7 Richard Wagner 7This conception found full embodiment in The Ring,
except that the leading motives did not always arise as
vocal utterances but were often introduced by the orchestra
to portray characters, emotions, or events in the drama.
With his use of this method, Wagner rose immediately
to his amazing full stature: his style became unified and
deepened immeasurably, and he was able to fill his works
from end to end with intensely characteristic music. By
1857 he had composed Das Rhinegold, Die Walküre, and two
acts of Siegfried. But he now suspended work on The Ring:
the impossibility of mounting this colossus within the
foreseeable future was enforcing a stalemate on his career
and led him to project a “normal” work capable of immediate
production. Also, his optimistic social philosophy had
yielded to a metaphysical, world-renouncing pessimism.
The outcome was Tristan und Isolde (1857–59), of which the
crystallizing agent was his hopeless love for Mathilde
Wesendonk (the wife of a rich patron), which led to sep-
aration from his wife, Minna.
Wagner completed Tristan in Venice and in Lucerne,
Switzerland. The work revealed a new subtlety in his use
of leading motives, which in Das Rhinegold and Die Walküre
he had used mainly to explain the action of the drama.
The leading motives in Tristan ceased to remain neatly
identifiable with their dramatic sources but worked with
greater psychological complexity.
Return from Exile
In 1861 he went to Vienna and remained there about a
year before traveling widely as a conductor while awaiting
a projected production of Tristan. When this work was
not produced because the artists were bewildered by its
revolutionary stylistic innovations, Wagner began a second
“normal” work, the comedy-opera Die Meistersinger von