Altered states : musical and psychological processes in Wagner
Date
2017-11-27
Authors
Syer, Katherine Rae
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Abstract
This study reconstructs the early development of modern psychological thought as a context for understanding Wagner's artistic practices. It opens by considering the evolution of psychological thought in German-speaking regions in the late eighteenth century and the growing recognition of unconscious psychological states. By the time that Wagner's career as an opera composer was underway, aesthetic theory and practices had changed to reflect implications of the model of the mind that absorbed early scientific and medical accounts of the unconscious. The application of these psychological ideas in Wagner's works is the focus of the analytical sections of the present work.
Der fliegende Holländer (1841) is the first opera in which Wagner systematically coordinated issues of musical-dramatic structure with psychological principles; this process merits detailed analysis. In Der fliegende Holländer, and all of his subsequent works, Wagner distinguished between phenomenal and noumenal music. Beginning with Tannhäuser, he experimented with the invisible fringes of the stage as performance space that could allude to the noumenal world. After surveying the evolution of Wagner's use of “unseen voices,” examples from Parsifal are assessed. Close examination of its second scene gives attention to this practice as well as to a vivid somnambulistic episode. The scene as a whole is shown to be a sophisticated manipulation of the Kantian notions of time and space that yields a tonal plan or framework coordinated with a differentiated conception of consciousness.
The final two chapters are devoted to the musical and psychological representation of two of Wagner's most important pairs of characters: Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and Tristan and Isolde. Analyses of Siegfried, Act I, and Götterdämmerung, Act III, as well as Tristan und Isolde illustrate how Wagner's large-scale tonal planning and associative tonalities are employed in the service of evolving psychological processes. Schopenhauer's theory of allegorical dream states is shown to be particularly relevant to a re-evaluation of the Wagnerian practice of the “double-tonic complex” much discussed in recent scholarship.
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Wagner, Richard