As an example of Wagner’s misunderstanding of his own expressivist genius, take his most self-conscious effort at a classicist work, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Here is a — wonderful and energetic! — performance of the Prelude. Wagner pitches it in a faux-Baroque register and dials back the adventurous harmonies a few ticks, such that it sounds by far the most conventional of his operas (compare even the earlier Prelude to Lohengrin, which is hardly Tristan und Isolde in its adventurousness.) It is an intriguing experiment for the expressivist-in-chief. And it is hard to deny that this piece is a lot of fun!

But aesthetically speaking, the experiment is a failure. Even when writing in a self-consciously restrained idiom, Wagner is unable to actually exercise any classicist restraint. (One hears a voice from Delphi intoning sternly: “Nothing in excess!") There is hardly a passage that does not have at least one too many things going on at once, and often two or three.

The problems are signaled from the very beginning. It begins in classical style, with a four-bar subphrase, and then a two-bar gesture that follows the first two bars rhythmically while moving toward a different part of the harmonic map. So far, so promising. (Though even in the first bar, Wagner hints that he wants to escape the mold harmonically with an undeniably tasty passing whole-tone triad over VI — A•C#•F.) But then the theme goes off in a new direction: a three-bar descending sequence that helps establish (in its second bar) a dominant pedal tone, followed by four bars of intense string noodling over the dominant pedal tone, resolving to a… restatement of the main theme that begins in the subdominant! Because of this irregular phrase structure of 4+2+3+4, with no harmonic movement of any kind in the last subphrase (indeed much of it is exact repetition), the restatement of the theme arrives — somehow — aurally both too late and too early. And after that restatement begins, Wagner gives us an exhaustingly thick texture, in which for eleven consecutive bars (note that we have another 13-bar chunk here) there is not a single eighth-value without movement somewhere in the orchestra. The lines seem to climb indefinitely to the secondary dominant, ratcheting the musical tension up and up (and up and up and up)… until we finally get the first major resolution. Then follows an actually quite lovely passage that introduces the lyrical second theme (whatever else one wants to say about him, Wagner is good for a lyrical second theme), twice in full, then twice fragmenting, and it is all feeling very proportionate and balanced… until the strings start buzzing around while the winds are still unspooling the theme, with an irregularly beaten scalar figure that causes one to completely lose track of the meter. The opening texture returns with the bold third theme, which is actually set in nice, symmetrical four-bar phrases most of the way to the next subject (only one random five-bar phrase thrown in there)… but it is thick and loud the whole way, without much real development, and with so much activity everywhere in the orchestra that it is hard to attend to any one line. Wagner gives us a great deal of sound and fury (cheerful fury, at least), but signifying really very little.

For another example of this aesthetic dynamic, listen to the short quasi-fugal passage starting at 6:07 (p. 22 in the unfortunately unmeasured score). There are three different fugal subjects or motives — the main subject, which is taken from the third theme, starts in the winds; the accompanying subject, which seems to be new in this section, begins in the celli; and the repeated trill motif, which appears to be drawn from the preceding lyrical passage. It is not illegitimate to have three elements in your contrapuntal texture. But Wagner cannot stop himself from using all three right from the beginning, rather than introducing them one at a time. From the start of the passage it is impossible to tell by ear which of the two subjects Wagner intends to be primary. I find it telling that, in the video linked above, the video editing cuts from string section to string section with each statement of the accompanying subject, even though at the beginning of the passage Alain Altinoglu actually cues the winds for their primary (and more melodic!) subject, and only gives the celli a secondary cue. Altinoglu makes the correct choice — but can you blame the video editor for not following him? The most egregious choice is that the trill motif, after being quietly introduced in the bassoons in the first measure, is given to the second violins in the second measure and marked sforzando. It is an orchestra-wide sforzando, to be sure, but Wagner has not given us a chance to hear the main subject(s) in this setting before making the second violins rudely interrupt the (quieter) winds and celli! It sounds like someone has come in too early — and not in the way of the famous horn entrance at the recapitulation in Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Either it is aesthetic incompetence, or it is a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the fugue (which might count as aesthetic incompetence).

For ten minutes, it is practically all like this: nearly constant (almost frenetic) activity in the subsidiary voices, lines that go on just a bit too long, elements that are repeated too many times, such that it is almost impossible to actually attend to any individual element as it belongs to the whole. Instead, the listener must instead accept the whole, lean back in his or her chair, and be sucked under by the aesthetic tsunami. None of this makes, as I said above, the piece any less fun (for the audience; it is rather a pain to perform, at least as a string player). And indeed it has a kind of showiness that is characteristic of the whole Wagnerian Schule, independent of style. But it is one thing to embrace (or at least tolerate) the showiness and the excess when the work in question is chiefly expressivist. It is another when the work aspires, or at least appears to aspire, to meet and embody certain classical standards of excellence. Nobody forced Wagner to write in this idiom; he composed it in 1862, when he was comfortably established and internationally famous. The showiness and the excess indicates that its composer does not understand the real value and spirit of classicism, and its link with expressivism.