Liszt’s “Seven‑Storey Melodies”

Wagner’s music has been mocked for its thick harmonies and enormous combinations of tones. Yet even in the last couple of decades ridicule began to fade and a grudging appreciation took its place—an encouraging sign for musical education.

Some listeners call Wagner “tuneless.” The problem is often the opposite: in places there are simply too many melodies moving at the same time—too much polyphony for a one‑track ear. Franz Liszt joked that Wagner wrote “seven‑storey melodies.” If your musical education is one storey high, seven storeys feel like confusion.

Those heavy harmonic stacks don’t make life easy for the singers either. You can come straight from Italian opera, where everything feels like smooth sailing and the orchestra is a constant support, and suddenly find yourself in Wagner where the harmonic weather is northern: rougher, less predictable. At times voice and orchestra can seem to travel on separate roads, and the orchestral sound is not always a clear guide to what the singer is doing.

But out of that apparent disorder Wagner’s hand draws a higher harmony than the powdered‑wig classicists ever imagined. The bass singer Whitney once quipped that Wagner typically used about seven notes of the scale in his opening chord, so all the singer had to do was find the other note and “blaze away on that.” An exaggeration—but a very recognizable feeling.