture and is especially notable during an exposed passage accompanied by throbbing basses and rumbling drums, one of several episodes that evoke an oblique sort of swing.

Any allusion to jazz aside, the title Zones of Blue was partly inspired by “Blue Song,” a long-lost poem written by the young Tennessee Williams. The unpublished work was discovered in 2005, scribbled on the back of a booklet Williams had used for a Greek exam while enrolled at Washington University in 1937. Neuwirth includes two passages from the poem as a preface to her score, and has emphasized the final stanza in particular:

I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.

Williams’s description of dust blown from a hand into the wind enhances and complicates the breathy sounds Neuwirth employs in her score. The poem’s tone of resignation and longing serves to underscore a work that serves at once as public homage and private elegy — the kind of layered nuance that runs throughout this composer’s complex yet immediately expressive music.

— Steve Smith

Steve Smith is a writer and editor based in New York City. He has written about music for The New York Times and The New Yorker, and served as an editor for the Boston Globe, Time Out New York, and NPR.

After creating the opera Lohengrin in 1848, Richard Wagner wrote almost no music for five years. His life was violently disrupted by his involvement in the revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1849, from which he was lucky to escape unharmed and un-jailed.

He made an exile’s home in Zurich and there drafted the outline of his next opera, which was to tell the story of the mythic German hero Siegfried. He didn’t immediately start writing the music or the libretto, however, as he would normally have done. Instead, he embarked on an immense series of essays setting out his views on art, opera, theater, and almost everything else. (This included his infamous antisemitic tirade “Jewishness in Music,” which would later become the foundation for the Nazi Party’s own antisemitic beliefs regarding Western art.) Wagner sensed that his own vision of and understanding of opera was undergoing a radical realignment, and used these writings to analyze his deepest instincts about “the opera of the future.” He eventually started composing Das Rheingold in November 1853.

Wagner thought the whole concept — which quickly ballooned into writing a cycle of four, full-length operas — would take him three or four years. In reality, he needed 21 years. After the “minor interruptions” of composing two other operas, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, the Ring of the Nibelung (as he called the four-opera group) was eventually completed in 1874. Finishing the Ring cycle was itself a superhuman achievement, but Wagner dared even further. He also helped design and build a special theater for his operas, and founded a summer festival for the sole purpose of performing them. Both the theater and the festival survive today, still serving that same purpose. The Bayreuth Festival opened in August 1876 with the first performances of the complete Ring of the Nibelung.

One of the most striking features of Wagner’s new style was the continu­ous flow of music from the beginning to end of each act, abandoning the older practice of composing operas in separate and distinct numbers — arias, duets, choruses, and so on. Wagner’s music, in contrast, is an organic substance that advances continuously with the action, using themes and musical motives that are often attached to — or comment on — characters in the action or concepts in the drama. In fact, many sections of Wagner’s operas can successfully — and satisfyingly — be performed in excerpts without the voices, since the drama is so strongly articulated in the orchestra.

The selections from Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, the final opera of the Ring cycle) heard here represent Wagner’s mighty orchestra at its most powerful. At the start of the opera, Siegfried has rescued Brünnhilde from the fire-surrounded rock on which Wotan (leader of the gods) placed her, and the pair instantly fall in love. Having wrested the all-powerful, yet cursed Ring from Fafner the dragon, Siegfried now gives it to Brünnhilde as his bride.

As the first excerpt begins, dawn rises over the Rhine and Siegfried’s horn call is heard in the distance. The music rises majestically to a full-blown statement of Siegfried’s heroic theme and develops into a rapturous love duet for the couple. Brünnhilde’s motive as a Valkyrie (winged women warriors who escort heroes to the afterlife) is also interwoven into the musical fabric.

With a breathtaking change of key, Siegfried leaves the mountain-top rock and heads down the Rhine Valley. Brünnhilde watches him leave and hears his horn call recede in the distance. A vigorous section carries him along the banks of the Rhine, whose surging waters roll the music forward to a serene close.

Siegfried is soon tricked into taking a potion that causes him to betray Brünnhilde and steal back the Ring. Meanwhile, the evil Hagen is intent on destroying Siegfried in order to recover the Ring and its power for himself. In the final act of the opera, Siegfried is given a second potion to restore his memory but is stabbed by Hagen. Siegfried dies with Brünnhilde’s name on his lips.

The orchestra stamps out the rhythm of a solemn funeral procession as Siegfried’s lifeless body is carried over the cliff top. In Wagner’s stage directions, the moon breaks through the clouds and mist gradually fills the whole stage. Many of the opera’s motives are heard, including Siegfried’s horn call and Brünnhilde’s love theme.

In the final scene of the opera, Brünnhilde confronts Hagen. She takes the Ring from Siegfried’s lifeless hand, slips in onto her finger, and rides her steed to a glorious death, leaping into the blazing pyre on which Siegfried’s body lay. The whole scene fills with fire and the Rhine overflows. Hagen is drowned and the Ring is restored to its rightful owners, the Rhinemaidens. In the distance, Valhalla, the home of the gods, is seen in flames. Humanity is now left to a future without assistance (or interference) from the immortals.

The music conveys all of this in a stupendous display of orchestral wizardry. Themes from the entire Ring cycle are brought back in a kaleidoscope of interlocking motives and musical keys. And the final destruction of everything, which can hardly be explained in terms of the drama’s action, creates a sense of total fulfillment — which must have been felt by Wagner himself in 1874 as he completed the final pages of one the longest and most ambitious operas in history.

— Hugh Macdonald