Listen to this Classical Music 2
Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky
It’s that time again! Let’s start with the same general advice I gave in the first part:
If you’re new to classical, here’s a bit of context:
Treat it like going to an art gallery. Wear headphones for the best experience. When you don’t know a piece yet, put all your attention on it, get absorbed in the detail and the harmony.
A big difference between classical and (say) pop music is that there usually isn’t an official version of a classical piece. Every recording is a cover, in a sense.
Different recordings of the same piece are made by different performers with different setups. So you can have a recording that is better in terms of feeling, but really old and fuzzy because it was made with ancient or badly-placed microphones. You can also have a crystal clear recording from 2026 where the musician plays like a soulless robot. (If you like one of the pieces here, I suggest you check out some other recordings of the piece to get a better sense of this.)
I’ll share Spotify links when I can, but sometimes a recording is only available on YouTube.
One more thing
In this post I share a bunch of vocal pieces. Listening to classical singing (e.g. opera) is different from listening to modern singing. Before the invention of microphones and speakers and recordings, a singer had to project their voice over an entire theatre. A loud orchestra might be playing at the same time. So, classical singing is exaggerated and its dynamic range is compressed upwards. A modern singer can whisper softly into a microphone when they want to be intimate; a classical singer needs to “gently yell”. This is similar to how a stage actor uses exaggerated and audience-facing body language and facial expressions, but a film actor in closeup can depend on the smallest of their expressions being visible to viewers.
It doesn’t take much time to get used to classical singing, but before that happens, you might find it kind of loud and flat. And there are a lot of mediocre classical singers, so the point about different recordings of the same piece becomes even more relevant.
Wagner
This asshole was a multimodal genius. Before him, an opera was a flowery sausage-chain of dialogues and arias, bound up in a ludicrous corset. Composers usually didn’t write the story or the words (libretto) themselves, but composed their music to fit existing texts. The grandiose took precedence over the profound.1
Wagner wanted to create a comprehensive work of art, a synthesis of all available media.2 He used his creative judgment to write the story, words, music, and stage directions for all his later operas. He also insisted on through-composition, meaning a continuous stream of music rather than discrete arias mingled with dialogue.
His most famous work is Der Ring des Nibelungen (i.e. “The Ring of the Nibelung” or just “The Ring”) a four-part opera cycle composed between 1848 and 1874. The story has many similarities to The Lord of the Rings, including, among others:
a ring, forged through a perverse sacrifice by the villain, giveshim mastery over the world; corrupts anyone else who tries to bear it; and is returned to its origin upon its destruction;3
an exiled Hero of Men reforges a fateful sword which belonged to his ancestor;
a wanderer in a cloak influences the plot from the sidelines (Wotan/Gandalf);
a treacherous, pathetic figure is obsessed with the ring (Mime/Gollum);
industrial corruption under the influence of the ring (Nibelheim/Isengard).
The piece at the beginning of this section is the opening prelude of the cycle. It depicts sunrise on the Rhine river, which is the only real-world location mentioned in the operas. The Ring’s music is woven out of many leitmotifs which represent different aspects of the fantasy world; here, at the very start, we have an uncomplicated arpeggio which represents the purity of primordial nature.
I’ll share just one other piece from The Ring: the funeral march of the central hero, Siegfried. He is a fearless and unconquerable warrior loved by all, until he is tricked into breaking a sacred oath, and killed by the villain’s bitter son.
Here are two more selections from other works by Wagner. First, the sublime prelude to Parsifal, his final opera:
And the pilgrims’ chorus from Tannhäuser, on their return home:
Beglückt darf nun dich, o Heimat, ich schauen,
With joy I may now behold you, O Homeland,
und grüßen froh deine lieblichen Auen
and gladly greet your lovely meadows.
Mahler
Some people are obsessed with Mahler. I’m not, but I do want to share the opening movement from Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), a symphony which he didn’t number as such, out of superstition.
This movement is called Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (“The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow”) and is a loose translation of 悲歌行 (“Song of Sorrow”) by the famous Tang dynasty poet Li Bai.
I recommend following along with the lyrics.
Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.
Dark is life; is death.
Richard Strauss
I bet you recognize this.
Strauss was the consummate post-Wagnerian. He has all the power and beauty of Wagner, but more refined and complex and modern.
I know what I want, and I know what I meant when I wrote this. After all, I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.
Don’t listen to his self-deprecation. He’s one of the best. In the early 1900’s he started to transition from late Romanticism to early Modernism with his operas Salome and Elektra, but then receded back into Romanticism instead of proceeding fully into atonality. Good for him.
Salome is probably my favourite opera. If you’re new to opera, this is a good one to start with. It’s only 100 minutes long and there’s a decent film recording of it. It tells the story of the ancient Judean princess who demanded the head of John the Baptist (named “Jochanaan” in the opera). The German text is an abridged but direct translation from Oscar Wilde’s only French play, which takes a lot of artistic license with the original biblical story, and portrays Salome’s motivation as infatuation.
Here’s the very end of the opera. Salome has successfully obtained the head on a silver platter and kissed it (“why wouldn’t you kiss me?”). She notes that he has a bitter taste on his lips, wonders aloud whether it’s the taste of love (“they say that love has a bitter taste”), then shakes her head and exalts in her victory (“what does it matter? I’ve kissed you!”) before being killed by the palace guards on the orders of her superstitious stepfather Herod.
His next opera, Elektra, is also excellent. It’s more modernist, more polytonal, and tells revenge story of the ancient princess. Elektra wants to kill her mother Clytemnestra for having murdered her father Agamemnon (for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia before going off to Troy). Instead, their exiled brother Orestes (Orest in German) shows up and does the deed.
In this clip, Elektra’s sister has an ecstatic meltdown because she had been led to believe that Orestes was dead. The sisters share a duet before Elektra dances herself to death, ending the opera:
Strauss, like Schubert, was a talented composer of art songs or lieder. Here’s a beautiful example:
And tomorrow the sun will shine again
and on the way that I will go,
she will again unite us, the happy ones
amidst this sun-breathing earth,
and to the beach, wide, wave-blue
will we still and slowly descend
silently we will look in each other's eyes
and upon us will sink the mute silence of happiness
(literal translation from the German)
Stravinsky
Igor is another transitional composer between romanticism and modernism. He’s famous for composing The Rite of Spring. Here’s the end of the first section:
Sound weirdly familiar? It directly influenced the soundtrack to Star Wars. This is super obvious if you compare the beginning of the second section with the Tatooine dune sea music.
Fin
I still have more to share: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Rameau, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff. Stay tuned!
Plot-wise, we could draw an analogy with how The Sopranos (drama) or Babylon 5 (sci-fi) changed television.
From Wikipedia:
Wagner felt that the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus had been the finest (though still flawed) examples so far of total artistic synthesis, but that this synthesis had subsequently been corrupted by Euripides. Wagner felt that during the rest of human history up to the present day (i.e. 1850) the arts had drifted further and further apart, resulting in such ‘monstrosities’ as Grand Opera. Wagner felt that such works celebrated bravura singing, sensational stage effects, and meaningless plots.
Many of the similarities are because Wagner and Tolkien relied on the same Germanic source materials: the Nibelungenlied, the Völsunga Saga, the Eddas, and the þiðreks saga. But some things – such as all these details I mentioned about the ring, apart from its mere existence in the story – are not found in the source materials, which suggests that Tolkien might have stolen them from Wagner. Tolkien would never admit to such a thing (“Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”). Some of this could be due to cultural osmosis (Wagner was all-seeping in the early 20th century) or simple convergence of ideas.