An extensive essay by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, comparing and contrasting the two “rings” – Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” and Tolkein’s Ring triology.
The essay is rather dense and I am not as familiar with Wagner’s work as I am with Tolkein’s. Nevertheless, it is quite an interesting read. I highly recommend it.
It starts thus:
Early in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jacksons monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy, the wizard Gandalf finds himself alone in a room with the trinket that could end the world. It lies gleaming on the floor, and Gandalf regards it with an attitude of fascinated fear. The audience feels a chill that neither Jacksons vertiginous camera angles nor Ian McKellens arching eyebrows can fully explain. The Ring of Power extends its grip through the medium of music, which is the work of the gifted film composer Howard Shore. In the preceding scenes, an overview of the habits of hobbits, Shores music had an English-pastoral, dance-around-the-Maypole air, but when the ring begins to do its work a Wagnerian tinge creeps infittingly, since The Lord of the Rings dwells in the shadow of Wagners even more monumental Ring of the Nibelung. J. R. R. Tolkiens fans have long maintained a certain conspiracy of silence concerning Wagner, but there is no point in denying his influence, not when characters deliver lines like Ride to ruin and the worlds ending!Brünnhilde condensed to seven words.
Shore manages the admirable feat of summoning up a Wagnerian atmosphere without copying the original. He knows the science of harmonic dread. First, he lets loose an army of minor triads, or three-note chords in the minor mode. They immediately cast a shadow over the major-key music of the happy hobbits.
I found especially riveting Ross’ discussion of why chords in a “major” key make us feel happy, hopeful, and what it is in “minor” formations that makes us feel uneasy.
Why does the minor chord make the heart hang heavy? First, you have to understand why the major triad, its fair-haired companion, sounds bright. It is based on the spectrum of notes that arise naturally from a vibrating string. If you pluck a C and then divide the string in half, in thirds, in fourths, and so on, you will hear one by one the clean notes that spell C major. Wagners Ring begins with a demonstration: from one deep note, wave upon wave of majestic harmony flows. The C-minor triad, however, has a more obscure connection to natural sound. The middle note comes from much higher in the overtone series. It sets up grim vibrations in the mind.
I’m no musicologist, but I’ll step out on a limb and say that Alex Ross is overplaying any Wagnerian influence on Tolkien: the two drew deeply upon the same earlier sources in the common mythological heritage of northern Europe, rather (or at least much more so) than one influencing the other. Wagner actually put much more of a contemporary romantic spin on it, though; it’s Tolkien that’s the real conservative here, a man who thought it was all downhill for England after 1066 (I exaggerate ever so slightly).
To a thoroughly modern writer like, oh, I don’t know, practically anyone with a byline in The New Yorker, it probably doesn’t even occur to recognize for a moment that Tolkien’s interest in English basically stopped at or before the point where it begins for most students of literature: with Chaucer, or really with Beowulf, which he translated a version of. To imagine such a person being heavily influenced by a 19th-century composer is really quite odd, save for the fact that they both have the word “ring” in the name of one of their major works.
As for Wagnerian influences on Howard Shore, OTOH, that’s a completely different question best left for others to answer, though my intuition tells me he may well be onto something there.
Perhaps Tolkein’s books should have a secondary title, as in:
The Hobbit or: It’s all downhill after 1066.
Maybe it is a “stretch” to look at the connections between Tolkein and Wagner – but I think it’s an interesting jumping-off point for conversation. You can decide not to participate if you wish, but swiping at The New Yorker is certainly a way to make ME lose interest in chatting with you. Yawn.
I have heard music theorists talk about how certain chords hold different – not emotions, exactly. But experiential responses. Grief, for example. One chord (can’t remember which one) is described as provoking a universal response in whomever hears it – a “glimpse of heaven”.
Music theory can be very dry, and very boring – like literature theory – But there are some interesting points.
I often wonder – when a certain chord comes up – why it moves me so much, why it almost seems to affect me in a PHYSICAL way. It is COMPLETELY not an intellectual response. The Beatles were masters at that. As were, of course, many of the classical composers.
I am SURE that there is a theory out there why this is so. I’m not sure, though, that anyone could possibly explain the theory to me in a way which would be interesting or accessible.
You never know, though.
Fortunately, even the dryest, most arcane and inscrutable jargon-filled academic theory couldn’t make this physical response go away.
And that previous comment about The New Yorker was, in fairness, probably overly flip and too particularized: I think my point was that there isn’t any publication I can think of that’s remotely as consciously pre-modern and, sometimes, anti-modern as Tolkien was. And I say that as someone who adores his work.