Through studying this intensely atmospheric scene, he is able to introduce the theory and practice of the Leit- motiv, the history of the Ring and its composition, the ideological and philosophical background to the drama, and -most important of all -the revolutionary syntax through which ideas and emotions are compelled along the path of the music. He goes on to treat Tristan und Isolde in a similar way, this time giving more space to the overall construction and tonal argument. And you come away from the chapter with a sense not only of Wagner's achievement as a composer, but also of the irreversible change that he effected in our conception of what music can do.
Moving on -through a brief consideration of Musorgsky -Taruskin gives, in the space of forty pages, a wholly engaging summary of Verdi, as a person, an artist and a national figure, concluding with an analysis of the Tristan chord in Otello that unforgettably illuminates not only Verdi's but also Wagner's use of it.
A critic who argues so intently and in such a focused way makes room for disagreement. In his justifiable desire to show the robustly tonal nature of Tristan, for example, Taruskin emphasizes Wagner's restoration of the dominant pedal and his use of prolonged dominant-tonic progressions, arguing that these show a move back from the third-relations explored by Schubert and Liszt. But the third-relations are just as important for Wagner the Tristan chord is a kind of vertical resume of them, and they are spelled out horizontally in the famous opening bars of the work. Likewise, Taruskin is determined to see nationalism as a central current in the evolution of nineteenth-century music, yet he accords no space to the French Revolutionary festivals, to the massed choirs of Francois-Joseph Gossec and the operas of Etienne-Nicolas Mehul, or to the rise of the national anthem and the contrasted impact, both musical and political, of Haydn's hymn to the Emperor and Rouget de Lisle's "La Marseillaise". Nevertheless, the eagerness with which the reader weighs in to argue with Taruskin, testifies to the skill and honesty with which he engages the attention. There is not a trace of phoniness, not a suggestion of showing off, even when Taruskin treats us, in discussing Gluck, Niccolo Piccini and Mozart, to a high-flying exposition of the Enlightenment. Everything is seriously meant, finely observed and intelligently presented. And perhaps nothing is so gripping to the reader as those moments when Taruskin, having worked through a sustained piece of analysis, comes out into the open in a spray of suggestive ideas, revealing just why the process that he has described in musicological terms is not a matter of technique, but of moral and spiritual values. This is the conclusion to his analysis of the Norns:
A strategically placed 6/4 chord or a tremulous pedal can cause a key to heave up before the contemplating ear like an iceberg in the path of the Titanic; and the key so drastically prefigured can be "liquidated" (to use a term Arnold Schoenberg invented for the process a generation later) before any of its primary functions have been asserted. Indeed, there is a whole category of leitmotivs (Fate and Oblivion, to recall two) that seem to have no other purpose than the securing of these effects -effects that resonate insidiously with their dramatic import.
So by now, a great flare-up of a long-awaited tonality like the present E-flat can be accepted as no more than provisionally decisive or conclusive. We can no longer trust harmonic functions to deliver, as once in Beethoven's time they did, on their promesse de bonheur, the "promise of happiness" that the French novelist Stendhal named as the most essential aspect of artistic beauty and the reason why art is cherished. We feel ourselves buffeted by the loss of certainty more deeply than a theory of representation can ever explain, for here we come to the nub of what makes the Wagnerian "sea of harmony" so much more than a metaphor or a representation.
That, it seems to me, is music criticism as it should be, and it leads into a long and illuminating discussion of closure in the Wagnerian idiom, and of the state of mind that it is used to articulate.
Despite the enormous time and energy that Taruskin has devoted to such musical analysis (surely the strongest point in these volumes), he has also kept abreast of musicological scholarship in other fields, and with the main currents of American cultural and historical criticism. He generously gives credit to other scholars whose arguments and phrases lend weight to his own (to Karol Berger, for instance, in the argument above), and although it is true that he ignores many writers who are equally important to his overall conception of the Western classical tradition (Nicholas Till on Mozart and the Enlightenment, James Johnson on the rise of the listening culture, Martin Cooper on late Beethoven, Wilfrid Mellers on Couperin, to name but four), Taruskin's selectiveness is in part explained by his need to win the acceptance of American musicologists for a project that puts so many of them in the shade.
Indeed, this is the only explanation I can give for the respect that he pays to the silly feminist theories of Susan McClary (the Ninth Symphony as a fantasy of rape, etc), or for his obeisance towards Edward Said's libel against the Enlightenment (Nathan der Weise, Rasselas, Les Lettres persanes, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, etc, all dismissed as "orientalism"). At the same time, Taruskin is neither a time-server nor a toady; his contempt for Adorno is matched by an equally gratifying cock of the snook at Carl Dahlhaus, the doyen of contemporary German musicology. Taruskin's respect for his colleagues is countered by a marked disrespect for the gurus who have led so many of them astray.
Some might still raise a question-mark above his project, in toto. Can one man truly comprehend the vast extent of musical and musicological scholarship, or really be an expert on all the composers whose music is central to our cultural history? Ought not an Oxford History of Western Music to be composed by a committee of experts, of the kind put together by the late Stanley Sadie when composing the New Grove Dictionary?
