Although I am not by any means a thorough music analyst, or very
'brushed up' on musical history, I think I may be able to add a few
interesting points about the music of Richard Wagner in response to Mr.
Heisig's welcome for information or articles regarding this composer.

The music of Richard Wagner can perhaps best be explained as an
enormous turning point in stylistic composition, in which music would
never again be the same, pointing musical history directly toward the
upcoming "crisis" of the twentieth century -- a "crisis" because of
the inevitable increase in ambiguity.

This musical "crises" not only achieved a greater ambiguity, but a
greatly anti-formatted deeply ironic creative point, in which Wagner
would completely alter the structural rules of composition (as codified
by Bach, whose genius so delicately and so justly balanced the two
forces of chromaticism and diatonicism to create the system of tonal
controls -- setting the standard for future composers such as Mozart
and Beethoven).

This ambiguity of Wagner's music is perhaps best exemplified by the
opera Tristan and Isolde, in which the highly chromatic opening bars
of the Prelude have fascinated analytical minds for over a century.
Although the history-making opening phrase of Tristan is in fact
the conjoining of two sub-phrases, it is also an extraordinary
transformational ambiguity in which the extension of the opening
interval (by enlarging the fourth to the fifth) is made clear to us
by the conjoining of the two tonalities.

But if it's made clear to us, then why is it considered an ambiguity?
Because the two intervals provide no means for exemplifying the key
that it is in (if any at all), or if the cadence on the dominant
seventh indicates minor; because, rather than resolving, it is repeated
higher (after a long pause which indicates growing intensity) with the
rising minor sixth then stretched to a major sixth, again ending on a
dominant but in a different key, thus evermore intensifying the
ambiguity of it all until finally resolved to yet another dominatant
-- in which all this resolution of the ambiguity is indeed, in itself,
ambiguous.

It is almost as though the extreme chromaticism of this music can no
longer be contained within a structured and tonal framework.  And this
is why (although numerous other examples of this kind of ambiguity also
exist in Wagner's works) his music has partially been considered the
"crises" of nineteenth century music.  And it is also curiously
interesting that all twelve tones of the chromatic scale appear at
least once; this in itself foreshadows twelve-tone music to come a
century later, although not in a consecutive, but repetitive, order.

All this chromatic ambiguity is reinforced to a large degree by the
syntactic vagueness of the musical structure.  But this can also be
considered anything but vague.  And that is indeed one of music's most
aesthetic functions, because it gives you (the listener) the freedom
of personal interpretation, and through this interpretation a deep
musical understanding and appreciation.

But there will always be the skeptics though, who claim that you must
listen to music a certain way, or that there are certain implications
in music that are accepted on a universal basis, while they themselves
don't know anything about what they are hearing.

These syntactic ambiguities are imposed not for the purpose of
being ambiguous, but deliberately to make the music seem languishing,
mysterious, and timeless -- which is perhaps the greatest thing about
Wagner's music, and indeed most all nineteenth and twentieth century
composers.

Of course, I'm skipping other enormous amounts of factors about
Wagner's music which distinguishes him from the rest of the nineteenth
century composers, which would ultimately be required for an in-depth
understanding of this great genius.  Unfortunately, neither time or
space would permit me to write about all of them, but with this, I hope
that I have pointed some unique qualities and interesting points of
Wagner's music.

Nathan Bello