Prologue to a reading of the “Götterdämmerung” before a select audience in Berlin

“Einleitung zu einer Vorlesung der "Götterdämmerung" vor einem ausgewählten Zuhörerkreise in Berlin”

Published 1873

Overview

A short address Wagner gave in Berlin before reading the poem of Götterdämmerung to an invited audience. He explains that his chief aim has been to make dramatic dialogue itself the main subject of musical treatment, so that the poem can stand as a spoken drama, and that this is why he is presenting the complete work to educated Germans rather than to ordinary opera-goers.

Why a Reading

Wagner explains that his listeners may know the work chiefly as music, so he will read part of the dramatic poem to show how he himself regards it, and why it requires a method of production quite unlike that of the usual opera house.

Dialogue as the Subject of Music

People speak of his innovations in opera, but the one advantage he has deliberately sought is to make the dramatic dialogue the main subject of musical treatment. In ordinary opera only lyrical pauses, which usually halt the action, were thought suitable for music. The wish to raise opera to true drama could arise only after the great German masters had widened music’s scope. Building on their legacy, music can now be united so fully with the action that the drama gains ideal freedom, no longer needing to appeal to abstract reflection, a goal the great poets had sought in many ways before turning to music as the means of reaching it.

The Modern Orchestra and the Chorus

Because music constantly reveals the characters’ inner motives, they no longer need to explain them in reflective language, and the dialogue gains the naive pointedness that is the life of drama. In ancient tragedy the dialogue was confined to sections between the choral songs, which gave the drama its higher meaning. In the modern orchestra, which Wagner calls the greatest artistic achievement of the age, this choral element accompanies the action itself and holds all its motives within it. The dialogue can therefore extend through the whole drama, and so he can read a work that exists only because it could be realised in music as a bare play, to be judged like any work written for the spoken stage.

An Audience of Educated Germans

This quality gives him confidence to present the work from this one side, and it is also his main reason for the unusual steps he is taking to bring the complete work before the German public. In both cases he addresses not opera lovers but truly educated people who care earnestly about an original cultivation of the German spirit.

Translated by William Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 5, pp. 305–306.

DESIROUS of your closer attention to a work which may have chiefly attracted your notice as a musical product, I believe I shall best attain that end by reading out a portion of the dramatic poem on which it is founded; for I thereby hope to shew you not only the character in which I view that work myself, but also that feature which compelled me to devise a plan of reproduction quite foreign to the habits of our Opera-house and its public.

People talk of innovations made by me in Opera: for my own part I am conscious of having, if not achieved, at least deliberately striven for this one advantage, the raising of the dramatic dialogue itself to the main subject of musical treatment; whereas in Opera proper the moments of lyrical delay, and mostly violent arrest of the action, had hitherto been deemed the only ones of possible service to the musical composition.

The longing to raise the Opera to the dignity of genuine Drama could never wake and wax in the musician, before great masters had enlarged the province of his art in that spirit which now has made our German music acknowledgedly victorious over all its rivals. Through the fullest application of this legacy of our great masters we have arrived at uniting Music so completely with the Drama's action, that this very marriage enables the action itself to gain that ideal freedom—i.e. release from all necessity of appealing to abstract reflection—which our great poets sought on many a road, to fall at last a-pondering on the selfsame possibility of attaining it through Music.

By incessantly revealing to us the inmost motives of the action, in their widest ramifications, Music at like time makes it possible to display that action itself in drastic definition: as the characters no longer need to tell us of their impulses [or "grounds of action"—Beweggründe] in terms of the reflecting consciousness, their dialogue thereby gains that naïve pointedness (Präzision) which constitutes the very life of Drama. Again, whilst Antique Tragedy had to confine its dramatic dialogue to separate sections strewn between the choruses delivered in the Orchestra—those chants in which Music gave to the drama its higher meaning—in the Modern Orchestra, the greatest artistic achievement of our age, this archetypal element goes hand in hand with the action itself, unsevered from the dialogue, and in a profounder sense may be said to embrace all the action's motives in its mother-womb.

Thus, besides the restoration of its naïve pointedness, it became possible to give the dialogue an extension covering the entire drama; and it is this that enables me to read to you to-day in guise of a bare dramatic poem a work that owes its origin to nothing but the feasibility of carrying it out completely in music: for I believe I may submit it as a play in dialogue to the same judgment we are wont to invoke with a piece indited for the Spoken Play.

The quality I thus have claimed for my work not only emboldens me to shew it you from this one side without alarm, but has also been my principal reason for the unusual steps I am taking to place it before the German public in its entirety; in the one case as in the other I wish to commend it, not to an assemblage of opera-lovers, but to a gathering of truly educated persons earnestly concerned for an original cultivation of the German Spirit.