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Wagner

By chance I listened in to a largely Wagner Festival Concert,
in which I was bewitched by the playing of
“Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” .

And an audience of some thousands sitting in the pouring rain
(closely wrapped in waterproof raincoats) in chilling weather ... ...and not budging from their seats, some of which were 100m from the covered podium for the orchestra.

Up till now I had regarded Wagner as a sour-faced loon,
deserving of the scrapheap ... guess I’ll have to change my ways.

Anybody else gone on Wagner?

There are a few composers I just don't connect with and Wagner is one of them. I like to keep an open mind and am looking forward to finding myself in your position. (The others are Ravel, Hindemuth, Messian, Richard Strauss.)

Wagner was certainly a musical giant of his time. I recorded most of the recent Ring Cycle on PBS (the Met from NYC). The music is incredibly beautiful, albeit long winded (is it really necessary for someone to take half an hour to die?). So I agree with you that Wagner deserves our attention and he certainly was not a sour faced loon, but he may not have had the highest morals either and this shows in the Ring Cycle, the Rhine Maidens are only concerned about their lost gold, not the moral and ethical concerns raised by what happens after the beginning of Das Rheingold and before the end of Gotterdammerung. But the music is scrumptious and holds one's attention for astounding lengths of time.

Thanks for that Steve ... must give Wagner my ear.

But why is it that the other chaps don't go gaga over this
apparent dodo?

I won't say that I go gaga over this dodo of a composer, but you've got to admit he's got real chutzpah. Who else would build an opera house from scratch just to perform his own music? As massive egos go, he's up there with you-know-who.

Personally, I prefer to hear a lot of his operas without all those screeching and wobbly sopranos (they have to screech a lot of the time to get heard; the wobble is a by-product ) and bawling Heldentenors. Lorin Maazel got the right idea when he conceived 'The Ring without Words' (which he recorded with the Berliner Philharmoniker - the perfect orchestra for Wagner), an hour-long extravaganza that includes all the juicy tunes from Der Ring des Nibelungen - all the notes by old Richard, but without any voices or those longueurs when nothing happens .

I'm not a HUUUGE Wagner fan (I don't know enough), but I spent a couple weeks last semester listening through the Ring Cycle and Tristan, and thought they were wonderful. Since it's summer time, I'm going to continue delving into his music.

I live and die by the late romantics, so Mahler, Wagner, Strauss and early Schoenberg speak volumes to me.

I am always looking for the same painfully yearning sensibilities in solo piano music. I have Berg's sonata and sometimes Max Reger, but I'm always looking for more...


-J

Richter playing Wagner's Elegie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO1rGXhQFE8

http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/c/c3/IMSLP94893-PMLP152145-Wagner_A_b_Maj.pdf

I feel like OSK. I am not a fan, but he certainly composed some masterpieces.

Rachmaninoff! Always connected more with him than with Wagner, or that sour-faced loon Schoenberg.

His piano music is his worst stuff, according to most Wagner fans.

Mark Twain "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

Liberace?



My preference for how I take my Wagner would be via Chabrier's Souvenirs de Munich, quadrille on themes from Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" for piano, 4 hands. The sections are Pantalon, Eté, Poule, Pastourelle, and Galop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G77cvcPA-s

and the Fauré/Messager follow-up - Souvenirs de Bayreuth (Fantaisie en forme de quadrille sur les thèmes favoris de L'anneau de Nibelung - R. Wagner)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0RZfgsCes0

I have heard that Wagner did not like vibrato when singers started using it.

Pretty sure vibrato has been in use since way before Wagner came around...

Judging by those who have chosen to post in this thread, I seem to be the odd one out as a commited Wagner enthusiast. Not quite as hog-wild about him as in my early 20's (I was really rather pathetic), but Wagner remains in my top five favourite composers. I have seen all the mature operas from Dutchman on, some of them multiple times.

No other composer has such a secure mastery of long time spans, and the ability to culminate in climaxes of a super-charged emotional intensity. 'Bleeding Chunks' don't really work because they have not been sufficiently prepared.

Along with the 'American Centennial March', his piano music is considered by all Wagner fans an embarrassment.

Goes to prove, as I once read somewhere: when Wagner wasn't inspired by a great human theme, he was hardly capable of writing much above Kapellmeister music.

Do I really need a higher level of commitment than "living and dying" by his music?


-J

Sorry, Jason, momentarily spaced your post.

Have you made your pilgrimage to Bayreuth yet?

Maybe if I ever bother to go there, I might also become a Wagnerite. But for now, if a BBC broadcast comes up, I'll have a watch and listen (I've got the Bayreuth/Boulez DVD set of The Ring - more for the spectacular sets than anything else ).

Otherwise.....life is too short to sit through 15 hours of, er, leitmotifs and gods behaving badly. OK, his other operas are more down to earth, but still needs some judicious pruning .

I also was a more rabid Wagner fan in my 20's. I think somehow it appeals to one's 'angry young man' phase.

I'm still a fan and a Bayreuth pilgrimage is on the bucket list. Watching the operas now I do sometimes feel like "oh just get on with it". But your patience is paid off with some brilliant musical moments and resolution of tensions that were posed hours (sometimes days) before what you are currently hearing.

Huh? Wagner was born on May 22nd.

His son was born on June 6th. I got them confused.

Ah, Siegfried. The guy wrote more operas than his dad, plus a number of purely orchestral works. I've heard a few excerpts, nothing terribly memorable, IMO he had less talent than Humperdinck who at least had one 'hit'. (Though a bit of a hard sell post-Holocaust with innocent children threatened with the 'oven' treatment.)

Siegfried was an interesting bloke. I can imagine his mother Cosima desperately urging him, now Siegfried, you just HAVE to get married, we need heirs!

Done deal. Four children, one of them a genius in his own right: Wieland. Otherwise, Siegfried certainly enjoyed the best of both worlds.

Edit: I would like to add that I feel Wieland Wagner was a genius as a producer of his grandfather's operas. The book 'Wieland Wagner - The Positive Sceptic' by Geoffrey Skelton is an invaluable study of Bayreuth after the war years, and just how much he revolutionized Wagner staging and de-Nazified the music. His influence lasted from 1951 through the late 1970's.

For me having a stepping stone seems to help.

For Wagner, try beginning of Parsifal (up to about 5:00).

I approach Wagner like other great composers who wrote too much, like Mozart or Haydn: I won't enjoy most of it, at least enough for it to be worthwhile, but some of it is as good as it gets.

Composers should be judged by their greatest achievements, and by this metric Wagner is at the top among with some others.

I've been an opera lover since I was about 15, but I didn't "get" Wagner, especially The Ring, until I was around 40.

I think the secret is to stop listening for the structure you hear in earlier operas. Don't listen for arias, beginnings, middles, and ends. Just go with the flow.

For me, listening to Wagner is like rafting on a river of emotion. It ebbs and flows, goes down rapids and slows down in pools. I love it.

As for watching the operas onstage, in The Ring most of the action happens offstage or at some other point in time. Onstage, they're sort of talking it all over. Talking it to death, some might say. But just listen and go with the flow.

Wagner wanted to revolutionize opera. He thought it should be a vehicle for exploring major ideas about man's place in the universe. He wanted to call it "music drama" instead of "opera". He rebelled against the situation comedy/drama nature of earlier operas. He accomplished that with The Ring.

Which leaves us all wondering what The Ring is really about. Every time Wagner was asked, he gave a different answer. Finally, he said people would just have to listen to the music and figure it out.

Wagner is like a vice that you never ever will admit to liking, but then when you are alone and nobody is watching ....

I heard Götterdämmerung live when I was about eight or nine and that got me permanently interested in his music, including also interest in the piano transcriptions whether by Liszt or others, and years later the Liszt-transcription-like Nyiregyhazi renditions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nVp-dOrF4o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RliNAQsSxHU

(it is quite audible that the tape used for the second link down is being replayed at too high of a speed . . . )

M.

Don't get me started on Wagner. The man was certifiable, having at least two personalities. His operas are filled with noble ideas, the themes being love, honor, sacrifice, loyalty. His characters, however, tend to act quite differently from all the lofty ideals they are singing about. Walther in Der Meistersinger spends nearly four hours wooing Eva, and at the very end of the opera he finally wins her hand and the approval of her father. In accepting her, however, he has to join the singers guild, and this he won't do because they had rejected and snubbed him earlier, and his singing is more important to him than some woman. So much for love. He eventually relents after Hans Sachs begs him to, but the whole bizarre scene tells us a lot about Wagner himself. Ultimately he cared only for himself and his genius. He was constantly begging people for money, never thanking them, never repaying them. He treated his father-in-law, a famous man, quite shabbily.

Nothing, though, is more disgusting than his treatment of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. Mendelssohn in particular had traveled all around Germany with his orchestra, touting Wagner's genius, putting his music on programs, and getting boos from the audience for his efforts. After Mendelssohn died a mysterious pamphlet started circulating titled "Judaism in Music", in which the anoynmous author threw page after page of antisemitic rants at Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer for not being true Germans, for not being Aryan, for displaying effeminacy and degeneration that was "typical" of the Jewish race. The reputation of these two men started to go downhill and never really recovered. Years later, when Wagner was successful, he not only admitted to writing the pamphlet, he reissued it with even more filth included.

At this stage he was writing his Ring cycle, having already completed several masterpieces to his credit that will never leave the repertoire. He revolutionized opera, and his music was so compelling, including a mastery of orchestration, that most people were captivated by him and fell under the spell of his "Music of the Future." Nothing ever has, or probably never will, change the fact that he is one of the greatest composers who ever lived, for all of the reasons people have listed above.

Still, I can't get out of my mind the image of Adolf Hitler in prison in the 1920's, working on Mein Kampf, and specifically asking the prison warden to get him a copy of "Judaism in Music" to help him in his "research". When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they ordered the statue of Mendelssohn in front of the Leipzig Gewandhaus to be torn down (Mendelssohn founded this orchestra, the first modern orchestra ever). It was forbidden to publish or perform Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and other "degenerate" composers, and their music was thrown on bonfires. To this day it is nearly impossible in Germany to find publications of this music earlier than 1950. Wagner's odious campaign against these two men had far more serious consequences than he could have imagined.

You can't say Wagner's legacy is mixed. That would be too kind to him. The best you can say about him is that his writing later in life were so consumed with rants against the Jews and many other people and forces he felt had kept him down, that he had to be mentally unhinged. All you can do is set that aside when you listen to his phenomenal music, and hope that he really believed all those libretti he was writing about love and brotherhood. If you let his dreadful personal and historical legacy dictate your musical standards, you won't ever listen to his operas. There are a lot of people who feel it betrays humanity to listen to Wagner, and for the longest time Israelis wouldn't even allow orchestral performances be put on in that country. That is certainly a fair way to approach him, and it looks like Wagner condemned himself and his music to forever be divisive and controversial.

I'm not really all that interested in opera.

All the more reason to listen to his music as pure music, without any anti-semitic libretto getting in the way. (Let's not forget he wrote the libretti himself....).

Listening to the opening of Tristan und Isolde.. Love it!!

But I don't see it that way. Anybody with an agenda can find antisemitism in Wagner's libretti. Too easy for the tabloids.

Wagner's antisemitism was very much a product of his time, and if he was more ruthless about it, well that was pretty much what many others were thinking also. It was very endemic to Germanic thought. Clara Schumann -the goddess of many PW members- was no more enlightened about it.

Whatever, I don't care. I do not advocate drug use, but when I happened to catch 'Walkure' on acid, everything all of a sudden made so much sense, the drug slowed me down and I became one with Wagner's dramatic timing. There is nothing like it in the world, then when we proceed to 'Seigfried', even the first act exchange between Mime and Wotan (Wanderer) becomes an absolutely awesome and world-changing event.

Perhaps the attention span of most people here is too short for Wagner, yet Ring cycles sell out, and Seattle is doing quite well for this Summer.

Numerian, your post was excellently written, though you seem a bit unhinged by the man.

Ultimately we are left with the music, and Wagner was a genius on the level of a Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Cheers and good night!

My goodness, the party is heating up .

Quite agree with argerichfan on the music of Wagner,
while chuckling over the ripe comment of Mark Twain ...
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” (earlier cited)

All this mud-slinging ... “Adolf ” Wagner and all that rot ... might just mention that some people try to give my dog a bad name, but it still wags it’s tail.

The Israelis need to un-ban the playing of Wagner and
sort out the Westbank for the Palestinians.

Now I’ve put my foot in it! ... sorry chaps
(Who Flung Dung)

It's the other way around. God won't let the Israelis near the genius of Wagner before they've started to treat their fellow men in a humane way. (Might take a couple thousand years, judging from history.)

Generations of students of ethics and aesthetics have struggled with this question and always will: How do you account for the human failings of an artistic genius?

I do consider Wagner a genius who produced great operatic masterpieces and in many ways changed music for the better.

As a human being, he was worse than most. That said, the fact that Hitler was inspired by Wagner's disgusting writings doesn't, for me, put Wagner in the same class as Hitler. Lots of abominable people do what they do in the name of others who themselves would have been horrified by those doings.

How would Wagner have behaved had he lived in Germany through the '30s? We suspect we know, but in the face of that horrible reality, perhaps he would have come down on the side of the ideals expressed in his music, and not the ranting in his pamphlets.

Stranger moral redemptions have transpired.

He would have behaved, as would you.

Let's not forget that nobody knew anything about any Holocaust before the 1940s. There are serious historians who claim that any Holocaust would never have occurred in the first place if Britain and France hadn't attacked Germany and the Second World War had never started. Before it did, the Nazis were discussing the possibility of sending the German Jews to Madagascar. The plan at that time, the Final Solution, was the expulsion of German Jews, not their extermination. Just to give some perspective to this absurd conversation about whether you should or shouldn't boycott the music of a dead composer and why.

This borders on Holocaust denial, and I'll have none of it.

I agree. The Israelis really need to get over themselves on the topic of Wagner.

Wagner was an antisemite, but he also hated the Jesuits and the French.

For a time he was banned from Germany for being involved in a plot to overthrow the government. He had a habit of cheating his creditors and patrons. He frequently "re-invented" his life story to make it more dramatic and grandiose. He had an affair with a friend's wife.

He was quite the scumbag, but that's no reason not to enjoy his music. I haven't seen antisemitism in his libretti.

Hitler loved Wagner (none of his henchmen did, from all reports), but that's not Wagner's fault. I love Wagner, and it hasn't turned me into a mass murderer.

Huh? Bayreuth was very popular with Nazi officials, the same thugs weeping in the Festspielhaus, who earlier that day had probably committed all manner of atrocities. That was why Bayreuth was such a problem after the war with its Nazi associations. It was Wieland Wagner's new productions which helped to cleanse it.

I know that Hitler loved Wagner, but Bruckner was evidently one of his favourites also.

Which part of it? It is all found in mainstream sources, including the main Wikipedia article on the Holocaust:

"Before the war, the Nazis considered mass exportation of German (and subsequently the European) Jewry from Europe." (Bauer 1989)

"Areas considered for possible resettlement included British Palestine,[77] Italian Abyssinia,[77] British Rhodesia,[78] French Madagascar,[77] and Australia.[79]"

As best I can tell, Wikipedia says the actual extermination began only in 1941, two years after the beginning of the World War.

Not sure what kind of pop history nonsense or elementary school tall tales you've been raised on, but those are the actual facts according to the history found in mainstream history books.

All of it.

And if Wikipedia is your notion of a reliable historical record, don't lecture me about "pop history nonsense or elementary school tall tales." Try cracking a book instead.

So, Britain and France started the Second World War??

And Germany was "attacked"??

Didn't you know? Hitler was just trying to have a giant pizza party.

Ah, I forgot Hitler was only trying to spread superior Italian cuisine around Europe with the help of his army . He'd obviously had enough of frankfurters, but Winston Churchill wouldn't play ball, and insisted on his fish n' chips and baked beans on toast to go with his cigars......

Back off a bit, ClsscLib. It is no longer fashionable to demonstrate sophistication by criticizing Wikipedia.

Several years ago, students at Cambridge concentrated on one issue, and found more inaccuracies (if to their satisfaction) in the Encyclopædia Britannica than Wikipedia.

Anybody can edit Wikipedia, and what is apparently wrong -or not properly documented- is fast fixed or contested. You cannot say that about the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Furthermore, several entries in Wikipedia (which I questioned, but did not hazard an edit), seem to have been corrected in the last several months.

Thanks for the suggestion. In this case, I think I'll stand by my response, though.

Well, actually, they did. In September of 1939 Germany invaded Poland -on a flimsy pretext- but France and Britain (to over simplify) were bound by treaty to defend Poland.

There is some great info on Wikipedia... though I am not defending Germany's aggression, nor would I ever.

That's cool.

BTW, I LOVE your signature. Festive common areas!

Depends on how you define 'started' - according to your definition, the first aggressor (Germany) didn't start the war. So, if France and Britain continued to let Germany (i.e. Hitler) roll on his merry way until he crossed the Channel, and then Britain defended itself by attacking the Luftwaffe as the Stukas roared above dropping bombs, Britain - by your definition - started the war - which also resulted in the Holocaust.....

Only in the sense that they declared it. I guess if nobody said it, by your logic, it wouldn't have happened.

As you wish. Britain and France certainly appeased Germany up until the last moment -when it was no longer convenient- so hardly surprising things turned out the way they did.

But it doesn't have anything to do with Wagner, which after all, is what this thread is about.

I like the parts where nobody sings.

The conventional date of the beginning of the Second World War is the day that Britain and France declared war, not the day that Germany invaded Poland. You may not like the truth, but that's the truth.

Here's another truth: nobody forced Britain and France to get involved. It's almost universally accepted today that Germany had zero intention of invading Western nations as long as they stayed out of the war. Many also argue convincingly that Hitler had no intention of starting any major war, even with the Soviet Union. In fact, the only reasons that the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany failed, instead of succeeding easily and without much effort, were the necessity to delay and divide the forces and the U.S. material support of the Soviet Union from 1941 onward with trucks and tanks etc., which made the eventual counter offensive possible and doomed half of Europe to fall under communism.

So. If Britain and France and the U.S. had minded their own business, Poland would have been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union would have been destroyed by Germany, and there would have been peace. Instead, all heck broke loose, and half of Europe was conquered by the communists instead, including the whole of Poland. Some say the communists were much worse than the nazis, who were brutal only in stamping out pockets of resistance and acted otherwise like gentlemen in the early phase of the war.

Painting the nazis as some inevitable monsters who were not influenced by the horrible circumstances of a war they didn't want and an existential threat from three world powers is childish and naive, and makes you less rather than more likely to identify humanitarian and political threats and issues correctly when they arise in the present and future. Painting Wagner as some sort of monster isn't only naive and mistaken, it's downright moronic and betrays a deep ignorance about his life and character.

(Contrary to popular delusion, Wagner wasn't dishonest as a rule, but rather one of the most honest writers of autobiography you'll find this side of heaven. Try to write an autobiography sometime and see how accurate and honest YOU can keep it. I'd bet you'd not be able to make it half as honest and insightful as Wagner did. But then I've actually read it as well as much of other literature on him, his acquintances and the times, including abridged version of Cosima's diaries.)

Wow!!

Just.....wow!!!

Remind me again what the Nazis did to their own citizens in the years leading up to when Britain and France started the second world war, when if only they had been sensible and kept quiet, they could have enjoyed the prosperity and long-lasting peace that Hitler would have brought to the whole world (apart from the fact that Jews wouldn't be a part of that, but, hey, there has to be losers, right??), if only Britain and France had the sense to see that the Führer was really a good guy, with really good intentions.......

Hitler was fundamentally misunderstood. At heart he was a humanitarian. And an artist.

Someone should write a musical play revealing the truth.

Please don't feed the history troll.

This is a piano forum.


-J

Agreed, but there are so many inaccuracies in that post that it is hard to ignore.

I never denied this technicality. The rest of your post is too mindbogglingly stupid and ignorant for a reply.

Sure it is. Except it's based on mainstream history c. 2000, as opposed to childlike black and white Hollywood hate propaganda c. 1945.

Seriously. Did you learn your history from MacDonalds Happy Meal packages? If you drooling History Channel watching sunken chested girly boy zombies could hear your feeble feminine screeches with my ears whenever someone makes an unbiased point about history that isn't completely retarded and gay you'd explode from embarrassment.

That's how ignorant you are. You are in some sense much less knowledgeable than people who don't know anything at all. They at least could learn. You already think you know something while the truth is you don't even know what you don't know. That's like knowing less than nothing at all. It's truly ironic that you express these pathetic notions in the passionate way that you do while your own nation is succumbing to totalitarianism every bit as disturbing on every level and from all possible points of view as 1934 Germany. What have you stupid, stupid Americans learned from history? Everything you've learned has been the opposite of truth and a preparation for this slavery you have fallen into.

Keep shooting the messenger, fool.

And good luck with all that emotional attachment to bullshit and nonsense. Be sure to let me know how it all turns out.