This chapter approaches Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde from the viewpoint of its temporal dramaturgy. It highlights the opera’s specificity by interpreting it as a tragedy of hearing: a tragedy in which the main characters, Tristan and Isolde, stuck in their melancholy, are bound to the discursive and plot-oriented forms of musical-operatic time, while the redemption they desire – aesthetically presented by Wagner through acoustic means – points musically beyond the opera’s temporal structures. These connections can be traced on the structural level and that of musical dramaturgy and musical form but also on the level of the characters’ psychology.

In the analysis of late tonal music, analytical approaches which attempt to understand tonal function on the one hand, and harmonic transformation viewed through a neo-Riemannian lens on the other, often stand in an uneasy relation. Through analysis of Act 1, Scene 3 of Götterdämmerung, this chapter attempts to bring neo-Riemannian theory closer to its origin in Hugo Riemann’s functional theory, and so to point the way towards a new theoretical frame for understanding the tonal function of chromatic music. We urge this return to Riemann because it enables twenty-first-century listeners and theorists to appreciate the complex power of tonality as a system which, like the great socio-economic, legal, religious and scientific systems that have endured into the twenty-first century, has an indefatigable ability to subsume anything that might seem to pose a challenge to it back into itself, as a source of further power.

This chapter demonstrates that despite Wagner’s claims that traditional operatic compositional schemes limited the composer’s ability to project drama successfully, he relied on these procedures in the operas from Die Feen through Lohengrin, and continued to use them thereafter in the mature music dramas. Analysis of Wagner’s first six operas demonstrates that Wagner utilised the formal conventions of Italian opera, including clearly articulated cabalettas, far more frequently than has previously been noted. The conventional Italian form accounts for one-third to one-half of musical numbers in these works. The chapter includes close analysis of four numbers (from Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin) and tabular presentation of all of Wagner’s appropriations of this formal convention in the first part of his career. The chapter further identifies vestiges and transformations of la solita forma in the later music dramas, concluding with speculation on why these formal devices have eluded critical commentary until now.

Revisiting selected passages from Siegfried and Parsifal, this chapter argues that the archaic surface of Wagner’s late counterpoint – the result of contrary motion, constructed symmetries, stepwise motion and rhythmic uniformity – relies less on historical styles than on a musical ‘laboratory situation’. Through a combination of nineteenth-century counterpoint pedagogy and historical and contemporary models (including some of Wagner’s own earlier works) with aspects of memory studies and Adorno’s ideas on late style, the chapter shows how a composed image of ‘counterpoint’ creates acoustic and analytical conditions that draw attention to the constructive elements of Wagner’s late style.

This chapter reconsiders ways to interpret the musical gesture of the turn figure in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by comparing it with Richard Wagner’s use of the same gesture in Parsifal – a work that proved crucial for Mahler’s development as a composer and as a conductor. In Parsifal, the descending second is associated with suffering and pain (‘Strafe’, ‘Klage’, ‘Qual’), but also with the possibility of redemption (‘Erlöse, Rette mich!’). As in the Adagio of Mahler’s Ninth, the melodic turn is omnipresent in Parsifal. This chapter concentrates on three specific moments where this orchestral gesture seems to express the unspeakable: Kundry’s narrative of Herzeleide’s death, her description of the gaze of Christ on the cross (both in Act 2) and her baptism by Parsifal in Act 3. Comparing these moments in Parsifal with similar instants in Mahler’s Ninth highlights their essentially theatrical and transformative nature: where verbal language reaches its limits, physical and musical gestures take over, transforming the silence of the words into material movement.

Wagner’s music had theorists continuously scratching their heads. Its fabled newness challenged not only established analytical systems to flex their theoretical muscles but also called for wholly new approaches. This chapter examines early attempts (c.1880–1910) to come to terms with Wagner’s formal and harmonic challenges – crystallised, as ever, in the iconic Tristan chord. Early efforts, by such figures as Karl Mayrberger, Cyrill Kistler, Max Arend, Cyrill Kynast and Emil Ergo, were focused on identifying the most suitable model of tonal harmony among Hauptmann’s, Sechter’s and, later, Riemann’s influential systems and expanding its reach to encompass Wagner’s progressive harmonies. In these discussions, Wagner’s musical structures became nothing less than a battleground for the validity and theoretical prowess of rival conceptions of harmony. It was left to a younger generation of theorists, chief among them Georg Capellen and Ernst Kurth, to reject these nineteenth-century models altogether and to reformulate extended theories of harmony on new foundations.

Wagner’s ‘relationship with music theory’, Alexander Rehding drily notes in his contribution to the present volume, ‘was complicated’ (p. 205). One could say something similar about music theory’s relationship with Wagner. On the one hand Wagner’s music, and especially its harmonic structure, has long served as a touchstone for theoretical models both old and new. At the same time, however, music analysts more often than not have appeared intimidated by the complexity of Wagner’s works, their multi-layeredness and their sheer unwieldiness. Already in 1981, the late Anthony Newcomb noted in the first of a series of remarkably forward-looking articles on Wagner analysis that American music theory was ‘unwilling to touch messy Wagnerian opera with [its] bright Schenkerian tools’.1 To be sure, much has changed since then: not only have Schenkerians (or at least some of them) embraced Wagner, but also the toolbox of both North American and global music theory has expanded considerably over the last three or four decades, not to mention how much broader the perspective of music theory and analysis in general (what they are, what they can do and what they can be about) has become. Still, a survey of general music theory journals or analysis of conference programmes from the past two decades quickly makes clear that Wagner’s music is not exactly one of the discipline’s main preoccupations.

Recent studies applying William Caplin’s form-functional theory to Richard Wagner’s music have focused on Das Rheingold and later music dramas. However, his earlier Lohengrin, the final work he titled ‘romantische Oper’, proves an ideal candidate for such a study, since it still retains certain conventions (such as subtly disguised ‘numbers’ and a fairly clear harmonic palette) while pushing the boundary on others (such as scenes built as ‘dialogue cycles’ and pervasive use of diminished-seventh harmonies). This study first focuses on the principal Leitmotivs of the work, those associated with Elsa, Ortrud, the Grail and the Frageverbot (forbidden question), examining their theme types and loosening features, then exploring their transformations in different appearances throughout the opera – particularly Elsa’s motive. It then considers selected passages constructed in ‘rotational form’, in which one or more of these leitmotivs are used as the backbone for the cyclic form.

There exists, under various names and guises since the late nineteenth century,  a common subject position constructed among Western gay men that engages power, agency, embodiment, sexual experience and marginalized identity in a way that sheds light on the essence of Wagner’s musical idiom and its lasting force in Western culture. Through analysis and close reading of instrumental passages from the end of the opening prelude to Lohengrin and the prelude to Act II of Die Walküre, this article constructs a non-essentialist gay-male subjectivity to explain the emotional force that Wagner’s use of tonality, harmony, theme, form and timbre achieve from this particular viewpoint. More specifically, the article traces the various teleologies of Wagner’s compositional practice and the ways in which these musical teleologies reinforce the explicit textual and dramatic centralities of sex and power in Wagner’s work, themselves dependent on these same centralities in contemporary culture.