John Pierce O’Reilly, ‘A Mass can never interest, but only dumbfound us’: Chorus and ‘Chorality’ in Wagner’s Late Music Dramas

July 2021, Volume 15, Number 2, 23–38.

Richard Wagner’s 1851 treatise ‘Opera and Drama’ outlines his vision of the music drama of the future and calls for the abolition of the opera chorus: ‘Even the Chorus’, he writes, ‘will have to vanish from our drama’. The promised exclusion of the opera chorus from Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk is significant not so much for its radical rejection of traditional 19th-century operatic form as for its apparent failure to materialise. For many of Wagner’s works following ‘Opera and Drama’ contradict this pledge, the chorus of the Volk in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg providing one notable example. The continued use of a chorus in Wagner’s late work does not, however, represent simply a wilful musical contradiction of a verbal promise. Rather, the chorus in late-Wagnerian music drama comes to symbolise the development of Wagner’s aesthetic and philosophical beliefs, and the evolution of his dramatic vision.