Richard Wagner and the aesthetics of musical form in the mid--nineteenth century (1840-1860)

Despite the voluminous literature pertaining to most aspects of Wagner's life and works, his large and important prose oeuvre has received little careful scrutiny. Discussion of the writings has usually concentrated either on theories of opera and "music drama," or on aspects of a Bayreuth "ideology." The present study aims instead to analyze Wagner's ideas about musical form (in both instrumental and vocal-dramatic genres) up to the time of Tristan (1860), and their relation to a larger context of aesthetic and critical writing about music in the early and middle parts of the century (primarily 1840-60). A particular focus is the relation of Wagner's writings at either end of the 1850s--Oper und Drama (1851), "Uber Franz Liszts Symphonischen Dichtungen" (1857), and "Zukunftsmusik" (1860)--to a number of widely-read contemporary publications concerned with issues of musical form and "content," "absolute" music vs. "descriptive," programmatic, or dramatic music: Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schonen and writings of A. W. Ambros, Theodor Uhlig, Franz Brendel, Liszt, and others. To what extent did new music (since Beethoven) seek to express a distinct, meaningful "content," and how might such a content be located in details of musical forms and procedures? Indeed, were "new forms" in music only motivated and justified by such expressive ambitions? Wagner's writings from the 1850s respond not only to his own compositional experience (which underwent its most radical evolution across this decade), but to discussion of such issues in the contemporary musical press, by his partisans and foes alike.;Part 1 of this study sets out a broad musical-aesthetic context for the beginning of the 19th century (the role of music and "form" in idealist philosophies and the early German Romantic generation) and proceeds to a closer discussion of the form-content dichotomy in critical/periodical literature from the second quarter of the century. Against this background, and that of Wagner's own music, three groups of Wagner's writings are treated in Part 2: the early Parisian writings (1839-42), the "Zurich" writings (1849-1851), and the two essays of the Tristan period (1857-60).