Winterlied Frühlingsmorgen Erinnerung Hans
und Grethe Serenade
aus Don Juan Phantasie
aus Don Juan Urlicht Three Rückert-Lieder
Wolfgang Holzmair (baritone)
Imogen Cooper (piano)
I can imagine that this would
have been a recital, as the cliché has it, to divide opinion. Though I found it
an enriching, enthralling experience, I could well imagine that some, many
even, would have responded less warmly to Wolfgang Holzmair’s voice, which has become
drier, than once it was, relatively lacking in tonal variety. For my part, I
relished not only his keen verbal attention, not only his undeniably ‘acted’
approach, but also that inimitably Austrian way he has with the language, which
simply seems so right here, leaving many peddlers – or should that be pedlars? –
of Hochdeutsch standing. I doubt that
anyone, however, could have entertained doubts concerning Imogen Cooper’s
contribution. Rarely if ever have I heard Mahler’s piano parts sound so
convincingly orchestral: not straining towards an unattainable ideal – well,
not very much – as taking on the very hues not just of any orchestra, but
Mahler’s. Such was certainly apparent from the very first of the Wunderhorn settings, ‘Ablösung im Sommer’.
Holzmair’s ‘Revelge’ revelled
in almost cabaret-like fashion; Weill came to mind, performance somehow
encompassing both Berlin and Vienna. A certain dryness of tone was more than
offset by sheer communicative ability, poised somewhere between bitterness and
sweetness, or rather combining the two. Cooper’s communication of Mahler’s
underlying rhythms was every bit as impressive. Neither was afraid to make an
ugly sound where necessary, the piano quite tumultuous before ‘Er schlägt die
Trommel’. By contrast Schubertian
lineage sounded very much to the fire from both artists in ‘Zu Straßburg auf
der Schanz’. The piano proved as sardonic as the voice in ‘Des Antonius von
Padua Fischpredigt'. One actually relished the relative awkwardness in pianistic
terms, especially some of the right-hand passages. Holzmair told the tale with
an almost childish truculence, though of course, with Mahler, there is always
an alienated sophistication to reassert itself too. Nothing is unmediated: the
blessing and curse of modernity. Irony pertained too in ‘Trost im Unglück’,
another vista opening up with the second character of the girl (Mädchen), but was it for real? The piano
sounded almost Schoenberg-like in ‘Der Tambourg’sell’, but that is how Mahler’s
writing should come across, perhaps especially in its piano version. Vocal
defiance provoked resonances once more of Brecht-Weill, Wozzeck too. If ‘Das irdische Leben’ does not chill to the bone,
something has gone terribly wrong; no fear of that here, though there were of
course all sorts of other fears to experience. Detail both verbally and from
the piano was exemplary. ‘Rheinlegendchen’ was suffused with melancholy, nostalgia
for a typically Mahlerian golden age that never was – and we knew it. Its loss
is of course none the less painful for that. ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’
evoked similar feelings. Here I admit that I did feel the loss of a more beautiful
voice – Fritz Wunderlich would have been ideal – or indeed the deeper tones of
a more conventional baritone. (Holzmair often sounds closer to a tenor.)
The second half opened with echoes
of Schubert and Schumann in Winterlied;
both artists’ experience in the music of those composers really told. Cooper’s
tone sounded close to Debussy in Frühlingsmorgen,
which preceded a pervasive yet detailed (words and music) sadness in Erinnerung. Beautifully judged rubato
helped the apparently naïve progress of Hans
und Grethe. Serenade aus Don Juan
was sweetly seductive through sheer vocal – and pianistic – intelligence; the
following Phantasie proved similar in
tone to Erinnerung. Urlicht was taken faster than one would
be likely to hear it performed with an orchestra, but that makes sense.
Crucially, it retained its quiet dignity, but sounded perhaps more Romantic,
less Nietzschean. (I could not help but long for the rest of the Second
Symphony.) Three Rückert songs completed the programme. ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’
displayed an admirable refusal to confound sentiment with sentimentality. ‘Blicke
mir nicht in die Lieder!’ offered itself as a companion to ‘Das irdische Leben’,
Holzmair’s detailed verbal response suggestive of Wolf. ‘Ich bin der Welt
abhanden gekommen’ was performed with straightforward, clear-eyed dignity. I
was put in mind of Peter Schreier in Wolf. Yes, hand on heart, I should prefer
the darker tones of, say, Hanno Müller-Brachmann here, but this moved and
provoked nonetheless.
Hans Werner
Henze has died, aged 86. It is with particular sadness that I write this, given
that I am presently at work in completing a chapter on his work. When writing a
book concerned with politics and post-Wagnerian music drama, it never occurred
to me that Henze would not receive a chapter. Indeed, there has been a
particular fascination in drawing implicit, sometimes explicit, comparisons with
his near-contemporary, Luigi Nono. Both men were avowedly committed to ‘politically
engaged’ music; both drew fire in almost equal measure from critics, generally of
the armchair variety, for permitting ‘political’ considerations to supplant æsthetic
concerns and for permitting the latter to gain the upper hand over the class
struggle. Neither accusation had much merit; the work of both composers showed
how, in at least the greater part of cases, the distinction was supremely
irrelevant. Indeed, the dialectical relationship between compositional
modernism, even in Henze’s more heterodox, eclectic sense, and Marxist politics
proved extraordinarily fruitful in artistic terms for both. Henze would, despite serious illness, remain active until the last, two of his most recent three operas having been claimed to be his last; it was only Gisela, first performed in 2010, that would ultimately be accorded that honour.
With Ingeborg Bachmann
As someone
especially interested in German history and culture, I was always likely to be
drawn to Henze, as a composer with such a fraught relationship to his homeland.
(How could one not, growing up during the Third Reich?) Even his move to Italy,
provoked by disgust at the extent to which post-war West Germany was still
ruled over by so many of the same institutions, attitudes, even people, stood
in a classical German tradition of longing for warm Mediterranean climes. And
yet, he could never really escape. Henze provocatively claimed that Der Prinz von Homburg, dedicated to
Stravinsky – Nono’s Intolleranza 1960
was dedicated, by contrast, to Schoenberg – was modelled upon
nineteenth-century Italian opera. (Boulez scathingly likened Henze’s opera to Don Carlos.) Yet the conflict between
freedom and organisation, the attempt by Henze and his librettist, Ingeborg
Bachmann, to render a classic nationalist text as something universal, could
hardly have been more German. Nor could Henze’s description of the drama,
which, he said, ‘very much cried out for this contrast between dodecaphony, and
what – with a pinch of salt – might be termed traditional harmony: the
dialectics of the law and its violation, of dreams and reality, of
mendaciousness and truth.’
For
Henze was as indelibly marked by Schoenberg, despite his constant Stravinskian
protestations, as he was by the horrors of an adolescence in which his
schoolmaster father became a Nazi enthusiast and excoriated his homosexual son.
Henze wrote of growing up, in ‘the bourgeois world of Bielefeld, to which I had
been admitted thanks to my being musical. Here the Nazis were considered
unseemly; people tacitly rejected them, and found that Hitler fellow more and
more of a nuisance, especially now that he was losing us the war and had landed
us with air-raids.’ What he called ‘this “I was always against the Nazis”
represents,’ he would write, ‘a banal and frivolous stance (created on the
stage by Auden in the last scene of The
Bassarids)’. And also, of course,
by Henze, in what many of us consider to be his greatest opera. Even
when proscribed composers, at first Hindemith, only later the Second Viennese
School, were once again performed, there was to him – at least in retrospect –
something suspect about the enterprise. When, in its first post-war concert,
the Bielefeld orchestra played Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler symphony,
‘it went down with a discreet cultural frisson of “We’re permitted to,
we’re able to, we have the freedom to play Hindemith … even if we hadn’t
actually missed this music.’” However, there was also, more ominously, ‘an
undertone of “Now that Hindemith can be played again, our guilt is removed,
everything is right with the world again, isn’t it?’” Fascism, it could be
claimed, ‘had been no more than a bad dream’. Henze, like Nono, felt he had no
choice but to bear witness; like Nono, he most certainly did bear that witness.
For
anyone seeking a taste of Henze as man and composer, I heartily recommend the
DVD to which I provide a link below. It contains fascinating interviews (with
Henze in his Roman villa, as well as others) extracts, and a fine, complete performance of his instrumental, avowedly post-Holocaust Requiem; if it does not have
you seeking to learn and to hear more, then nothing well. Here is one of his
most delightful works, Nachtstücke und
Arien, characteristic in its suffusion of the post-Bergian labyrinth with Mediterranean warmth. (Bachmann again wrote the texts).
Henze
wrote in his memoirs (also linked to below) in typically entertaining – and angry – fashion of the premiere:
…
at its first performance at Donaueschingen, on 20 October 1957, under Hans
Rosbaud’s ouststanding direction, three representatives of the other wing –
Boulez, my friend Gigi Nono and Stockhausen – leapt to their feet after only
the first few bars and pointedly left the hall, eschewing the beauties of my
latest endeavours. Throughout the evening, heads continued to be shaken at my
cultural faux pas, and Ingeborg [Bachmann] and I suddenly found
ourselves cold-shouldered by people who actually knew us, foremost among whom
was Herr Dr Heinrich Strobel [chairman of the International Society for
Contemporary Music and initiator of the Donaueschingen Festival]. There was a
sense of indignation throughout the building, no doubt made worse by the fact
that the audience had acclaimed our piece in the liveliest manner… The
impression arose that the whole of the world of music had turned against me, a
situation that was really quite comical, but also somewhat disturbing from an
ethical point of view: for what had become of artistic freedom? Who had the
right to confuse moral and æsthetic criteria? Teddy Adorno?
Yet
again, we are returned to questions of freedom and authority. Doubtless part of
Henze’s positioning there is designed to present the ‘other wing’ in less than
a flattering light, but his concerns, understandable now, would have been
doubly so in a post-war climate in which Henze stood deeply troubled by even
the slightest hint of ‘totalitarianism’. We can stand grateful that we no more
have to choose between Boulez and Henze than we do between Schoenberg and
Stravinsky. However, we should also express our sadness at the loss of one of
the greatest composers of an outstanding generation, and salute his memory.
Sciarrino – Tre madrigal Monteverdi – Sovra tenere erbette Io
mi son giovinetta Larry Goves – Sherpa Tensing stands up from the piano,
says something quiet, and walks outside (world premiere) Christian Wolff – Ashbery Madrigals (world premiere) Monteverdi - Vattene
pur crudel Gesualdo – ‘Mercè!’, grido piangendo Asciugate
i begli occhi Morgan Hayes – E Vesuvio monte Gesualdo – Ardita Zanzaretta Languisce
al fin Evan Johnson – Three in, ad abundantiam (world
premiere) Michael Finnissy – Sesto Libro di Carlo Gesualdo I (world
premiere) Monteverdi – Rimanti in pace EXAUDI James Weeks (conductor)
This tenth birthday celebration
for the EXAUDI consort, founded in 2002 by James Weeks and Juliet Fraser,
commendably looked forward rather than back, by presenting the first
performances of four new commissioned works, ‘the first tranche,’ to quote
Weeks’s programme note, ‘of what we hope will become a long-term enterprise:
the creation of a book of (mainly) Italian madrigals, each by a different
composer. Our aim is to discover what the idea of “the madrigal” might offer
the present day, either as a concrete historical phenomenon or as a set of more
general principles: principles perhaps to do with the relationships between
individual voices or the singers themselves, or to do with the idea of vocal
expression, or simply to do with the humanist, secular impulses underlying the
genre.’
The door is thus left pretty
much open for composers to do as they will; whether something a little more
prescriptive might have been in order, only time will tell. I perhaps responded
more readily to those works more recognisably ‘madrigalian’, but that is
doubtless a different, personal matter. (One should recall that the form had
died out before and been reinvented more or less from scratch, fourteenth- and
sixteenth-century madrigals possessing little in common beyond the name.) Michael
Finnissy’s Sesto Libro di Carlo Gesualdo
I is in a sense a transcription of Gesualdo’s Se la mia morte, dividing the six voices into two competing trios,
one amplified. The dark, at times almost neo-expressionist, harmonies (or
should that, in Gesualdo’s case, be palaeo-expressionist, since our terms of
reference are certainly not his?) proved attractive for singers and audience
alike. Evan Johnson’s Three in, ad
abundantiam, sets fragments from Petrarch, apparently aiming to express
difficulty or reluctance to communicate. I found it muted, fragmentary, for
want of a better word, but ultimately perhaps not very interesting. Initially,
I was unsure whether the intervention of a mobile telephone and ensuing
conversation between one singer and the offending member of the audience, was
part of the work or not; perhaps it ought to be incorporated.
Larry Goves’s Sherpa Tensing stands up from the piano,
says something quiet, and walks outside sets a lengthy, repetitive text by
Matthew Welton, to which the musical response seems deliberately sectional.
Though in English, it retains another characteristic of the Italian madrigal:
the privileged position of words. Christian Wolff’s Ashbery Madrigals seem concerned with quotidian experience in
setting as well as text, though they are not without attractive enough
harmonies; performance certainly lent them fine chiaroscuro.
Salvatore Sciarrino and
Morgan Hayes offered examples of recently written works, which were not yet
part of the EXAUDI project as such. Sciarrino’s Tre madrigal set Japanese haiku (Matsuo Bashō) in the composer’s
own translation, itself apparently preparative of the Mediterranean sensibility
with which the notes are imbued. Waves murmur, a cicada, bells, red sun, and
winds appear. In performance – and presumably to a certain extent in score – we
heard a post-Berio marriage of roughness and sophistication, intensifying the
impression of Italian Renaissance roots. This for me sounded the finest or at
least the most inviting of the ‘new’ works, but I am speaking from but a single
hearing. Morgan Hayes’s E Vesuvio monte
opts, as the title suggests, for Latin rather than Italian, setting Pliny the
Younger’s description of the eruption of Vesuvius. A brace of countertenors
comes to the fore, lending the narration a sense both of old and of new. The
violence of antiquity is felt; whilst never sounding ‘like’ Birtwistle, that
spirit, so inherent in the older composer’s work, sounded almost reimagined
here – though that of course may well be a matter of me finding bearings rather
than intent or indeed practice.
Andrea Gabrieli’s Vieni, vieni Himeneo had offered a
well-chosen introduction, a welcome to performers and performance. The rest of
the programme was devoted to Gesualdo and Monteverdi, avant-gardists both. Monteverdi’s
Third and Fourth Books were raided, his voice unmistakeable in Sovra tenere erbette, redolent of both
opera and choral music, and yet differently tender in the progress of its
melodic lines and the harmonies created. Io
mi son giovinetta was florid yet neither smudged nor merely ‘ornamental’,
benefiting from a fine sense of harmonic direction. Vattene pur, crudel certainly marked itself out at the end of the
first half as the masterpiece that it is. It seemed informed, or at least its
opening did, by a more modernistic style of performance than had hitherto been
heard in the Monteverdi works, though that did not preclude warmth. If here, as
in the closing Rimanti in pace, I
should sometimes have preferred performances a little more Italianate in
spirit, the plangency of the latter arguably making it sound disconcertingly
close to Couperin at times, then the chromaticism of the former remained
searingly apparent, especially in those descending lines throughout the
ensemble.
Extremity was embraced from
the opening exclamation of Gesualdo’s ‘Mercè!’,
grido piangendo, the sheer weirdness of the composer’s writing apparent, in
no sense tonally explicable and yet sounding with necessity rather than in
merely arbitrary fashion. Whereas Monteverdi in retrospect came to sound
almost Mozartian, or at least classicistic, in his perfection, Gesualdo sounded
more experimental, whether for better or for worse. If Ardita zanzanetta is almost skittish by his standards, the sense of
split personality was still powerfully conveyed. The refusal to milk the ending
of Languisce al fin was admirable.
Many happy returns, then, to
an enterprising and highly accomplished ensemble!
Beethoven – Piano Concerto
no.5 in E-flat major, op.73, ‘Emperor’ Elgar – Symphony no.1 in
A-flat major, op.55
Simon Trpčeski (piano)
London Symphony Orchestra
Vasily Petrenko (conductor)
Sir Colin Davis remains in
recovery from a recent illness, so Vasily Petrenko stepped in to conduct this
concert, the programme unchanged. Petrenko’s way with Beethoven and Elgar was certainly
very different from what one would have expected – and doubtless heard – from Davis,
but there was much to intrigue, especially in Elgar.
From the outset of Beethoven’s
Fifth Piano Concerto, there was no doubt that Petrenko intended to make full
use of the capabilities of the LSO – no fashionable scaling down here – just as
Simon Trpčeski would employ the full resources of his Steinway. The tempo was
fast, faster than my general preference, but that is neither here nor there; it
suited the performance, which was very much of the here and now rather than a
probing of Wagnerian metaphysics. A muscular exposition tutti did not detract
from characterful woodwind playing. Petrenko’s reading was rhythmically
insistent, very different from the more flexible and harmonically-grounded
Beethoven one hears from, say, Daniel Barenboim, or would have done from
Furtwängler. It was highly martial, perhaps too much so at times, but I was
intrigued to hear Beethoven’s score here more as a successor to Mozart at his
most public (the 25th Piano Concerto, rather than the 22nd,
despite the key), albeit with greater menace, or indeed to the military brass
interventions in Haydn’s late masses, inevitably putting one in mind ultimately
of precedents for the Missa solemnis.
Trpčeski’s performance was finely shaded, always clear, notably in the cruel
left-hand passagework, unfailingly even in tone. The moment of return was a
high point, piano and orchestra together veritably blazing. A songful,
intermezzo-like character was granted the slow movement, clearly informed by
experience in Romantic (post-Beethoven) piano concertos: Schumann, even, more
controversially, Chopin and Tchaikovsky. I was not entirely convinced, but it
made me think, and it was a welcome luxury to hear such warmth from the
deep-pile LSO string section. The finale was taken at a fast tempo too, but was
carried off well. Trpčeski voiced those extremely difficult chords in the
opening bars to perfection, though there were occasional examples later on when
heavy-handedness intervened. There were a couple of odd instances of slowing
down, pianist later echoed by conductor, so they would seem to have been the
products of conscious decisions. That
bassoon solo emerged unscathed from the preceding orchestral onslaught.
After the interval, Elgar’s
First Symphony opened arrestingly with deliberate tread, almost as if the
glorious celebration of a hero passed (a successor, perhaps, to Siegfried, or
even to the hero of the Eroica?), sad
yet defiant. The main Allegro, by
contrast, opened in fast and furious fashion, quite un-Boult-like, though its
fragility would soon be exposed. The score often sounded closer to Tchaikovsky
than Brahms, especially at its most frenetic, the LSO brass ablaze. This was an
unabashedly Romantic reading, which yet did not preclude uncertainty, above all
at the close. The second movement – I suppose one ought not to call it a
scherzo, since Elgar did not – also opened furiously, by turn thereafter
balletic and martial. (I could almost imagine it danced.) It was quite
different from any performance I could recall, yet clearly from conviction
rather than a desire to ‘say something new’ for the sake of it. I found it exhilarating.
The slow movement emerged with almost Mahlerian intensity from the strings, the
warmth and generosity of their vibrato throughout a standing rebuke to the
Norringtonian tendency. Echoes of Wagner – sighing phrases, choice harmonic
shifts, baleful English horn (Christine Pendrill) – were sung freely.
Instability was never far from the surface, despite the often ravishing beauty
of the performance. Though the opening of the finale was well-nigh obliterated
by a barrage of coughing, it emerged from bronchial envelopment with a nice
sense of fantastical revisiting: a tribute to Strauss? The Allegro recaptured earlier fury, yet quite rightly seemed to struggle;
‘hard-won’ would be misleading, since it was never clear that victory had been
attained. Astonishingly, even today, Elgar sometimes needs to be rescued from
provincial devotees, who would confine him to the ranks of merely ‘English
composers’. In this fine performance, he was triumphantly, which is in another
sense also to say equivocally, rescued.
Don
Giovanni – Iain Paterson Leporello
– Darren Jeffery Donna
Anna – Katherine Broderick Don
Ottavio – Ben Johnson Donna
Elvira – Sarah Redgwick Commendatore
– Matthew Best Zerlina
– Sarah Tynan Masetto
– John Molloy
Rufus Norris (director) Ian MacNeil (set designs) Nicky Gillibrand (costumes) Paul Andreson (lighting) Jonathan Lunn (movement) Finn Ross (projections)
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick) Orchestra of the English National Opera Edward Gardner (conductor)
Zerlina (Sarah Tynan), Don Giovanni (Iain Paterson), Donna Elvira (Sarah Redgwick)
Images: Richard Hubert Smith
Some
especially puerile, needlessly irritating, marketing, involving pictures of condom
packets – oddly chosen in so many ways, since few people find contraceptives
especially erotic, and Don Giovanni would seem an unlikely candidate to have
employedthem – had attended the run-up
to this revival of Rufus Norris’s production of Don Giovanni. In
2010, it registered as the worst staging I had ever seen: a fiercely
contested category, when one considers that it includes
Francesca Zambello’s mindless farrago across Covent Garden at the Royal Opera
– now, may the Commendatore be thanked, consigned to the flames of Hell.
(Kasper Holten, Director of Opera, is said to have insisted, having viewed it
in horror, that the sets be destroyed, lest it never return.) There were
grounds for the odd glimmer of hope; Norris was said to have revised the
production in the face of its well-nigh universal mauling from critics and
other audience members alike. Yet the marketing did little to allay one’s
fears, especially when reading the bizarre description on ENO’s website of a
‘riveting romp [that] follows the last twenty-four hours in the life of the
legendary Lothario’. Something really ought to be done about whomever is involved
in publicising productions; for, irrespective of the quality of what we see on
stage, theymore often than not end up
sounding merely ludicrous: in this case, more Carry On Seville than one of the greatest musical dramas in the
repertory. Even if one were willing thus to disparage Da Ponte – and I am
certainly not – does Mozart’s re-telling of the Fall in any sense characterised
by the phrase ‘riveting romp’?
How, then, had Norris’s
revisions turned out? Early on, I felt there was a degree of improvement. The
weird obsession with electricity – certainly not of the musical variety – had
gone, but not to be replaced by anything else. Certain but only certain of the
most bizarre impositions had gone, or been weeded out, yet not always
thoroughly enough. For instance, there was a strange remnant of the already
strange moment when, towards the end of the Act Two sextet, people began to
strip off, when Don Ottavio – an ‘uptight fiancé’, according to the company
website – carefully removed his shoes and socks. No one reacted, and a few
minutes later – I think, during Donna Anna’a ‘Non mi dir’ – he put them back on
again. Otherwise, the hideous sets and other designs remain as they were,
though one might claim a degree of contemporary ‘relevance’ in that Don
Giovanni’s dated ‘leisure wear’ now brings with it unfortunate resonances of
the late Jimmy Savile. Alas, nothing is made of the similarity. The flat
designed as if by a teenage girl, full of hearts and pink balloons, remains; as
does the building that resembles a community centre. Leporello still appears to
be a tramp. There are no discernible attempts to reflect Da Ponte’s, let alone
Mozart’s, careful societal distinctions and there is no sign whatsoever that
anyone has understood that Don Giovanni
is a religious drama or it is nothing. Norris has clearly opted for ‘nothing’.
There
is, believe it or not, a villain perhaps more pernicious still. Jeremy Sams’s dreadful,
attention-seeking English translation does its best to live up to the ‘riveting
romp’ description. A few, very loud, members of the audience did their best to
disrupt what little ‘action’ there was by laughing uproariously after every
single line: the very instance of a rhyme is intrinsically hilarious to some,
it would seem. A catalogue of Sams’s sins – sin has gone by the board in the
drama itself – would take far longer than Leporello’s aria. But I no more
understand why the countries in that aria should be transformed into months – ‘ma
in Ispagna’ becomes ‘March and April’ – than I do why Zerlina was singing about
owning a pharmacy in ‘Vedrai carino,’ or whatever it became in this ‘version’. It
is barely a translation, but nor is it any sense a reimagination along the
brilliant lines of the recent gay Don Giovanni at Heaven; it merely
caters towards those with no more elevated thoughts than Zerlina going down on
her knees, about which we are informed time and time again, lest anyone should
have missed such ‘humour’. The lack of respect accorded to Da Ponte borders
upon the sickening.
Edward
Gardner led a watered-down Harnoncourt-style performance. At first it might
even have seemed exciting, but it soon became wearing, mistaking the aggressively
loud for the dramatically potent. Where was the repose, let alone the well-nigh
unbearable beauty, in Mozart’s score? A peculiar ‘version’ was employed, in
that Elvira retained both her arias, whereas Ottavio only had his in the first
act. On stage, Prague remains preferable every time, despite the painful
musical losses its adoption entails; sadly, few conductors seem to bother.
Donna Anna (Katherine Broderick), Zerlina, Leporello (Darren Jeffery),
Masetto (John Molloy), Don Ottavio (Ben Johnson)
Iain
Paterson remains bizarrely miscast in the title role, entirely bereft of
charisma. Darren Jeffery’s Leporello was bluff and dull in tone. (How one
longed for Erwin Schrott – in either role, or both!) Katherine Broderick was
too often shrill and squally as Donna Anna, and her stage presence was less
then convincing, shuffling on and off, without so much as a hint of seria imperiousness. Her ‘uptight fiancé’
was sung well enough, by Ben Johnson, though to my ears, his instrument is too
much of an ‘English tenor’ to sound at home in Mozart. Sarah Redgwick’s Elvira was probably the best
of the bunch, perhaps alongside Matthew Best’s Commendatore, but anyone would
have struggled in this production, with these words. Elvira more or less
managed to seem a credible character, thanks to Redgwick’s impressive acting
skills, quite an achievement in the circumstances. Sarah Tynan made little impression
either way as Zerlina, though she had far more of a voice than the dry-, even
feeble-toned Masetto of John Molloy: surely another instance of miscasting.
ENO
had a viscerally exciting production, genuinely daring, almost worthy of Giovanni’s
kinetic energy. It seems quite incomprehensible why anyone should have elected to ditch the coke-fuelled
orgiastic extravagance of Calixto Bieito – now there is a properly Catholic
sensibility – for Rufus Norris. whose lukewarm response at the curtain calls
was more genuinely amusing than anything we had seen or heard on stage. Maybe the contraceptive imagery was judicious after all.
Whilst pitched at an introductory level - actually a far more difficult task than many would suspect - these may be of interest, offering commentary and musical excerpts. From what the website says (click here), they may only be downloaded within the United Kingdom. The latest is for Das Rheingold; contributors are Antonio Pappano, Kasper Holten, John Deathridge, Sarah Lenton, and yours truly. Guides to the remaining instalments of the Ring will accompany the live broadcasts from Covent Garden over the coming few days and will then appear online too.
Wellgunde – Kai Rüütel Flosshilde – Harriet Williams Alberich – Wolfgang Koch Wotan – Bryn Terfel Fricka – Sarah Connolly Freia – Ann Petersen Donner – Peter Coleman-Wright Froh – Andrew Rees Fasolt – Iain Paterson Fafner – Eric Halfvarson Loge – Stig Andersen Mime – Gerhard Siegel Erda – Maria Radner
Keith Warner (director)
Walter Sutcliffe (associate
director) Justin Way, Michael Csar
(first assistant directors) Stefanos Lazaridis, Matthew
Deely (set designs) Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes) Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting) Mic Pool, Dick Straker (video
designs) Claire Gaskin, Michael Barry
(movement)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera
House
Sir Antonio Pappano
(conductor)
Siegfried, Götterdämmerung,
Rheingold, little likelihood of Die Walküre: not necessarily the most
obvious, nor indeed recommendable, way of experiencing the Ring, though Wagner’s method and form in any case leave us with all
manner of questions and experiences concerning history, memory, the past, the
present, and the future. No matter: though one can never know the Ring too well, I have seen the
production twice before and flatter myself that I have not entirely forgotten
the works themselves either. After the dismal
experience of Götterdämmerung, I
was in any case feeling distinctly unenthused about the prospect of standing
through Das Rheingold. Low
expectations were probably no bad thing. Would they be fulfilled, exceeded, or
somehow prove nevertheless too elevated?
Fulfilled really – though, on
the whole, it was probably a bit better than Götterdämmerung. Keith Warner’s production is for the most part on
safer ground here. The opening scene works well: I like the idea of having the
initially nude Rhinemaidens clothe themselves as their behaviour becomes
nastier; there never was a Golden Age in the Ring-cosmos but things only get worse. The gods’ realm benefits
from richly-upholstered designs, though I think the portrayal of Froh is
overdone; he is pretty much a cipher, a deliberately uninteresting aristocrat, in
any case, but silliness was pushed too far. Wolfgang Göbbel’s lighting works
wonders, especially in Nibelheim – Alberich’s transformations are probably the
best I have seen – and during the storm of the final scene. I still do not
understand why Nibelheim is a place of scientific experimentation, though. One
could make all sorts of points about instrumental reason, but they need to be
made. Here it rather appeared as if the setting of Warner’s Royal Opera Wozzeck had been modified a bit, and
capital had bizarrely gone out of the window. Surely this must in some sense be
a factory.
Antonio Pappano’s conducting
remained disappointing. There were moments that impressed, but Wagner, whatever
Nietzsche’s barbs, is anything but a miniaturist. The point is the composer’s
art of transition, of which he was justly proud; Pappano simply seems unable to
make the score work as a whole, quasi-symphonically. The Prelude was
depressing, seemingly presented bar by bar; if ever forward momentum needs to
be achieved in the most ‘natural’ fashion it is surely here. Without any intelligible sense of life, of momentum, the second and fourth scenes in particular dragged almost interminably. The orchestra for
the most part played well enough, despite a few too many brass fluffs, but the anvils
were both risibly underpowered and, on more than one occasion, disturbingly out
of time. They almost might have been cowbells, albeit without Mahler’s sense of
foreboding.
The Rhinemaidens, once past
their opening bars, sang impressively – and acted with convincing coquetry throughout.
Wolfgang Koch’s Alberich lacks the
blackness one might expect, but is always intelligently portrayed, with more or
less equal attention to words, music, and gesture. His Mime, Gerhard Siegel is similarly
good in those respects. (Why, though does Warner have Loge stay behind in
Nibelheim to tie him up?! It only serves to confuse, especially when he seems
about to immolate his captive and then does not.) Sarah Connolly sings
beautifully for most of the time as Fricka, though I missed something more
formidable in Wagner’s Hera equivalent. Ann Petersen made a lovely Freia
though, and the love felt by Iain Paterson’s Fasolt seemed utterly genuine. He
and Eric Halfvarson both acted their parts well, though the latter’s Fafner was
a bit bluff. Andrew Rees was an attractively-voiced Froh; doubtless the over-acting had been pressed upon him. Alas, Peter Coleman-Wright proved at least as dreadful a Donner as
he had a Gunther, his weakness of voice an embarrassment for one who should
resound as the incarnation of brute force. He really ought to have been
replaced. Stig Andersen lacked much sense of the sardonic as Loge; his stage
portrayal – Warner’s idea of Loge as a magician intrigues – was stronger than
his delivery of the vocal line. Maria Radner seems miscast as Erda; her voice
is simply not deep enough to register the earth mother’s tones. That leaves
Bryn Terfel as Wotan. He seems to garner plaudits from all and sundry, but to
my ears he too often alternated between coarseness, even shouting during the
final act, and something perilously
close to crooning. The words were delivered intelligibly, but there was little
philosophical depth to his portrayal; again, stage presence was generally more
impressive than vocal delivery. It was nevertheless probably a better stab at
the role than his Wanderer in Siegfried.
Oh well: probably no reason
to feel dispirited about missing Die
Walküre then...
... or rather of its first public performance, on 16 October 1912. Is there any work that stands so proudly before the music of the twentieth century and pushes the Romanticism of the previous century to its extreme and beyond? Not even The Rite of Spring, whatever its musical greatness and the quasi-legendary nature of its premiere the following year. If too often today performances of Stravinsky's masterpiece have been neutralised, the Rite degraded into an orchestral showpiece, then Pierrot seems, like so much of Schoenberg's œuvre, still, in an almost Adornian sense, to resist. The very notion of adequacy in performance seems misplaced. It seems impossible even to agree upon how its Sprechstimme should be 'voiced'. The very make-up of its instrumental ensemble is prophetic of so much 'New Music' to come. Can one imagine Le marteau sans maître without Pierrot? More to the point, could Boulez have done? Peter Maxwell Davies's Pierrot Players, later the Fires of London, took Schoenberg's quintet as its core. Hans Werner Henze's Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer took the same ensemble as its emobdiment of sickly, bourgeois expressionism - and, almost despite itself, despite the composer's intentions, ended up offering to the Pierrot-ensemble the most compelling music. Stravinsky, who could in equal measure hit musical nails squarely on the head and prove himself grotesquely wrong-headed, came perhaps closer to the truth than anyone else when he celebratedly described Pierrot as 'the solar plexus as well as the mind of early-twentieth-century music'. We might simply delete the 'early'. And so, in tribute to that performance in Berlin's Choralian-Saal from Albertine Zehme as reciter, Eduard Steuermann, Jakob Masiniak, Hans Kindler, Hans de Vries, and Karl Eßberger, here are the score and one of the great recorded performances of the Dreimal sieben Gedichte, from Boulez, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Christine Schäfer:
Blazes – Nicholas
Merryweather Arthur – Richard Mosley-Evans
Ted Huffman (director)
Neil Irish (designs) Guy Hoare (lighting) Oliver Townsend (costumes)
Aurora Orchestra Richard Baker (conductor)
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s
chamber opera, The Lighthouse,
received a splendid performance from English Touring Opera, just as Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis
did last week. At little more than an hour and a half, including an interval, this proved a far more satisfactory dramatic
experience than the Royal
Opera’s Götterdammerung on the
main Covent Garden stage. (To be fair, that would not be difficult, and ETO’s
performance was far better than merely preferable.)
The opera has the gripping
quality of a superior detective – and ghost – story. Its Prologue sets up the
situation as three naval officers answer questions concerning the disappearance
of three lighthouse keepers, questions posed by a solo horn. As time goes on,
their interrogation metamorphoses into something approaching reconstruction,
the point we reach in the opera proper, in which the singers who have played
the officers turn to play the lighthouse keepers – and, at the end, return to
the guise of the officers, who may or may not bear guilt. Davies wrote the
libretto as well as the score, composed for an expanded Fires of London
ensemble, out-of-tune piano, banjo, and flexatone included.
Misunderstandings and the weird
ways in which makes sense out of disparate, perhaps even mutually exclusive, ‘truths’
are finely portrayed musically and verbally as well as scenically. Words from
the three characters come together to present something that may or may not be
more or less truthful than what it is they think they are saying individually:
a verbal magic square perhaps? Webern’s shadow is cast longer and more widely
than one might expect. The instability of the three men’s relationship – they have
been together for a good few months now – is menacingly conveyed, though not
without affection either. Arthur is a different matter, or at least he seems to
be, but there is certainly at least a hint of homoeroticism, especially in Ted
Huffman’s excellent production, between Sandy and Blazes. Parody is present, of
course, most evidently in the reimagination of the ballads – a street variety
from Blazes and Sandy’s sickly drawing-room version – and the hymn tunes.
(Arthur is clearly the kind of Protestant fundamentalist who has long drawn
Davies’s ire.) The rhythm of the closing automation – ‘The lighthouse is now
automatic,’ we hear at the end of the Prologue – is as stubbornly memorable as
the New York traffic-jam sounds at the beginning of Stravinsky’s Agon, another work owing a great
debt and repaying it handsomely, to the jewels of Webern. All of the way home and for
some time afterwards I found it impossible to rid my head of its repetitions.
Both Huffman’s staging and
Richard Baker’s conducting are excellent, equal in precision; so,
unsurprisingly, is the expert witness of the Aurora Orchestra, as fine an
ensemble of young soloists as one is likely to encounter. The simple set, faithful
to the work, provides a suitably claustrophobic backdrop and indeed participant
– who are the ghosts and where are they are? In the characters and/or our
minds, or are they something more? – for the keenly directed drama to unfold. Guy
Hoare’s lighting did its job very well indeed, especially when it came to
showing the automated signals in the deserted, desolate house. Tenor Adam
Tunnicliffe offered a sensitively sung performance of Sandy, both contrasting
and blending well with baritone Nicholas Merryweather as Blazes. Richard
Mosley-Evans presented a powerful portrayal of Arthur, alive to his daemons,
and to the illusory and real strengths and weaknesses arising therefrom.
It is not merely that there
was no weak length in the cast; these were performances that would have graced
any stage. The excellent news is that they will grace a good few more stages,
for after the Linbury performances, this production will be seen in Cambridge,
Exeter, Harrogate, Bath, and Aldeburgh. For further details from ETO’s website,
click here.
Martin Geck has written a
good few composer biographies: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. In his most
recent, first published in German in 2010, Geck turns his attention to Robert
Schumann.
The author draws out some
important biographical themes, not least the extent to which, from an early
age, Schumann’s twin literary and musical careers informed one another. In the
most impressive section, Schumann’s role as editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in its heyday one of the most
influential music periodicals of all time, is brought to vividly Romantic life.
Schumann’s ‘friends’, fiery Florestan and introverted Eusebius, and the Zeitschrift’s ‘League of David’,
dedicated to the defeat of the ‘Philistines’, played games of identity with
readers not unlike those of German Romantic poets such as Schumann’s beloved
Jean Paul.
The composer’s marriage is
treated more sensibly than often, though Clara Schumann is treated with kid
gloves. No mention is made of the Schumanns’ rank ingratitude towards Liszt;
nor does Geck deal critically with Clara’s music – perhaps because, sadly, it
is not intrinsically very interesting. The final years of Schumann’s life and
career receive surprisingly short shrift. It is almost as if Geck stands
reluctant to tell the harrowing tale of psychosis and the Endenich asylum.
Moreover, the sheer strangeness of Schumann’s highly disturbing late works goes
unexplored.
In general, a deeper
understanding of Schumann remains elusive. One particular problem lies in the
lack of any sense of place. We learn some facts about, for instance, Schumann’s
time as a student in Leipzig; yet without a keener sense of what Leipzig, or
indeed Saxony, c.1830, was like, they
amount to little more than the sum of their parts. An historian of
nineteenth-century Germany, alert to the differences between, say, Saxony and
Prussia, might have had something revealing to say here. Alan Walker’s
compelling Liszt biography presents a model too little followed in writing on
composers’ lives.
Discussion of Schumann’s
music – which is surely why we are most interested in him – is mixed in
quality. Following a striking, if brief, discussion of the piano piece, Papillons, and citation of Schumann’s
contention that he had learned more about counterpoint from Jean Paul than
anyone else, comes the bizarre claim that the Marseillaise quotation in Faschingsschwank
aus Wien is ‘almost unrecognisable’. I recall it leaping out from the page
at me in a childhood piano lesson – and certainly not on account of any
particular acuity. Analysis and even description tend to be approached and
veered away from, an odd state of affairs for a treatment of ‘life and work’.
Attempts at theoretical engagement, for instance, citation of Roland Barthes,
seem somewhat forced and sit oddly with a generally belletrist approach. There
is nothing wrong with the latter; sadly, however, Geck’s lettres prove more often grises
than belles.
Historical situation of
Schumann amongst his peers is dubious, largely consisting in his relative
elevation through swiping at others. Quite why an irrelevant and, in the worst
sense, merely subjective contrast with Schoenberg, whose music ‘is less popular
than Schumann’s ... [because] it is more difficult to understand,’ is thought
necessary but four pages in, I cannot imagine. Inevitably, though no less
wearisomely, there comes a host of digs at Wagner. Even Beethoven has his
middle-period works portrayed as one-dimensional when compared with Schumann’s
music. As for Geck’s wildly unhistorical claims that ‘until Beethoven’s day
composition was primarily a craft that required an adherence to traditional
rules,’ and that ‘Mendelssohn and Schumann were the first musicians,’ not even
the first composers, ‘to receive a proper formal education,’ hands must be
thrown up in the air.
Second Norn – Karen Cargill Third Norn – Elisabeth
Meister Brünnnhilde – Susan Bullock Siegfried – Stefan Vinke Gunther – Peter
Coleman-Wright Gutrune – Rachel
Willis-Sørensen Hagen – Sir John Tomlinson Waltraute – Mihoko Fujimura Alberich – Wolfgang Koch Wellgunde – Kai Rüütel Woglinde – Nadine Livingston Flosshilde – Harriet Williams
Keith Warner (director)
Walter Sutcliffe (associate
director) Amy Lane (first assistant
director) Stefanos Lazaridis, Matthew
Deely (set designs) Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes) Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting) Mic Pool, Dick Straker (video
designs) Claire Gaskin, Michael Barry
(movement)
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus
master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera
House Sir Antonio Pappano
(conductor)
I am not at all sure what is
meant by the claim on the Royal Opera House’s website that ‘Keith Warner
presents a bravura production of the fourth opera in the Ring cycle’. Anyway,
‘bravura’ or otherwise, here came Götterdämmerung,
or should it have been Wagner-Dämmerung?
If this is the level of Wagner performance to which we can look forward in
2013, his bicentenary, then it would be better to shut up shop now. Siegfried
had had a good few virtues, as well as failings; I had blithely assumed that Götterdämmerung would have been vaguely
comparable. Pride, as Wotan discovers, comes before a fall.
Little had changed in terms
of Keith Warner’s production, problematical
in a number of ways in 2007, though the production was far from the weakest
link in the performance as a whole. Warner’s staging lays claim to a number of
positive features. The role allotted to the gods, whose twilight we are
supposed to be enacting, is a particular strength. They appear, as they ought
yet seldom do, during the second act, as statues, vain objects of sacrifice.
This was recognisable as the decaying
Gibichung society Patrice Chéreau so rightly characterised as ageing, pointing
to the increasing desperation of its rituals — rituals which would seek some
sort of moral code in a post-religious society that knows no morality, indeed
finds it impossible, as Chéreau put it, to ‘know’. (See Pierre, Boulez and P. Chéreau, ‘Commentaires
sur “Mythologie et Idéologie”,’ in Programmhefte
der Bayreuther Festspiele, 1977, VI, p. 81.) Wotan, I think, reappears from afar
to view Siegfried’s death ; Loge summons and is consumed by fire at the
end ; the statues are burned. There is also a nice – well, provocative – suggestion
of incest between Gunther and Gutrune.
Alas, a great deal of incoherence remains. Why Grane is represented by a mere skull I cannot imagine.
The ultimate indignity is suffered when Brünnhilde’s trusty steed is passed
around as if the characters are worried that, when the music stops – one is
tempted to add: ‘if only...’ – one of them will suffer a forfeit. It would be
perfectly possible to have an off-stage horse, but a dead one seems pointless. Why does
Waltraute appear in ‘civilian’ guise, dressed as Brünnhilde is now ? Is
not the whole point of the scene the contrast between inhuman Valkyrie and
Brünnhilde as human being ?
Perhaps the most glaring sequence of confusion is seen in the final scene to
the first act. What I wrote in 2007 still holds word for word, so I shall save
time by repeating myself: ‘Hagen’s continued presence on stage, following
the move from the Hall of the Gibichungs to Brünnhilde’s rock, did not augur
well. We all know that in a sense he is “still there”: his dramatic shadow
hangs over the rest of the act, and the music could hardly make this clearer.
Actually to have him on stage added little, except confusion as to where the
action was taking place. But this was as nothing to the final scene (in which,
needless to say, he remained on stage). Anyone who did not know what was
supposed to be going on would have been utterly confused, since we had
Siegfried as himself, wearing the Tarnhelm, and Siegfried transformed by the
Tarnhelm into Gunther, on stage at the same time. All of the singing came from
– audibly and visually – from the former Siegfried. This was logically
incoherent, and the whole mess could easily have been avoided by following Wagner’s
directions.’ The end is marred not only by having Hagen, Brünnhilde, and the
vassals run around like children in the playground. Quite why the Rhinemaidens
strip part way through, as opposed to being nude throughout, is anyone’s guess.
Conflagration, such as it is, cannot come soon enough. What we are to make of
the girl standing in a ring – a belated advertisement for the Olympic Games? –
I do not know. The ‘watchers’ are an athletic bunch, though they are not called
upon to put that athleticism to use; a rather more mixed sample of humanity
might have been more to Wagner’s point. (Chéreau’s conclusion remains an object
lesson here.)
There were some good solo
performances. Mihoko Fujimura, arguably the world’s reigning Waltraute,
injected as much passion as Antonio Pappano’s lethargic conducting would permit
into her scene. Rachel Willis-Sørensen surprised me as an uncommonly womanly
Gutrune, an eminently creditable object of Siegfried’s diverted affections.
John Tomlinson’s Hagen had strength where it counted, even if he sounded a
little genial to begin with. The scene with Wolfgang Koch’s once-again excellent
Alberich was a rare highlight. And Stefan
Vinke’s Siegfried, if hardly perfect, and a little flat of tone to begin with,
was far better than one generally hears. The young Siegfried seems more suited
to his voice, for whatever reason, or perhaps he was simply on better form a
couple of nights before. Nevertheless, there was much to admire in a
performance of stamina and considerable strength. The Norns and Rhinemaidens
impressed, as did Renato Balsadonna’s splendid chorus.
Susan Bullock’s Brünnhilde
was by and large a disappointment. Indeed, I am sure that this is the first
time I have heard a Brünnhilde who was not considerably superior to her
Siegfried. Bullock’s voice, as in Siegfried,
sounds strained by the role. The contrast between her struggling and Fujimura’s
proud performance was unfortunate, to say the least. Peter Coleman-Wright’s
Gunther was worse, however, quite the worst Gunther I have heard. Persistently
out of tone, vocally insecure, he sounded at least 103 – and not in a good way.
Pappano’s conducting was the
gravest problem, reflected in a frequent tiredness sounding from the orchestra.
The opening of the Prologue actually began rather well, at least in retrospect.
If Wagner’s metaphysical depths remained unplumbed, then at least there was
fluency, which one cannot always say with respect to Pappano’s Wagner. From the
departure of the Norns, it was, alas, to be mostly downhill. Listlessness, born
of an apparent lack of understanding of harmonic motion, made much of the
performance seem interminable. Whether the Waltraute scene was the longest I
have ever heard I have no idea, but it certainly sounded like it. The Vassals
Scene was conducted with rigidity, as if it were a march from Aida. By the end of the second act, so
little seemed to be at stake, so little was the score’s richness penetrated, that
we might have been listening to an episode of Crossroads, an impression heightened by the shaky platform – was this
deliberate? – on which the characters were walking. Lethargy was accompanied by
a sound-world somewhat akin to the opaque meaningless people who do not like
Debussy ascribe to Debussy. And so it went on and on and on. By the time the
final theme – the glorification of Brünnhilde, redemption through/of love, whatever
one wishes to call it – sounded, initial near-occlusion of the strings by a bizarrely
prominent kettledrum roll seemed neither here nor there.
There are several Wagner
conductors with connections to the Royal Opera who could have made not just a
better job of this, but most likely produced great or at least very good performances.
It may well now be impossible, but heaven and earth should have been moved to
persuade Bernard Haitink to return to conduct, if not the Ring, then at least some Wagner following his
2007 Parsifal. Whatever happened
to Christian Thielemann? Whatever it was ought to have been put right. Daniele
Gatti and Semyon Bychkov might have been called upon. Simon Rattle and Mark
Elder have both impressed in Wagner, if at a slightly less exalted level. At
the Berlin State Opera, it is quite understandable that Daniel Barenboim tends
to conduct many of the Wagner performances from Das Rheingold onwards; there are few, after all, to match him in
this repertoire. It is less understandable that a conductor whose strengths lie
elsewhere should monopolise performances of the music dramas in London. Parsifal awaits in 2013.
‘Yes, I should like to perish in Valhalla’s
flames! — Mark well my new poem — it contains the beginning of the world
and its destruction!’ Wagner’s words in an 1853 letter to Liszt, a copy of the Ring poem enclosed, express abiding theatricality,
often overlooked, despite Nietzsche’s vicious attack on Wagner as ‘actor’. They
point also to his framing of the Ring
dramas on which he had been at work since 1848 and whose completion would lie
more than two decades hence, in 1874.
The Immolation Scene from the 'Centenary' Ring
Copyright: Bayreuth Festival
It is well known that Wagner wrote his
poems in reverse order, beginning with Siegfrieds
Tod, soon to become Götterdämmerung,
and needing to write three prequels, before composing the music in the order we
know today: the trilogy ‘with preliminary evening’. Likewise that he broke off
composition of Siegfried to write Tristan and Die
Meistersinger; likewisethat he
found it necessary to write a number of verbal endings to Götterdämmerung between 1848 and 1856 before resolving upon the
‘wordless’ solution, or rather enigma, with which he continues to tantalise us.
But the consequences for his dramas are often misunderstood. Wagner’s thought
always tended towards an amalgam of the agglomerative and the synthetic. That
characteristic renders him especially attractive to the historian of the
nineteenth century. Ideas and influences overlap, not necessarily supplanting
or resolving, but heightening conflict, the very stuff of drama, thereby
rendering him especially attractive to audiences and to performers. Not every
idea and influence need be reflected in every performance; were that attempted,
we should most likely end up with an unholy mess. However, not only will any
production, indeed any audience, have to make choices; they also need to
consider what is being left out, or at least played down.
Feuerbach, Bakunin, Marx
Keith Warner’s production emphasises Wagner’s
intellectual influences during the 1840s, as he worked not only towards the Ring but also towards active
participation in the violent, abortive Saxon revolution of 1849. Precisely what
role he took on the barricades remains unclear, but it is unquestionable that he
was close to the visiting anarchist revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, and that he
was consequently ‘wanted’ by the authorities, Wagner being exiled from German
soil until 1860, an amnesty from Saxony taking longer still.
Bakunin
In Warner’s words, ‘Whatever you
personally believe, Wagner is dealing in the Ring with the nature of God and the universe.’ Indeed, he is, which
takes us to ‘the beginning of the world,’ or at least to the beginning of a world. It is actually more complex
even than that, for Wagner presents us, like the Book of Genesis, with
alternative beginnings. Take the following words, which describe the Prelude to
Das Rheingold: ‘the gradual development
of the material world … a wholly natural movement from the simple to the
complex, from the lower to the higher,’ not ‘the vile matter of the idealists … incapable of producing anything,’
but ‘matter … spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive.’ Those
words describe the opening perfectly, from the first sounding of the double
basses’ low E-flat pedal, held throughout the Prelude, reflecting unchanging
Nature: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be – or such would
be the claim of the Church, and of many others. Except that those words were
not written with Das Rheingold in
mind at all. They come from Bakunin’s God
and the State, the convergence a testament to both men’s preoccupation with
the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx and Engels owed a similar debt.
Indeed, the young Engels’s enthusiasm for Feuerbach and Teutonic mythology
mirrored Wagner’s own.Engels wrote in
1840, eulogising Siegfried as the representative of German youth. … We feel the
same thirst for deeds [Taten, the same
word with which Brünnhilde will send Siegfried out into the world from her
rock] … we want to go out into the free world.’ Romantic words, one might
think, for a founding-father of ‘scientific socialism’. That is the point: Engels’s
socialism did not lack on account of his mythological enthusiasm; nor did
Wagner’s.
Feuerbach
Feuerbach was a central
figure in the movement that has come to be known as Left or Young Hegelianism.
During the political, social, and religious repression of the period between
the uneasy restoration of 1815 and the outbreak once again of revolution in
1848-9, a group of German writers wished to extend the revolutionary dynamism
of Hegel’s ontology (philosophy of being) to human realms in which they
believed their father-figure to have neglected, through self-censorship or
otherwise, to follow its implications. Above all, radicals such as Feuerbach,
David Strauss, and Bruno Bauer wished to extend Hegelian criticism to the world
of religion.History, it was claimed, in
true Hegelian style, had a purpose; now was the time to cast out Christianity
at least and perhaps religion itself from philosophy. In his Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach
argued that theology transferred authentic religious impulses, such as love,
justice, and charity, to an object outside man, namely a God of man’s own
invention. Now, however, was the moment to turn from God to man. Wagner would
pay tribute to Feuerbach’s Principles of
the Philosophy of the Future by dedicating to him the 1849 essay, TheArtwork
of the Future. Wotan and Alberich, Valhalla and Nibelheim
And so, in
the Ring, Wagner unmasks – a favourite
Young Hegelian conceit – the realm of the gods, built not upon that first
‘natural’ opening to the cycle, but arising from the second, counterpoised genesis,
as told by the Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung.
Not that the first is so straightforward as it might seem, for Nature, in the
guise of the Rhinemaidens, acts cruelly to Alberich, denies the misfit dwarf
love, and is violated by him in turn; there is no golden age in the Ring-cosmos. That said, the natural
world stands preferable to the deeds of Wotan, chief of the gods and thus in
some sense a representation of the godhead itself. Inscribing runes upon his
spear, Wotan commits the primal sin of politics, defining principles which,
even had they once been good in themselves, become outdated as soon as they
find themselves represented in dead wood. Fricka, according to Wagner the voice
of ‘custom’, simply cannot understand this, lamenting with all the outworn
moralism of a believer who has forgotten quite why she believes, that Siegmund
and Sieglinde should love one another. We never see her again, though she will
be invoked, off-stage – out of Heaven? – by Hunding, not that she can help him,
and as the recipient of vain burnt offerings in Götterdämmerung. Her day has passed.
The spear is also an instrument of
domination; it is with military force as well as ideology that Wotan rules the
world. Yet ideology in a sense comes first, which is why Valhalla is built, as
much a religious as a political fortress, a classic instance of European
‘representational’ culture, which ‘re-presents’ its power to subjects who must
be overawed. For, as Wagner and Bakunin were convinced, the ‘critique of religion is the essential precondition
for all criticism’ (Marx on Hegel): that of Alberich’s capitalist tyranny
of Nibelheim with its golden hoard, the modern factory incarnate, as well as
Wotan’s more sumptuous, more ideologically complex castle in the air. It is
intended, in the words of the celebrated Lutheran chorale, as ‘ein’ feste Burg’
(‘a stronghold sure’), yet note that it appears first of all to Wotan in a
dream. In Feuerbach’s
proclamation: ‘Religion is the dream of the human mind,’ in which ‘we only see
real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of
in the simple daylight of reality and necessity,’ a view lent Wagnerian
credence by Pierre Boulez’s observation, voiced whilst working on the Bayreuth
‘Centenary’ Ring, thatour first musical encounter with Valhalla ‘is
not clearly delineated but belongs to a world of dream, phantasmagoria, and
mirage.’ Moreover, the forced, disturbingly
empty grandeur, or rather grandiosity, of Das
Rheingold’s closing bars tells already of desperation, unnatural
prolongation, deceit, and, as Erda has already foretold, ‘a dark day [that]
dawns for the gods’. Freia and her golden apples may have been regained, but we
have seen behind the throne, as has Alberich. Both Alberich and Licht-Alberich
– the Wanderer, in his riddle-confrontation with Mime styles himself
‘Light-Alberich’, his ‘black’ antagonist’s power-seeking alter ego – commit crimes against Nature, one despoiling the Rhine,
one sapping the life from the World-Ash Tree; both wish to extend that power
through possession of the ring, forged in denial of that love, which was for
Feuerbach the foundation of a true, human religion; both can be unmasked and
thereby overthrown by extension of religious criticism beyond the ‘merely’
theological; and both have their deeds dialectically connected in the musical
metamorphosis between the first two scenes of Das Rheingoldof
Alberich’s ring into Wotan’s Valhalla.
Loge, critic and god of fire
Built upon false contracts, entered into with Fasolt and Fafner,
which was for guaranteed by Wotan’s very own spear of domination, and
perpetuated by continued denial of the gold to the Rhine and its daughters,
Valhalla and the gods’ rule are fatally compromised from the outset. The gods’ entrance,
punctured by the Rhinemaidens’ plaints and Loge’s (Young Hegelian) criticism –
‘They hasten to their
end, they who imagine themselves so strong and enduring’ – is already a dance of death, rendered all the more slippery by
the destabilising, negating, almost Faustian chromaticism of Loge’s motif. Not
for nothing has he been identified as the Ring’s
sole intellectual, and, when one bears Bakunin and indeed the Wagner who
prescribed a ‘fire-cure’ for Paris in mind, one realises that there lies no
contradiction whatsoever between Loge’s twin roles as critic and as god of fire.
Moreover, Loge’s ‘imagine’ (wähnen)
is crucial not only in the Feuerbachian sense, but also in that it provides, in
its anticipation of the Wahn
(‘illusion’) of Schopenhauer, whom Wagner had not yet read, a textbook example
of a concept that would acquire additional layerings of meaning as Wagner’s
work on the cycle and elsewhere proceeded: recall Hans Sachs’s ‘Wahn, Wahn,
überall Wahn!’
The ‘purely human’ Volsungs
The contrasting
world of the ‘purely human’, a term Wagner often employed in his theoretical
writings, is experienced with vernal, magical immediacy in Die Walküre: ‘You are the Spring,’ Sieglinde exults, before
submitting to her brother, the curtain falling only just in time, as the music’s
passion requires us all to take a metaphorical cold shower during the interval.
Feuerbach abides here, for not only does this celebrate love between Siegmund
and Sieglinde; it commemorates Siegmund’s rejection of Valhalla, echoing
Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and
Immortality, whose opening pages include a ‘Humble petition to the exalted,
wise, and honourable learned public to receive Death into the Academy of
Sciences’:
He is
the best doctor on earth;
none of his cures has yet failed;
and no
matter how sick you become,
he
completely heals Nature.
To be
sure, he never has concerned himself
with
Christian theology,
yet he
will have no peer
in
understanding philosophy.
So then
I implore you to receive
Death
into the academy,
and, as
soon as possible, to make
him doctor of philosophy.
What Siegmund accepts, celebrating death
and his love for Sieglinde in heroic defiance of the illusory promise of
immortality in Valhalla, Wotan struggles towards, at one point willing ‘the
end’ and yet, even at the last in Siegfried,
making a stand, unwilling quite to ‘die in the fullest sense of the
word,’ according to Wagner’s words in an 1854 letter. It takes, moreover, a
free act, albeit unconsciously free, by Siegfried, revolutionary hope of Engels
and Wagner alike, finally to shatter Wotan’s spear of law, and to return the
god for good to Valhalla, to await, in Schopenhauerian resignation, the end.
Siegfried’s undoing will be his lack of consciousness, though that spontaneity
will also point to his greatness, a dilemma which, as revolutionary hopes faded
yet never entirely died, became all the more pressing for Wagner. Indeed, it is
only in memoriam, in the shattering
Funeral March, that Siegfried proves worthy of the hopes invested in him, of
Wagner’s stated desire in the Ring
‘to make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’. No longer quite
the hero of the drama that he had been in the more straightforwardly
revolutionary Siegfrieds Tod,
Siegfried has neither quite triumphed nor quite been supplanted: again,
Wagner’s intellectual method poses rather than answers questions.
Concluding, thinking,
making sense of uncertainty
To have written that the dramas were
completed in 1874 was in a sense misleading, for they remain magnificently
open-ended, whether in performance or staging. The composer was notably
dissatisfied with scenic realisation at Bayreuth. Wagner’s great effort to
conclude remains, whatever his own ambitions towards Hegelian totality,
stubbornly necessitates further questioning. This may be of the nature, ‘What
happens to Alberich?’, not at all a silly question. Does such uncertainty of
plot, hardly accidental, suggest that, whatever the ‘watchers’, the mysterious
‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’, at the end of Götterdämmerung may have experienced,
even learned, that we are doomed to repeat the cycle ad infinitum? Such, after all, is the implication of a cycle,
though what of Warner’s and Stefanos Lazaridis’s double helix, perhaps
suggestive of Hegel’s favoured spiral? Indeed, whilst the ring itself tempts us
to think in circular form, we should always bear in mind that, more often than
not, its powers are ‘unmasked’as
illusory. All forms of power, love included, fall prey to Wagner’s deconstruction
and savage indictment – his encounter with the philosophy of Schopenhauer here
fuses with prior disillusionment with the more naïve aspects of Feuerbach’s
‘love-communism’ – and yet we continue
to ask ourselves whether a world without power is even conceivable, or merely
‘utopian’, to borrow from Marx and Engels. Siegfried is never better off than
when he values the ring at naught; Brünnhilde is never worse off than when she
considers it to betoken marriage, another form of property-based power. (The
socialism of French writers such as Charles Fourier, with its celebration of
something akin to what another generation would call ‘free love’, was always a
potent ingredient in Wagner’s intellectual mix, likewise that of Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, whose most famous slogan remains ‘Property is theft’, instantiated in
Alberich’s conversion of value-free Rhinegold into capital.)
Thus particular questioning readily
transforms itself into the more general, conceptual variety, and vice versa. That whole ‘world’ of which
Wagner wrote to Liszt develops before our very eyes and ears, both in
performance and in subsequent contemplation. The Ring’s web of motifs encourages us to think in such a way, to dart
back and forth, reminding us of its world’s past, hinting at its future, and
tantalising us with alternative paths of development, which intriguingly become
all the more ‘real’ the more strongly we know that they will be denied. What
if…? This is not a work one can know too well, or even well enough. And yet, we
know ,with Hegel, that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk; or,
with Marx, that it is folly to write recipes for the cookery books of the
future. It is no coincidence that Hegel and Marx were so taken with early
theories of evolution, with their strong facility of backward explanation and
their weak predictive powers. Wagner might speak theoretically of the ‘artwork
of the future’, but he is wise enough in that artwork to stick to the past and
present; he does not present us with science fiction.The world is rightly given over to the
‘watchers’.
What
about us? We might do well to heed Warner’s words, ‘When you are torn apart at
the end of Die Walküre – as I think
you should be – it’s because you’ve had five hours of profound information
about these people, not because you’ve been manipulated into weeping by mere
theatrical or musical devices.’ Wagner, in his own words, aims at
‘emotionalisation of the intellect’, not at its abdication. The Ring acts as a standing rebuke to those
people – Nietzsche might have called them ‘Wagnerians’ – who wish merely to
wallow. An audience, just as much as a performer or a director, which fails to
think is unworthy of the Ring, yet
that incitement affords an extraordinary opportunity. There is clearly
identification, albeit uncertain, to be had between us and the ‘watchers’ – we
are all survivors – and a crucial clue here is that they are human. The end of
Wotan’s rule is not hymned with words of revolutionary jubilation as it had
been in one of Wagner’s projected endings, the so-called ‘Feuerbach ending’,
yet there nevertheless remains a strong sense that, human though we may be in
our failings as well as our strengths, our world is that Nietzsche would herald
in The Gay Science:
We philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel,
when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone upon
us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation.
At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be
bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any
danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our
sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.
Uncertainty with respect both to the
watchers’ position and to ours precludes glib chatter of a happy ending.Yet,
informed as much by Schopenhauer’s ideas of compassion as Feuerbach’s unmasking
of religion, they stand a little advanced upon the savagery we have witnessed,
a beacon of hope to our world, which has signally failed to destroy Valhalla or
Nibelheim. In the words of Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art cannot change the world, but
it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women
who could change the world.’ There can be no final words when it comes to the Ring, but let us temporarily conclude
with a return to Boulez:
There have been endless discussions as to
whether this conclusion is pessimistic or optimistic [in our shorthand,
‘Feuerbach or Schopenhauer?’]; but is that really the question? Or at any rate
can the question be put in such simple terms? [Patrice] Chéreau has called it
‘oracular’, and it is a good description. In the ancient world, oracles were
always ambiguously phrased so that their deeper meaning could be understood
only after the event, which, as it were, provided a semantic analysis of the
oracle’s statement. Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us
with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in
meaning.
