In Thursday’s (12/12) Pacific Standard (Santa Barbara, California), Tom Jacobs writes that a trio of researchers is arguing that much of Wagner’s music is “a reflection of his migraines. ‘Wagner deeply interwove his migraine attacks and auras into his music and libretti,’ a team led by Carl Gobel, a research fellow at the Kiel Headache and Pain Centre in Germany, writes in the BMJ [formerly the British Medical Journal]. The researchers … describe what they call a ‘migraine leitmotif’ ” in Wagner’s Siegfried. “ ‘The music begins with a pulsatile thumping.’ … While the music is rising in intensity, the character of Mime is ‘pounding with his hammer.… At the climax, Mime cries out: “Compulsive plague! Pain without end!” ’ … Mime [later] complains ‘Loathsome light! Is the air aflame?’ The researchers call that ‘a musical depiction of the visual disturbances of a typical migraine aura.’ … In January 1857 [Wagner wrote to] fellow composer [Franz Liszt] that ‘for 10 days, after I had finished the sketch for the first act of Siegfried, I was literally not able to write a single bar without being driven away from my work by most tremulous headaches.’ ”
Posted December 17, 2013
