"Bombastic and overblow." "Sensual." What is Richard Wagner's music? It is different things to different people. Hear Leon Botstein, Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO)--and who when only 23 yearsof age became the youngest college president in US history (Bard College)--briefly discuss some of the famous Preludes from Wagner's great operas, Wagner's career, and the ASO's Wagner performances in this the 200th anniversary year of Wagner's birth...and the 50th anniversary season of the ASO.
Here are two interesting recent articles on Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
"Is Wagner Bad For Us?" by Nicolas Spice, London Review of Books (11 April 2013); from the article:
Theft; the breaking of vows, promises and contracts; seduction, adultery, incest, disobedience, defiance of the gods, daring to ask the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power, genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.
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Difficulties and disasters dogged [Wagner's opera] Tristan und Isolde from the start and in the Wagner circle it came to be thought of as in some way cursed. The attempt at a first production in Vienna in 1862 foundered: the demands the opera made on players and singers were too much for them and the production was abandoned after 77 rehearsals. The planned public premiere in Munich in 1865 had to be postponed for a month, when Malvina Schnorr, who was singing Isolde, lost her voice on the morning of the first performance after taking a ‘vapour bath’. Relations between the orchestra and the conductor, Hans von Bülow, grew strained: Franz Strauss, father of Richard and the brilliant first horn of the Munich orchestra, had a blazing row with von Bülow, stomped out of the pit and had to be coaxed back. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who sang Tristan to his wife’s Isolde, caught a chill on stage and subsequently died; on his deathbed he is said to have called out Wagner’s name. His wife abandoned her career after his death. ‘I drove you to the abyss,’ Wagner wrote in his diary; ‘I pushed him over.’ Four years later, during rehearsals for a revival of the first production, one of von Bülow’s young assistants had a mental breakdown, apparently brought on by the opera, and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.
"Wagner's Dark Shadow: Can We Separate the Man from His Works?" by Dirk Kurbjuweit, Spiegel Online (April 12, 2013); from the article:
Markus Käbisch, 45, is adept at describing what it's like to listen to this music. He studied music and is now an entrepreneur in the solar industry. He lives in Leipzig, Wagner's birthplace....
Käbisch loves Wagner's music but says he "couldn't handle it every day." He describes it as being, "extremely captivating; when you listen to it the ego and the individual disappear, and you become intoxicated, entering a state of ecstasy." Käbisch calls it "overpowering music." "That's what is so dangerous about it, and it's why this music was so well-suited to politics in the Third Reich." When the conversation turns to Wagner, politics is never far away. Wagner himself conceived his music as political. He didn't want to be merely an artist, but to build a new society, a society of the emotionally transported, of people who seek love instead of striving for money and power. His music was also a propaganda tool for this idea.
Photos: (Click each image for an enlarged version); top: Richard Wagner, 1861 when in exile in Paris; bottom: a 2010 staging of Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival.
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