Ring of Truth

Dear Mr. Heise,
I am familiar with your excellent site and in fact linked to it in this article. What counts for me first is the music, in purely functional terms, and the plastic representation of time. And that is where (after half a century of listening and study) I have come to truly dislike what Wagner is doing.

Funny; for me, listening at home, usually to Solti, Wagner’s continuous melody still strikes me as episodic, and even choppy at times. A familiar bit, trailing off…another familiar bit, trailing off, ad nauseum, periodically attaining a kind of dramatic and musical climax. But a lot of it does seem like filler sometimes.

In fairness, the only performance I’ve seen was Barenboim’s concertized Tristan, with the Chicago Symphony, and he was great.

But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a collection of preludes and other excerpts.

The image Wagner now connotes for me is James Mason and Gregory Peck, listening to the Siegfried Idyll, somewhere in the Amazon, in The Boys from Brazil.

Understood Paul, and I have ransacked a lot of the literature, and even own a comic version of the Ring. I may be one of those people who enjoy the music, without quite responding emotionally. It’s not the length, per se, because I’m actually a Bruckner fan. More the melodramatic aspect of it. To be fair, that is my reaction to opera generally.

Regarding your question about the antisemitism, Wagner is rather more than noxious, even in the company of other artistic figures with similar proclivities, and I am inclined to believe it stemmed in part from his anxieties about his own obscure origins. Had this been confined to his private life it would be on thing, but it became doctrinal for him, and something he expounded in an extra-musical capacity.

And I’m aware of the exculpatory anecdotes, but the betrayal of some of his early supporters, including Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn is hard to overlook.

Someone once wrote that it is important to take an inclusive view of the man and his work, including the antisemitism, because that is how he insisted on being understood.

My training is Schenkerian (with Carl Schachter and Charles Burkhart and CUNY), and I begin and end with the score. Symbolism doesn’t interest me much; Bach, for example, is full of number symbolism, but that is inside humor. I care about musical function, that is, what the music does in strictly musical terms. Wagner does something quite different than, say, Schubert. That does have broader cultural significance, though. I’ve written about this at more length here:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/11/why-we-cant-hear-wagnerrsquos-music

Dear David and Therry:

I just read David’s very interesting article whose link he posted above, and in all due respect I can only say that the Wagnerian experience he describes does not correspond with my own. I don’t mean in saying this that he isn’t correct in his local musical analysis of certain moments in Wagner’s works. But that’s beside the point, for the following reason:

Anyone who has experienced the Wilhelm Furtwaengler RAI mono recording of Wagner’s “Ring,” or his “Tristan” with Kirsten Flagstad and Ludwig Suthaus, as I have, knows that Wagner creates a musico-dramatic propulsion, a feeling of teleological necessity, which is virtually unprecedented in dramatic art, and this is as much due to Wagner’s musical construction as to his dramatic construction, which work in tandem. Local analyses of moments in which Wagner seems to halt the propulsion to create a feeling of timelessness bespeaks one of Wagner’s many virtues, and is actually the contrary of a critique. Wagner was able to do both at once.

But David seems to insist on doing purely musical analysis without even taking account of the role the music plays within the dramatic framework, and seems to dismiss Wagner’s drama as a sort of extraneous symbolic component like Bach’s number symbolism, which, I agree with him, is wholly irrelevant (in Bach) to our appreciation of Bach’s music. To compare the dramas for which Wagner wrote his music to Bach’s insider number symbolism bespeaks a critical philosophy which is inherently incapable of assessing Wagner’s achievement at its true worth. In truth, Wagner on his own terms bores David, which is why he can only justify a few chosen bleeding chunks out of Wagner’s otherwise allegedly tedious dramaturgy. No amount of local musical analysis, however well informed, can compensate for a musico-dramatic deficit which seems to be fatal.

In sum, I can’t even recognize the Wagner I’ve known for 40 years in David’s description.

Wagner is capable of composing with long-range tonal goals; the “Immolation Scene” in Goetterdaemmerung comes to mind. And I agree that Furtwaengler is the great interpreter of the past century. But Wagner is also guilty of some dreadfully mediocre moments (the “Forging Song” is probably the worst — “Siegfried Fit the Battle of Jericho”), and of just-too-clever tricks that get old fast. Perhaps we can agree that there is a fundamental difference between the experience of hearing Wagner vs. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, and then try to specify what the difference might be.

I concur, and happily concede Wagner’s seat in the pantheon of immortals. Oddly enough, it’s probably some of the music in Parsifal I find most compelling, again in an almost symphonic way. Before I had children, and had time, I was often content to listen to to the von Karajan version in its entirety. But this is probably why I like Bruckner–some of the same tonal qualities, without the overt emotionalism, but with the added structure.

I am now reminded–and this maybe from Harold Schoenberg–of Mahler’s statement that there is no such thing as absolute music, and that every piece has its narrative, even if it is only privy to the composer.

Sir, very interesting, and I was fascinated by your assessment of Wagner’s art, of which, like Mahler, I am a “victim.” But you also have a responsibility to assess the singing, as lucidly as you do the aesthetic and philosophy of Wagner’s music dramas. With all due respect, you have a tin ear when it comes to singing; Deborah Voigt was totally inadequate. Listen to her without the benefit of sight; she can not sing in tune and has no breath control. Compare her to Flagstad, Nilsson, Varnay, or Grob-Prandl. There are standards to uphold and you should listen as critically to the singing as you focus on the piece with intellectual insight. The rest of the cast was wonderful though.

Theodore Herzl attended, I think it was Parsifal, shortly before siding with Zionism (see Carl Shorske’s essay on Herzl) – the liberation from the liberal culture of law to the pursuit of impulse and dream did not mean forsaking purposive action for Herzl, and I daresay it did not for most people influenced by Wagner. One does not have to agree with the idealization of human nature (and thus, human impulse – the idealization itself if are older than Wagner, going back to Rousseau) to find the obsession with it as the root of some decline of the west tiresome. I vaguely recall “spengler” from columns in the asia times, and I recall them as about as cranky and sophmoric in their political analysis as this.

While I disagree with your assessment of Wagners work, it’s merit’s, Wagnerians (Wagnerians as rebellious teens? Well, while pop psychology at its worst it was at least amusing and I suspect slightly tongue in cheek?) and also much of your thoughts on the METs production, I could not possibly argue with your assessment of Luisi’s handling of the score – and this continued beyond the opening night.

From interviews, I have begun to deduce this was less to do with “nerves” and more (at the risk of putting words in his mouth) taking Wagner away from the German Romantic Movement (to which he more than anyone clearly belongs) and placing him in the Classical soundscape of Mozart (of who’s operas of course Wagner greatly admired). Like Karajan with his studio Ring he wishes to “make” Wagner (and I use his words) “lighter” to “bring out its lyricism” (as if it needed to be wrenched kicking and screaming from the score like a fan of Puccini to a production of Parsifal). Line, line and more line one suspects. Levine’s (who’s, coincidentally, excellent Mahler 10 I am presently listening to) expert Wagnerian hands were and continue to be sorely missed.

By the way, as an aside I greatly enjoyed your “Why We Can’t Hear Wagner’s Music” when I first read it and was glad to be reminded of it.

Reactionary,
My teacher, Carl Schachter, once interrupted a class on a different topic and give a spontaneous lecture on why Tchaikovsky was a better composer than Mahler. I don’t mind Rachmaninoff, but Tchaikovsky is in a different league; better organized, less episodic, more inventive.