In Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the title characters conceive their union as a direct linkage between self and world, a linkage that involves a crucial short circuit, bypassing societal conventions and institutions, and echoing the nineteenth-century Germanic disdain for "Civilization" as opposed to "Culture." Facilitating this Wagnerian short circuit is a fluid musical discourse that can seem, alternately and even simultaneously, either to simulate a single consciousness, in which impressions and memory freely commingle, or to provide a deep sense of the world, bypassing surfaces to evoke a kind of world-sublime (or "world-breath," as Isolde would have it). Generally absent from Wagner's music are the correlatives of "Civilization": well-articulated forms and other markers of conventional musical types, which would disrupt the sense of musical flow essential to WagnerÕs "Gesamtkunstwelt."In this article, I trace the roots of Wagner's practice both in German Idealist thought and in Beethoven, especially as received through a totalizing mode of Beethoven reception fostered by Wagner, in which Beethoven's "voice" seems fully coextensive with his music while resonating on a deep level with the Germanic Welt. I then sketch two separately developed modes of post-Wagnerian dramatic music. I first describe how Mahler's novelistic musical discourse sometimes imposes a sense of continuity on the broken surfaces of a world through an overpowering musical "flow," a process that derives from the ways that Leitmotivs emerge from the fluid orchestral fabric of Wagner's music, but reverses the latter's sense of intrinsic embeddedness by beginning with the sounding surface of the experienced world. I then briefly lay out how and why WagnerÕs technique has proven so useful for film music and consider the ways that the overtly Wagnerian scoring of Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) supports a particularly Wagnerian retelling of the Arthurian legends.

The traditional cuts in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto include nearly half of a developmental passage in the first movement and a series of shorter cuts in the finale. The first-movement cut comes after the second tutti, a triumphant thematic culmination that rings false on two levels, since it is a "polonaise" in 4/4, and since there has been no first tutti. The developmental passage that follows seems to confirm Tchaikovsky's self-confessed weakness in handling large-scale forms, but may arguably constitute an "anti-development" that sets up a mincing violin variation, which, in falling between two versions of the orchestral tutti and rescuing the larger group from its developmental ineptitude, models a homosexuality closeted within the aristocracy (this structural grouping reappears in the original slow movement). The various instances of "passing" in this movement (the faux polonaise, the "second tutti ," the "anti-development," and a gradually emergent octatonic element in the violin climax just before these events) relate to Tchaikovsky's own "passing" dilemma, both as a homosexual and as a Russian nationalist working within Germanic forms; his specific treatment reflects the fact that the concerto was composed between his disastrous marriage and his later affiliation with the imperial court. A particular marker for Tchaikovsky's musical "passing" is the blended octatonic passage in the main theme of the finale——which, however, forms the core of the series of traditional cuts in that movement.