We wonder how many Members have read Bryan Magee's little Penguin entitled "Wagner and Philosophy" (2000), and what did they think? We are half-way through it and find it full of ideas!

As just one example, Wagner was against the old idea of repetition of words in the vocal lines, and he was against the old idea of two or more characters singing at the same time. He was not a pure musician. His idea of an art-form was the combination of words, with their connected thought, and music, with its huge emotions.

Schoenberg on the other hand complains bitterly about the "unvaried or slightly varied repetitions" in Wagner's music, differing in nothing essential except that they are exactly transposed to other degrees. He contrasts that procedure with Brahms' "developing variation," where repetition of structural elements is done (so he says) only in varied forms. This cranky theory about the avoidance of repetition was one of the roots of his rather nasty and unnecessary invention the "twelve-note technique".

But in fact many of the most moving passages of music are straightforward sequences. We find them in the greatest works of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bruckner, besides everywhere in Bach of course. Not only that; repetition (together with contrast) is at the basis of most musical forms - on both the macro scale and the micro.

They were then both wrong - musically. Wagner in contaminating the purity of absolute music through his introduction of the word, and Schoenberg in his oddly confused inability to grasp the expressive quality of simple repetition.

Yes, I too have always found Schoenberg's apparent failure to acknowledge the effectiveness of simple repetition a little odd. After all, we never step in the same river twice. Even the Greeks knew that!

But I don't ultimately think it does his music any harm. After all, plenty of composers have been (and indeed are) blind to what's good in others' music. One might almost think it a precondition for their own ability to do something fresh. Certainly Harold Bloom, another 'cranky theorist' for whom I have a great deal of time, seems to think so.

As for Wagner, couldn't you say that his particular mode of treatment of words and music, far from 'contaminating the purity of absolute music through his introduction of the word', was an attempt to raise music-drama to the same exalted plane on which he believed Beethoven's instrumental music operated?

Richard Strauss, who might be regarded as something of a disciple of Richard the Elder, was certainly not against the latter, yet one may nevertheless assume that the Member Grew regards him as even less of a "pure musician" than the said Richard the Elder (what on earth is a "pure musician" anyway? - I've certainly never been or met one!)...

And he was alone in this, was he? And it was a bad idea, was it? And where (if anywhere at all) does this leave the songs of Brahms?...

It would seem that the Member Grew has derived little of constructive use from his perusal of the writings of Schönberg, since repetition, both varied and unvaried, can constitute a part of the process of "developing variation"; the Member Grew might do well to read and consider the Member Pace's observations in the Brahms thread about the repetitions of phrases but with different phrasing or other nuance (which some have, incidentally, ignorantly ascribed to the mere carelessness of the composer and/or editor!).

Whilst not doubting the expressive value of repetition, varied and unvaried, the Member Grew seems to undermine what substitutes for his own premise here, in that eve he recognises that Wagner uses repetition, just as Schönberg also does. Whilst again not wishing to devalue "straightforward sequences" (whatever they may be in the ears of each individual beholder), who is to say that they and only they are capable of generating "many of the most moving passages of music"? That said, there are, of course, numerous passages that could well be described as "straightforward sequences" in that most moving work, the Eighth Symphony of Schostocowitch...

The Member Grew hereby summarily dismisses Wagner and Schönberg as "wrong" by his own mercifully unique standards of music appreciation, yet his pot-calling-kettle-black use of the term "wrong" seems ironically misappropriated here, given that the idea that Wagner "introduced the word" to music (as if for the first time!), thereby "contaminating" the latter(!!), is at least as "wrong" on both counts as is his assumption that Schönberg was unable to "grasp the expressive quality of simple repetition". The addition of words to music and the understanding of the rôle of repetition of various kinds in music were, of course, also well known to and understood by Chopstickowitz, as all those who know his work will agree.

Best,

Alistair

Except that the somewhat neurotic Stravinsky surely not only had his cake but ate it, too, by eventually going down the Schoenberg path as well (even if was due at least in part to the enticement of Robert Craft...)

Interesting, jenny ... Though I can think of at least one living composer whose not infrequent use of actual repeat marks produces at times quite a neurotic effect!

Well, Finnissy himself almost entirely eschews literal repetition, throughout his output, which is one of various things that relates him closer to Schoenberg. Despite his having mixed feelings nowadays about both Brahms and Schoenberg (something to do with breaking away from father figures?), both have clearly been major influences upon him in various ways.