page_title: Orchestration
section_title: Wagner
hierarchical_section_title: Orchestration / Examples from the repertoire / Wagner
caption_attribution_description: English: Wagner, Tristan prelude, opening
context_page_description: Orchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra or of adapting music composed for another medium for an orchestra. Also called "instrumentation", orchestration is the assignment of different instruments to play the different parts of a musical work. For example, a work for solo piano could be adapted and orchestrated so that an orchestra could perform the piece, or a concert band piece could be orchestrated for a symphony orchestra.
  In classical music, composers have historically orchestrated their own music. Only gradually over the course of music history did orchestration come to be regarded as a separate compositional art and profession in itself. In modern classical music, composers almost invariably orchestrate their own work.
  However, in musical theatre, film music and other commercial media, it is customary to use orchestrators and arrangers to one degree or another, since time constraints and/or the level of training of composers may preclude them orchestrating the music themselves.
  The precise role of the orchestrator in film music is highly variable, and depends greatly on the needs and skill set of the particular composer.
context_section_description: After Berlioz, Richard Wagner was the major pioneer in the development of orchestration during the 19th century. Pierre Boulez speaks of the “sheer richness of Wagner’s orchestration and his irrepressible instinct for innovation.” Peter Latham says that Wagner had a “unique appreciation of the possibilities for colour inherent in the instruments at his disposal, and it was this that guided him both in his selection of new recruits for the orchestral family and in his treatment of its established members. The well-known division of that family into strings, woodwind, and brass, with percussion as required, he inherited from the great classical symphonists such changes as he made were in the direction of splitting up these groups still further.” Latham gives as an example, the sonority of the opening of the opera Lohengrin, where “the ethereal quality of the music” is due to the violins being “divided up into four, five, or even eight parts instead of the customary two.” 
   "The A major chord with which the Lohengrin Prelude begins, in the high register, using harmonics and held for a long time, lets us take in all its detail. It is undoubtedly an A major chord, but it is also high strings, harmonics, long notes - which gives it all its expressivity, but an expressivity in which the acoustic features play a central role, as we have still heard neither melody nor harmonic progression."
  As he matured as a composer, particularly through his experience of composing The Ring Wagner made “increasing use of the contrast between pure and mixed colours, bringing to a fine point the art of transition from one field of sonority to another.” Robert Craft found Wagner's final opera Parsifal to be a work where “Wagner’s powers are at their pinnacle… The orchestral blends and separations are without precedent.”   Craft cites the intricate orchestration of the single line of melody that opens the opera:
  “Parsifal makes entirely new uses of orchestral colour… Without the help of the score, even a very sensitive ear cannot distinguish the instruments playing the unison beginning of the Prelude.  The violins are halved, then doubled by the cellos, a clarinet, and a bassoon, as well as, for the peak of the phrase, an alto oboe [cor anglais]. The full novelty of this colour change with the oboe, both as intensity and as timbre, can be appreciated only after the theme is repeated in harmony and in one of the most gorgeous orchestrations of even Wagner’s Technicolor imagination.”
  
  Later, during the opening scene of the first act of Parsifal, Wagner offsets the bold brass with gentler strings, showing that the same musical material feels very different when passed between contrasting families of instruments:
  
  On the other hand, the prelude to the opera Tristan and Isolde exemplifies the variety that Wagner could extract through combining instruments from different orchestral families with his precise markings of dynamics and articulation.  In the opening phrase, the cellos are supported by wind instruments: 
  
  When this idea returns towards the end of the prelude, the instrumental colors are varied subtly, with sounds that were new to the 19th century orchestra, such as the cor anglais and the bass clarinet.  These, together with the ominous rumbling of the timpani effectively convey the brooding atmosphere: 
  “It’s impressive to see how Wagner… produces balance in his works.  He is true genius in this respect, undeniably so, even down to the working out of the exact number of instruments.”  Boulez is “fascinated by the precision with which Wagner gauges orchestral balance, [which] … contains a multiplicity of details that he achieved with astonishing precision.” According to Roger Scruton, "Seldom since Bach's inspired use of obbligato parts in his cantatas have the instruments of the orchestra been so meticulously and lovingly adapted to their expressive role by Wagner in his later operas."
caption: Wagner, Tristan prelude, opening.
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