Nature Boy

Barry Emslie’s Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love has attracted lavish praise, already described as ‘the essential Wagner book of the year’ in Classical Music magazine. It is a bold book which argues that Wagner's music dramas cannot be understood if treated separately from his thought, his life and the intellectual and artistic climate of his day. To give a flavour of Emslie’s style, here is an extended excerpt from his examination of the character of Siegfried:

Siegfried has a mother complex; indeed he has the mother of all mother complexes. Not least among the attractions of this is that Wagner, when it comes to maternal longing, is extremely sensitive. And although this is highly subjective territory, I suggest that many of the most tender and beautiful passages in the score of Siegfried are expressive of those moments when the hero muses on his mother. I would also make a similar claim for the exquisite passage at the end of Walküre when Wotan kisses his daughter/bride Brünnhilde to sleep.

Siegfried is the ideal oedipal candidate because he is not only obsessed with The Mother; he has never had any contact with a woman. He lives in state of absolute lack, but it is a knowing lack. That is, the empty site of the absent mother is something of which he is heart-breakingly aware. It pains him. But he has come to this knowledge in a purely pantheist fashion. He has observed all-wise nature working out her various miracles among the creatures of the forest and has thereby inferred the truth about pairing and reproduction. He is, in fact, a vulgar materialist, a true child of nature. Offended yet again by Mime’s lies, he retorts: “My ears do not believe you. I’ll credit only the evidence of my own eyes.” Having then dismissed Mime’s claims to be mother and father in one, he is confronted with trying to make sense of the great gap where the secret of his identity lies. Solving this mystery, gaining this knowledge both theoretically and – when he meets Brünnhilde – corporeally is the real agenda of the work. Indeed within the parameters of Wagnerian ideology this can only be accomplished courtesy of the deepest (i.e. sexual) experience of life. With this will come not only entry into manhood but, potentially, into human society as well. Firstly, however, he must get a name and the name of his parents. Mime must be forced to give up this information. After this has been achieved the dwarf feels compelled to produce the broken shards of Nothung. But here his motives are ambivalent as he needs both the sword and Siegfried to kill Fafner. However, while these events put Siegfried on the narrative road of the great adventure, the profound emotional lack, expressed as maternal longing, remains his sole motivation. Psychologically he is in effect setting out on a search for his mother, although he does not know this. In fact he is ostensibly aware that such a search is impossible in commonsense terms, Mime having explained that Sieglinde died in giving birth. On hearing this Siegfried’s response was brief but exceptionally poignant. Superficially regarded, he knows – and we know – that he has no hope of finding the all-privileged, all desired woman. Yet Wagner’s subtlety is such that we come to understand that that is, nevertheless, the hero’s unconscious agenda. Furthermore, we will come to feel – at the very least – that such an agenda is realisable once we enter into the deeper metaphysical world of The Ring.

The first stage in this oedipal narrative is the passage already referred to as “Forest Murmurs”. Left alone by Mime in front of Fafner’s cave we experience Siegfried for the first time as a true child of, and in, nature. Naturally he muses on his mother. There is no better place for him to do so irrespective of whether we are inclined to look for specific maternal (womb based) symbols in the setting or not. Nature herself is surely enough. His frustrated mother love is expressed in several telling passages. He is struck that he cannot imagine what she looked like (but speculates that her eyes must have been lustrous like the deer’s) and asks himself the naïve question “Do all men’s mothers die of their sons?” In this instance the mother’s status as the paradoxically absent but omniscient signifier, could not be more explicit. And yet there is a slight, and poignant, contradiction. Siegfried’s empiricism seems not to do the business when it comes to his own kind. He knows full well that in the forest the female is not condemned to sacrifice her life in childbirth. However, not having experienced any human society (the dwarf Mime in the Wagnerian scheme of things hardly qualifies) he cannot make the obvious inference with any certainty. Women may be different. In Wagner they are certainly special.

It is not too fanciful to suggest that Wagner is knowingly drawing our attention here to the wholly apposite dichotomy between the individual absent mother for whom Siegfried longs, and maternal nature which not only surrounds him but moreover creates the womb-like benevolent and comforting environment in which he is most completely at home and where, consequently, he has no need to learn fear. A Schopenhauerian might see this as a (temporary) triumph over the debilitating awareness of individuation which otherwise alienates the subject from the universal will and thereby makes impossible a deeper understanding of its phenomenon: the world. Siegfried gives us some sense here of the will-in-itself in that he is, momentarily, pantheism embodied. However there is no way that Wagner can pursue this agenda, given that he is set on celebrating the amoral hero who is true to greater and undiluted egocentric values and must, therefore, exuberantly and hopefully leave the forest and burst into the world as a wilful “doer”. Whether Wagner likes it or not, the hero he sketched more than two decades before he finished musically setting the text, has much in common with the world enhancing individual celebrated for his amoral greatness in the pages of the philosopher Schopenhauer most despised: Hegel.

There then follows the business by which Siegfried enters the cave and thus goes more deeply into nature. Subsequently Fafner’s blood and the decoding of the Forest Bird’s song accord him an identity which is unique in The Ring. In this, at least, Wagner realises his agenda. He has found dramatic means equal to the deeper story and its symbols. The disaster for the composer comes about, as we have seen, when he can find no acceptable terms of reference for Siegfried (and Brünnhilde) once he has taken one of them out of the forest and brought the other down from the mountain top.

However, it is only when Siegfried encounters Brünnhilde that the true subtlety of the oedipal trauma becomes clear. Having dismissed his father’s murderer (as he not unfairly regards Wotan) and faced down the fire (no problem as he is still without fear) he frees the sleeping Brünnhilde from her armour and discovers that she is “not a man”. At this point he immediately learns fear and calls frantically on his mother to think of him. Soon after – before he has kissed Brünnhilde awake – he again calls on his mother, asking her to see what has become of her valiant child. Thus the all-important signifier of the absent mother becomes step by step associated with the present woman for whom, as Siegfried repeatedly declares, his heart pounds and his blood rushes. And subsequently when the awoken Brünnhilde explains to him that she protected him before he was born, that she “fed [his] tender being,” the two notions become momentarily fused. Siegfried imagines that he has encountered his actual mother and mate in one, whereupon Brünnhilde is compelled to bring him back to what we might call commonsense reality.

This is an adept set of shifts and, although the relevant passages are short and the matter speedily dealt with, it should be seen as a clear and important advance in respect of what Wagner can do with sexual mores, love, knowledge and identity. In Parsifal, however, exactly that same nexus will surface in a superficially similar manner. But this time the synthesis will be, in real terms, much deeper and more far-reaching. In fact, in the swindle stakes Parsifal will out trump everything that precedes it. Meanwhile in Siegfried, once Brünnhilde has cleared up the misunderstanding, the oedipal complex is simply and relatively brusquely put to one side and everything is then exclusively focused on the coming union. But even while we may not see that union as literally oedipal in that it does not directly express Siegfried’s mother complex, it certainly implies it. Furthermore it is still, literally, an incestuous pairing. Siegfried is, after all, about to copulate with his twin parents’ half sister. He can, at least in his present state of ignorance, hardly know this, but she, and we, most certainly do.

What follows has more to do with Brünnhilde and at this point we should backtrack briefly to the moment of her awakening. It is striking that her first words are not to Siegfried, about whom she is already better informed than he, but to the natural world; her own shining natural world. She greets nature. She hails the sun, the light, the day. And the score is duly flooded with radiance. Nevertheless, she will no more be able to remain immaculately in that milieu than Siegfried has been able to remain in the forest. In fact it is worthwhile noting that Siegfried was always well aware that the forest was not the “be all and the end all”. When told in act one of Fafner’s lair and where it was to be found, he observed that it is “not far from the world”. But of course this is meagre stuff in comparison to what Brünnhilde knows and has experienced. As a result her encounter with Siegfried is much more complicated than his with her. She knows too much and is therefore forced into the role of his teacher.

In some ways – though not sexually, she is a virgin – she is the classic older woman. Furthermore she finds herself in momentary difficulties because of the radical shift in her identity which has seen her lose her Godhead only to be compensated by the miserable status of a mere woman. This appals her and she initially asks to be left alone. However, as we know, the seemingly miserable status of “woman” is, in the Wagnerian scheme of things, redolent with higher philosophical significance. This is particularly so when the privileged woman mates (whether “idealistically” or, as here, clearly physically) with the needy male. There is no more ethereal role for the eternal feminine, at least until that ultimate moment is reached when she will sacrifice her own life to bring the beneficent parable to an even greater, and decisive, climax. So Brünnhilde succumbs passionately to Siegfried’s ardent demands and they duly couple in a torrent of (barely singable) exaltation. When they climax (at least musically) they do so by welding “radiant love” to “laughing death.” Love (implying procreation) and death might be seen as nature’s most fundamental categories. Wagner sees them as such. And it is with the signifier “death” that the work joyously concludes. It is the last word we hear from both of them, blazing out at the very end in the full self-confidence of Brünnhilde’s top C. Of course Wagner had known that death was a necessary ingredient in the recipe of the music drama from the moment he first tackled the redemption theme in The Flying Dutchman. However before setting the last act of Siegfried he had not only read Schopenhauer but written and composed Tristan und Isolde. As a result he had a deeper understanding of death and a greater ability to take full advantage of it as the necessary corollary of love; which is to say as the noblest manifestation of nature and the royal road to renunciation.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love is available from all good booksellers.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love

Barry Emslie's new study of Wagner's intellectual and creative wellsprings goes to the heart of the matter. Focusing on the centrality of love to the Wagnerian project, he shows how its obverse, hate - and specifically racial hate - is also ineluctably integral to the composer's Weltanschauung. Here, Barry Emslie outlines the central theme of this provocative new title:

Oh no, not another one! For while the world needs many things and no doubt many books, it surely doesn't need another book on Wagner. Well I have no option but to maintain that it does, or, at the very least, that it needs mine. This is an outrageously arrogant position but it is rather forced on the writer. All that work, all that time, if it ends up as a printed and published object pushed – oh so modestly pushed – under the noses of the public, just doesn't wash if the modesty is real. Surely this a discrepancy that Wagner forces on the author. For it is his dubious spirit that keeps the publications glut at just slightly below the tsunami but well above the justifiably sensible level. The ironic result is that the scribbler, no matter how self-effacing, is compelled into a form of special pleading which, in its own way, is no less egotistical than the megalomaniac posturings of the Master himself.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love had its origins – as far as one can be specific on the matter – in an article I wrote for the Wagner Journal (Wagner: Race, Nation, Culture Vol. 2 No. 1). This paid as much attention to Wagner's polemical writings as it did to his music dramas, though it had little to say on more general German historical and cultural themes. It led to the book in two ways. Firstly there seemed in retrospect to be a bad fit between content and form. I felt that I had tried to pour a quart bottle into a pint jug. Much that was there needed to be filled-out, developed and placed in a more ambitious and far-reaching context. But the second consideration was yet more important. In reading Wagner's anti-semitic and Germanophile writings I became convinced that the natural and customary horror they evoked was misplaced, or, better said, that it was the product of a mis-recognition of what was really motivating him. For his anti-semitism is not significant simply because – or even chiefly because – it is obnoxious. Of much greater importance is that the idea of the Jews and Jewishness underpins his wider Weltanschauung. Consequently his positive notions of race, nation and culture take meaning from a Jewish antipode, chiefly because that antipode is dependent on a notion of “lovelessness”. I was convinced that this alternative, negative paradigm was essential to the productive development of Wagner's theoretical essays and his operatic practice, and that in its own way it was a key factor in the development of his ideas on redemption, on sexual liberation, and on what it means to belong to the German Volk. Far from muddying the waters it seduced me further into believing that I could interrelate the whole panoply of Wagner's intellectual and artistic strivings. In short it made the proposed book yet more ambitious: it was now going to cover a great deal of messy terrain without getting bogged down or entangled in contradictions. And it was all going to be done unproblematically under the rubric of love. Chance would be a fine thing!

Nonetheless, the element of hubris has remained. For while I would not claim that the book is the riddle of Wagner solved and that it – as used to be said of Marxism – knows itself to be the solution, it is not coy in laying out its far-reaching and comprehensive interpretation. Even so, everyone is aware that all pretension as to final answers in matters of this sort is folly. Worse than folly; it is unproductive. So there must be a contradiction at work here as well, in that one takes a big approach while accepting that no comprehensive interpretation can ever deliver in the manner that one wants. In the end even a grand theory purporting to get a handle on Wagner's music dramas, his polemical essays and to deal with them both in the impossibly broader contexts of German culture and history, can only vindicate itself in as much as it suggests new resolutions and opens up new areas of doubt and debate.

Which rather means that Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love won't be, can't be, and certainly shouldn't be, the last word. Therefore one contributes to the potential tsunami in two ways. Firstly as drop in the ocean, and secondly, as an incitement to others. As Thomas Mann said “Wagner and no end...” At least not yet, anyway.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love is published by the Boydell Press and available from your favourite music bookseller.

Whatever happened to Reggie?

‘Even if you lived to be 150 years old you would still not discover all the secrets of the Ring,’ said Reginald Goodall, and indeed he continued to study the scores of this and other Wagner operas until the end of his life. And what a colourful life it was, as anyone who knows John Lucas’s biography of the conductor, Reggie, will confirm. Next month we will be reissuing the book for the first time in paperback, updated with a new Foreword by Sir Peter Moores, under the new title The Genius of Valhalla. Here is a short extract from the Introduction:

I first heard Goodall conduct in the 1950s. He was on the staff of Covent Garden, though his appearances in the pit there were sporadic. He gave performances of Manon, Turandot and Bohème that were cogent and illuminating, and he breathed life into Britten’s Gloriana after its unfortunate premiere under John Pritchard. His Meistersinger – “Not my Meistersinger,” I can hear him saying crossly, “Wagner’s” – won him glowing notices in the press, as did the performances of Die Walküre he conducted on tour. Yet by the end of the decade he had all but disappeared from view. It was puzzling, but I knew nothing then of operatic politics.

At a party at the 1961 Edinburgh Festival I was introduced to a Covent Garden stalwart, the baritone Geraint Evans, who regaled his fellow guests with tales of the Opera House. What, I asked him, had happened to Goodall? He adopted a solemn expression. “Ah, Reginald,” he said, rolling the initial R theatrically. “Poor Reginald.” He then changed the subject. Clearly, as far as Covent Garden was concerned, Goodall was a spent force. Yet seven years later, at the age of sixty-six, he made an extraordinary comeback, with a production of The Mastersingers for Sadler’s Wells Opera that demonstrated beyond dispute that here was a great Wagner conductor in a tradition stretching back through Hans Knappertsbusch and Karl Muck to Hans Richter, conductor of the first Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876.

Goodall had watched Knappertsbusch at work during his visits to Bayreuth throughout the 1950s, and from him had learned how to build the acts in great, seamless arches, how to relate one tempo to another, how to balance the sound so that each individual strand in the orchestral fabric could be heard, how to ensure, through close attention to the dynamic markings in the orchestral parts, that singers were never drowned. Goodall complained that most conductors failed to observe Wagner’s dynamics; as a result, he said, singers were encouraged to sing stridently in order to compete with the orchestral flood. Big steely voices were not for him – he liked voices that were even in quality and sonority from top to bottom of their range. “Too much metal, dear,” he grumbled at even his favourite sopranos when they sang high notes – and he would stick his fingers in his ears to underline the point. In low-lying passages he demanded the rich characteristic of the violin’s bottom string – “More G string, dear” was a constant plea.

Not all singers could cope with Goodall and the demands he made of them. But those who could revered him. A Goodall regular, the bass Gwynne Howell, has written, “He could be infuriating and cuttingly critical with, at peak moments, a quick stamping of the feet. With luck the next singer would arrive – preferably female, he liked female company – and calm would be restored. I would return home on some exhausted high, but just as I felt I wanted to give up it would all fall into place. All those shaky gestures of his conducting style would become clear and meaningful.”

Goodall attached the greatest importance to Wagner’s final injunction to his singers before the 1876 Ring at Bayreuth: “Die grossen Noten kommen von selbst; die kleinen Noten and ihr Text sind die Hauptsache” – “The big notes look after themselves; the little notes and their text are the main thing.” All the semi-quavers, said Goodall, were to be given their proper sonority; they were not to be “snatched at”. Words had to be sung with the utmost clarity and attention to meaning. Notes had to be “coloured”, either to mirror the harmonies in the orchestra or to reflect the emotional mood of the scene or phrase. “Angel of death,” he would say to his Brünnhildes in the Todesverkündigung in Act 2 of Die Walküre, urging them to adopt a dark, grave sound; during King Marke’s long solo in Act 2 of Tristan, he would ask the singer to match the timbre of the accompanying bass clarinet. Goodall was responsible for a remarkable flowering of Wagner singing that led to a generation of British and Commonwealth Wagner singers he had coached taking leading roles at Bayreuth, stretching from Jon Vickers in the late 1950s to John Tomlinson and Anne Evans thirty years later.

Goodall was sometimes mocked for his painstaking rehearsal methods, yet he worked in a way that would have been considered natural by Wagner’s earliest interpreters. He was shocked by the fact that international conductors in the latter part of the twentieth century rarely took the trouble to coach the singers for their own productions: “Imagine Klemperer behaving like that! That’s one of the things I like about Barenboim – he works with his singers. He’s one of the few who does, and it shows. Most of the others are flitting here and there, conducting this and that. It makes me tired.”

The Chandos recording of Goodall’s Mastersingers has been nominated for a Gramophone Award. The Genius of Valhalla: The Life of Reginald Goodall by John Lucas, author of the acclaimed Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, will be available from all good booksellers from October.

Wagner today and forever

From Beyond the Stave will take a short break for three weeks, returning at the end of May. In the meantime we leave you with Eastman Studies in Music series editor, Ralph Locke, whose own book has recently been published by a publishing house just down the road from Boydell & Brewer's Suffolk HQ.

Wagner’s operas repel some people and strike others as simply ridiculous. But many of those who scoff, or claim to be repulsed, have never listened to an entire Wagner opera, studied its libretto, or done much reading about the works, their background, and their importance. It is easier now than ever to get one’s ears and eyes around Wagner’s works. All of his operas (except to some extent his earliest three) are available in numerous superb recorded CD and DVD performances. The Metropolitan Opera sent a live high-definition video transmission of Tristan und Isolde to movie theaters around the world in March 2008, and repeated it on television a few months later. All told, the performance reached millions of viewers.

During a recent out-of-town trip, the car that I rented was outfitted with something new to me: Sirius Satellite Radio. I tuned in to the Metropolitan Opera Radio channel one weekday morning at 7:45AM, only to find myself in the middle of a recording from the Met’s audio archives: a 1971 Saturday matinee radiocast of Tristan. The opera must have started more than an hour earlier: we were already in Act 2, heading toward Tristan’s entry and the great love duet. The featured singers were soprano Birgit Nilsson (legendary for her rock-solid performances in the 1960s and 70s) and tenor Jess Thomas. For my taste, both of them were outshone by the less well-known Irene Dalis as a riveting Brangäne. Clearly, Dalis possessed one of the great mezzo-soprano voices—and mezzo temperaments!—of the twentieth century. (Her intense portrayal of Kundry, in the 1962 Bayreuth recording of Parsifal under Knappertsbusch, is praised by connoisseurs as one of the best ever.)

A few days before I was thrown into the heaving surges of Tristan und Isolde at such an early hour, someone at the Christian Science Monitor asked me to comment on the recently inaugurated Ring Cycle at Los Angeles Opera (more on this below). Though my own operatic research veers towards the Italian and French repertoire, the Met re-broadcast from 1971 and the news about Los Angeles’s Ring Cycle reminded me how important Wagner was and remains for the musical world, and for Western cultural life, generally.

Despite the remarks of confirmed anti-Wagnerians, the operas (or, as Wagner termed them, “music dramas”) remain commanding monuments of artistic inspiration and insight. And they have been broadly influential, besides. Indeed, it seems to me nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of Wagner’s theories and the operas in which he put those theories into often blazingly brilliant practice. Before Wagner, the full resources of symphonic music—the elaborate development of musical motive and astute handling of key, chord, and modulation—had been brought to new heights by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Wagner was the first to propose certain immensely effective ways in which these essentially symphonic and sonata-like resources could be harnessed to an acted-out story, in conjunction with other resources, such as sets and costumes.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle remains, to my mind, the highest of his achievements. It uses sharply etched motives and no less distinctive orchestral colors to characterize—brilliantly, movingly—the individuals and actions on stage. As many a Wagner commentator has recognized, the motives do not necessarily stay fixed but are altered, combined, reharmonized, and sometimes utterly transformed. (For the utter novice, one great place to start is Deryck Cooke’s perceptive 2-CD set, An Introduction to Der Ring des Nibelungen, which uses musical excerpts from the still-unsurpassed Solti recording. Another is the hilarious—and remarkably accurate—narrated version by “concert comedienne” Anna Russell, which is likewise now available on CD.) The resulting music, immensely varied and emotionally pointed, suggests how we might feel about the story that is being played out in front of us. Of course, we are not obligated to respond in the way that the music wants to impel us. As always with great art, we are free to give in to the tide’s flow—or to resist it, by which I mean think critically about it.

Wagner’s innovations shaped the operatic work of composers within Germany and abroad, such as Massenet and Debussy in France. Directly or indirectly (i.e., through the works of the post-Wagnerians), these innovations also became embedded in the practices of musicians who accompanied silent films. (Of course, Wagner’s works were by no means the only root of silent-film accompanying. Perhaps the single most basic influence came from the established practices of incidental music in the theater: a small orchestra played short tunes and more continuous figurations “under” mimed action scenes and even under many spoken exchanges.)

Once sound film arrived in the 1920s, the standard devices of silent-film accompanying found their way into the practices of film-score composers. These (partly Wagnerian) devices continue to work their reliable magic in our own day. Particular features from Wagner’s Ring Cycle find echo in Howard Shore’s background score to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: the orchestra underlines, with vividly characterized themes and distinctive orchestral colors and textures, the highly contrasted characters and their temptations and travails.

Elsewhere in the popular realm a different kind of Wagnerian ambition often shows up. One need only think of the sound-and-light shows that occur nightly in front of certain historic European buildings or, in Egypt, at the pyramids at Gizeh. Götterdämmerung-like effects have become standard at ice-skating exhibitions and stadium-rock concerts.

Still, Wagner’s achievement in the Ring Cycle remains incomparable. No other operatic work is at once so great and so vast. And so daunting. Few cities in the world have an opera company capable of mounting even one of the Ring operas in a given year. No wonder people in Los Angeles are getting so excited that the first two Ring operas are being performed there this season (Das Rheingold in February and March; Die Walküre during April, featuring Plácido Domingo as Siegmund) and that all four will be scheduled in 2010—along with a two-and-a-half-month city-wide Wagner festival involving over 50 arts and cultural organizations.

Los Angeles’s mammoth Wagner project will surely attract people who come from many walks of life and have many different tastes and, we might say, cultural commitments. Brünnhilde and Siegfried, armed with helmets (or not, depending on the costume designer) and industrial-strength voices (for sure), could even be considered the original heavy-metal artists! The Ring Cycle is a world unto itself. It can be explored again and again, in different productions and with different performers. And, like all great works of art, the more one brings to it, and the more one approaches it with an open and active, challenging mind, the more one gets in return.

I also imagine that opera lovers from elsewhere will make Los Angeles a chosen destination, as already happens every summer at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus that Wagner himself designed, and at the Seattle Opera (whose every-four-years Ring Cycle returns this coming August).

Meanwhile, those of us in more modest-sized cities and towns have access, as I mentioned earlier, to Wagner’s various operas through CDs and DVDs. There are also splendidly insightful and challenging books. Restricting myself to titles from the Boydell family of imprints (including University of Rochester Press and Camden House), I might mention the multi-authored companions to Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal and books on the importance of two cities in Wagner’s career: Venice and Zurich. Stephen McClatchie’s Analyzing Wagner's Operas tells the engrossing story of how the writings of a widely respected scholar of the 1920s-30s, Alfred Lorenz, served as a “musical metaphor” for Nazi ideology. (The often perverted appropriation of Wagner by the Third Reich need not, however, scare us away from exploring the works today, and finding out for ourselves what they have to offer.) In another recent study, cultural historian Hannu Salmi reveals unknown details of Wagner’s early years in Riga (today the capital of Latvia) and Königsberg (today the Russian city of Kaliningrad). Salmi’s book also recounts the struggles of local musicians throughout the Baltic region to get Wagner’s operas performed even halfway adequately.

And now, as I indicated at the outset, there is the Metropolitan Opera Radio channel (via Sirius Satellite). No Ring Cycle operas were to be heard during the few days when I was driving that nicely outfitted car. But it is surely only a matter of time before Sirius will be broadcasting them. Perhaps all four operas will be scheduled, one after the other, running for some 16 or more hours straight. Operaphiles may end up driving out of town on the highway and then back home, repeating the trip as many times as needed. Or they may prefer to sit listening in their driveway, running down the battery until that sweet-sad moment of release when the fabled Rhine overflows its banks and what we perhaps mistake for real life can begin again.

Wagner fans will also be interested to hear that the Boydell Press will reissue John Lucas' acclaimed biography of conductor Reginald Goodall later this year.

The Lion roars for Wagner

In a week when the flood waters threatened Venice more dramatically than at any time during the past two decades, here is John W Barker, author of Wagner and Venice, on the composer's relationship to that great city:

The Lion of St. Mark, eternal symbol of Venice, has witnessed a lot over the centuries, good and bad, and even since the fall of the Serene Republic in 1797. All the tourists might not think so, but the Lion has had some fun even since then. He has actually taken a shine to some of the many foreigners who visit. One in particular, a funny chap named Richard Wagner.

Short and stubby, with an ego at least double-sized. And opinionated! But, you know, a genius, too. A great composer, and lots more. The Lion first got to know some of Wagner's music when the Municipal Band played a few arrangements. Then the Lion heard some of Wagner's full operas. The Lion loves opera -
after all, his city of Venice almost invented it as a form of public entertainment in the sixteenth century, and built the first permanent theaters for it.

Sure, the Lion didn't like Wagner himself too much at first. The guy came to Venice the first time in 1858 and spent some months there. Gloomy fellow, keeping to himself, not caring that the Lion had an Austrian muzzle at the time. But during that stay, Wagner composed the middle act of what the Lion was informed was one of the greatest of all operas. Though German, of course. Wagner came back for five more visits, eventually bringing with him his new wife, Cosima - now there was one tough lady! - and their children. At first they were just passing through, but the Lion was pleased to see that Wagner quickly came to love the Lagoon City. Cosima dragged her husband to art galleries, and they walked and gondola-ed about, while Wagner spouted his endless pontifications. Venice really got to Wagner, the Lion noticed. And Wagner even rented the facilities of the glorious Fenice Theater and Music Conservatory to conduct his major student work, one of those Germanic symphonies.

But then, on that last visit, Wagner suddenly died, in that grand old Palazzo Vendramin where he and his family were lodging. The Lion by then had recognized what a truly famous and important chap this Wagner was, and wanted to keep his body in Venice, or at least make a big splashy send-off to his remains. Well, the composer's corpse was quietly taken back to Germany for burial, but soon the Lion realized that Wagner had nevertheless left something of himself and his art to Venice. Just two months after the composer died, a visiting German company gave a fully staged production of that cycle of four operas, The Ring of the Niebelungen, at the Lion's beloved Fenice - honoring the theater and the city with the first such show of it anywhere in Italy. OK, in German, but what a blast! The Lion was now a true Wagnerian convert. And what fun to watch the circus as all the critics decided what Wagner's music meant for Italian music and how it affected Italian opera-lovers!

It didn’t stop there. That Municipal Band really took up the composer's cause in the city. Its leader, that brave little Sicilian with the Neapolitan name, Calascione, who had conducted for Wagner and had won his respect, became a real booster - giving concerts right under the Lion's twitching nose in the Piazza San Marco. Pretty soon, there was an annual commemoration on the day of Wagner's death. Those went on for decades, and that famous American lady in Paris, the Princesse de Polignac, even chipped in some cash to support those events. But the Lion wanted still more. Under his inspiration, some of the foreign residents in the city arranged to have a fine bust of Wagner set up in the Public Gardens. The Lion had to allow good Italians to set up an adjacent bust of Verdi, the following year, to satisfy national honor. So the Lion found in that daring egotist, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and some of his foreign friends, just the ones to create and set up a memorial plaque on the Canal wall of the Palazzo Vendramin, as a final riposte. Other markers, too. A plaque at the Lavena Café where Wagner liked to take his kids for sweets. And a marker outside the street entrance to the Vendramin. No other foreigner has acquired as many monuments and markers in Venice as has Wagner.

Of course, there were slights along the way. That silly strutter, Mussolini, and that evil dictator, Hitler, first met in Venice, and they never bothered to pay the slightest attention to the Wagner associations of Venice and the Vendramin. By now, however, the Lion has won over Venetians and Italians to appreciate Wagner's music. There is even a Wagner Association in the city, and although the Vendramin is now a part-year gambling casino, that Association has turned the room were Wagner died into a museum.

Yes, the Lion honors many other composers, like Gabrieli and Monteverdi and Vivaldi. But Wagner is special. Venice has stolen some of him from the Germans and made him a naturalized Venetian.

The Lion is still there, proud and undaunted, an unashamed Wagnerite. And Wagner himself is still there, too, a permanent part of Venice's mystique.

John W Barker's superbly evocative Wagner and Venice is available now from all good booksellers.

Wagner and Wagnerism

This week it was announced that Wolfgang Wagner, Director of the Bayreuth Festival since 1951, would retire at the end of August. Although it seems that problems with his successor have not been completely ironed out, the two main contenders, Wolfgang’s daughters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, have submitted a joint proposal to the foundation that runs the Festival.

It was a production of Parsifal at the 1966 Bayreuth Festival that signified Pierre Boulez’ move into mainstream repertoire. His tempi were controversial, he remembers in a fascinating interview with Nicholas Wroe in the Guardian, and although he claims not to enjoy controversy “if you feel something deeply, then you shouldn’t fear polemic.”

Our US-based imprints the University of Rochester Press and Camden House continue to publish widely on Wagner, with the announcement of John W Barker’s Wagner and Venice for November 2008. Wagner died there in 1883, and this book will use new and previously unavailable sources to chart his visits to the city, what it meant to him, and the process through which Wagner and his posthumous reputation became integrated into Venice’s own cultural image.

It joins a distinguished list of publications on the composer, most recently Chris Walton’s well-received Richard Wagner’s Zurich, as well as a companion to Parsifal, a fascinating book of essays on Wagner’s Meistersinger, an examination of the Wagner cult in Scandinavia and the Baltic region, and an analysis of Wagner’s operas in the context of German nationalist ideology. More on Wagner and Venice in future posts.

Chris Walton's Zurich

Chris Walton, author of the acclaimed Richard Wagner's Zurich, published under our German Studies imprint, Camden House, writes about his own years in that beautiful city:

I’ve been asked to write something for From Beyond the Stave. But being doggedly lowtech in most things (I never use Powerpoint, for example, but stick with transparencies whenever I lecture), I’ve been humming and hah-ing about it for several months. But I’ve promised I’ll write something, and since the Boydell Blog seems to favour the anecdotal (those are the bits of the Blog I myself enjoy the most), I’ll oblige with something anecdotal of my own.

When I was a student back in Cambridge, I’d always sworn that the two careers I’d avoid would be teaching and librarianship. Perhaps inevitably, I ended up running Switzerland’s main music library for ten years and have been teaching ever since. The decade in Zurich was in many ways the most fascinating, not least because almost everyone who was anyone in the music world has passed through the place or lived there at some point. My job thus brought me into contact with all kinds of people I’d only ever read about – the place is a name-dropper’s paradise – and I was privileged to get to know, for example, the last surviving Berlin student of Arnold Schoenberg (Erich Schmid), I had tea regularly with Furtwängler’s widow Elisabeth (a remarkable lady in her own right), and became such good friends with Lotte Klemperer (a woman possessed of a great mind and even bigger heart) that we named our second daughter after her. For a boy from a northern English comprehensive school whose family comprised mostly coalminers, Zurich was quite an experience (Billy Elliot was filmed near where my family came from, and the star of the movie, Jamie Bell, comes from my home town of Billingham).

Part of my job was to locate the archives of composers and musicians and convince them or their heirs to donate them to my library (we never paid a penny, on principle, yet we still managed to get 106 archives in ten years). There were depressing occasions – such as when I found the heirs of a man who’d been a major concert pianist before the First World War and had written some spectacular music, only to find that they’d thrown out his diaries two weeks before. But then there were wonderful occasions such as when I visited the widow of Paul Kletzki in Berne. I’d been put in touch with her by a colleague from the Swiss Rights Society, but had at the time had my fill of widows of mediocre composers, and so allocated half an hour on my way back from a meeting to pay her a courtesy call, and then get home to the wife and kids halfway across the country. But when I got there, I discovered not only that she was charming, ebullient and very clever, but one glance at the opening of a symphony by her husband left me so excited that I immediately arranged to come again as soon as possible – the music was simply wonderful, subtly scored, and full of personality (if a composer can show you that on a single page, then he’s got something). I visited her several times after that – mostly for my own pleasure, I have to confess, as chatting with her (despite my rusty French) was a pure joy. And she donated all her husband’s scores to my library. Thanks to a local foundation and a lot of help from Tim Jackson of North Texas University, more and more of Kletzki’s works are being performed and recorded today (check out his Third Symphony on the BIS label).

One of the other real discoveries, however, was a Wagnerian one. I was visiting the daughter of a little-known late-Romantic Swiss composer and her husband with a view to our library acquiring her father’s archives. We had discussed everything, it was all decided, then just as we were leaving for lunch, she said “I’ve got a score that my mother picked up at auction fifty years ago, perhaps it might interest you as well”, and at that put before me a full score of Wagner’s Die Walküre. The score was in a script unknown to me, but the title page was unmistakeably in Wagner’s own hand. Another hand had scrawled a number at the bottom of the title page that I realized had to be the plate number of the full score as first printed by Schott in Mainz. I only had a minute or so to look at it before we went to lunch. I was probably too distracted to be polite over the meal, and couldn’t wait to get back to the office to check up on the score I’d just seen.

A quick look through the books and a phone call to the Wagner Edition in Munich that afternoon clarified the matter. It was the Stichvorlage, the manuscript copy made under Wagner’s supervision that had served as the basis for the first edition of the full score. It had been considered lost for half a century, since it was sold at auction and never seen again. Until now. And since Wagner’s original manuscript is deemed to have burnt to a cinder in Hitler’s bunker, the newly discovered score in question was more or less the most important source one could find for the opera. I explained to the family what it was they possessed, and they still agreed to donate it to my library. In return, we promised to have some of the father’s music recorded (and very fine it is too, well deserving of attention – check out Hermann von Glenck on the MGB and Guild Music labels). As it happened, the Wagner Edition was just busy with that opera, so the discovery came in time for them to consult it properly. Our fabulous bookbinding department (thank you, Armin Müller) was able to detach the many pasted-over sections (mostly Wagner tuba parts) so that the music underneath could be filmed for the Wagner Edition; it was all then put back the way it was.

Zurich has not seen any wars for two centuries, not since Napoleon invaded, and so many treasures have survived there that would have surely been destroyed anywhere else. I have no doubt that there are still Wagner treasures to be found there; but I consider myself lucky to have found one of the big ones.