Wagner for opera-haters

[Mark Thomas]

A fascinating pair of posts. I wonder whether the way Wagner's mind was moving bore fruit in the twenty years after his death in the symphonically-proportioned tone poems of Strauss and von Hausegger? Of course, they needed the prop of an extra-musical programme but the underlying conception is symphonic.

[Rainolf]

Eric has mentioned Reger's Problems to combine traditional sonata form (in a very schematic way) with Wagnerian harmonic language. Reger was a good composer, of course, a great master of variation, fugue and choral fantasy, but his use of sonata form I would compare with a vase in which water is filled, and not with a river making its way through the landscape (as I would characterise Bruckner's much different schematism).

Regarding this, it's remarkable that Hausegger's Nature Symphony contains no sonata form movements. Wagner's idea of organic motivic development and endless melody unifies the work even without using sonata models.