This chapter demonstrates that despite Wagner’s claims that traditional operatic compositional schemes limited the composer’s ability to project drama successfully, he relied on these procedures in the operas from Die Feen through Lohengrin, and continued to use them thereafter in the mature music dramas. Analysis of Wagner’s first six operas demonstrates that Wagner utilised the formal conventions of Italian opera, including clearly articulated cabalettas, far more frequently than has previously been noted. The conventional Italian form accounts for one-third to one-half of musical numbers in these works. The chapter includes close analysis of four numbers (from Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin) and tabular presentation of all of Wagner’s appropriations of this formal convention in the first part of his career. The chapter further identifies vestiges and transformations of la solita forma in the later music dramas, concluding with speculation on why these formal devices have eluded critical commentary until now.

Revisiting selected passages from Siegfried and Parsifal, this chapter argues that the archaic surface of Wagner’s late counterpoint – the result of contrary motion, constructed symmetries, stepwise motion and rhythmic uniformity – relies less on historical styles than on a musical ‘laboratory situation’. Through a combination of nineteenth-century counterpoint pedagogy and historical and contemporary models (including some of Wagner’s own earlier works) with aspects of memory studies and Adorno’s ideas on late style, the chapter shows how a composed image of ‘counterpoint’ creates acoustic and analytical conditions that draw attention to the constructive elements of Wagner’s late style.

Recent studies applying William Caplin’s form-functional theory to Richard Wagner’s music have focused on Das Rheingold and later music dramas. However, his earlier Lohengrin, the final work he titled ‘romantische Oper’, proves an ideal candidate for such a study, since it still retains certain conventions (such as subtly disguised ‘numbers’ and a fairly clear harmonic palette) while pushing the boundary on others (such as scenes built as ‘dialogue cycles’ and pervasive use of diminished-seventh harmonies). This study first focuses on the principal Leitmotivs of the work, those associated with Elsa, Ortrud, the Grail and the Frageverbot (forbidden question), examining their theme types and loosening features, then exploring their transformations in different appearances throughout the opera – particularly Elsa’s motive. It then considers selected passages constructed in ‘rotational form’, in which one or more of these leitmotivs are used as the backbone for the cyclic form.

There exists, under various names and guises since the late nineteenth century,  a common subject position constructed among Western gay men that engages power, agency, embodiment, sexual experience and marginalized identity in a way that sheds light on the essence of Wagner’s musical idiom and its lasting force in Western culture. Through analysis and close reading of instrumental passages from the end of the opening prelude to Lohengrin and the prelude to Act II of Die Walküre, this article constructs a non-essentialist gay-male subjectivity to explain the emotional force that Wagner’s use of tonality, harmony, theme, form and timbre achieve from this particular viewpoint. More specifically, the article traces the various teleologies of Wagner’s compositional practice and the ways in which these musical teleologies reinforce the explicit textual and dramatic centralities of sex and power in Wagner’s work, themselves dependent on these same centralities in contemporary culture.