Liszt’s Tone Poems as Musical Realizations of Ideas from Opera and Drama and Their Influence on Wagner’s Musical Language

Is it possible that Wagner found in Liszt’s tone poems practical applications of theoretical concepts articulated in Opera and Drama (1849)? There Wagner argues that multiple changes of key—each possessing its own characteristic qualities and each related to the others—are necessary for the proper musical expression of poetic ideas. The combination of distinct musical sections, or poetic-musical periods, gives rise to an overarching poetic conception that forms the basis of an entire music drama. Only by coupling tonality with dramatic action and poetic intent, Wagner believed, could music as an art form continue to develop, for without an extra-musical foundation the continued expansion of chromaticism risks leading to harmonic aimlessness. Liszt’s revolutionary harmonic language, the resulting attenuation of the diatonic system, and his treatment of form—especially the combination of several movements into a single whole—may represent the practical means by which these aesthetic ideals found musical realization. This presentation examines the techniques that distinguish Liszt’s compositional language from that of the First Viennese School, considers their affect on tonal structure and form, and explores their possible reflection in Wagner’s music dramas, where they become inseparable from dramatic action and poetic meaning, both before and after the Siegfried hiatus. More broadly, it asks whether Liszt’s tone poems may have furnished Wagner not merely with new harmonic procedures, but with compositional solutions to problems he had himself articulated in Opera and Drama.

About the Speaker: Chris Park is a part-time associate teaching professor in the Techniques of Music department at the Mannes School of Music at The New School. Originally trained as a violinist, he later studied Schenkerian analysis with Carl Schachter. He teaches courses ranging from freshman music theory to advanced analysis, as well as seminars on Beethoven, Wagner’s Ring, Mahler, and the nineteenth-century tone poem. Drawing on Schenkerian analysis, his research explores the interaction of tonal structure, musical form, and extra-musical meaning in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoire. His current work brings together three longstanding interests: musical form, tonal structure, and drama. Underlying much of his scholarship is a central question: How does tonal structure create or support musical meaning? His recent work on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony traces the long-range preparation of climactic moments in the Finale, including one of particular social and political significance. He completed his dissertation, Mozart’s Harmonization Exercises for Barbary Ployer, in 1999. Park’s opera, Phedra and Hippolytus, based on Euripides’ Hippolytus, was fully staged in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2013. He is the reed organist at the New Boston Congregational Church in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and the drummer for Otto’s German Band in Berkshire County.

The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments.