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.

Lied by example

The 75th volume in our Eastman Studies in Music series is a study of German Lieder edited by Jürgen Thym, Of Poetry and Song. Within its William Morris covers is a truly interdisciplinary study of the relationship between text and music written by two musicologists and two German-literature specialists. In this post, Thym explains how this quartet came together and the rationale behind their collaboration:

Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied constitutes a kind of symposium, a (mostly virtual) get-together of scholars with a common interest and a similar approach to the subject matter. Our conversations extended over decades. Sometimes we met at conferences, sometimes we offered separate contributions at the same conference session, and sometimes two of us teamed up on a conference paper or article. In retrospect, it may even seem that the four humanist-musicians (or were we musician-humanists?) constituted a school.

It was by no means foreordained that the quartet of scholars represented through selected writings in Of Poetry and Song would recognize each other as like-minded and belonging together, as disciplinary boundaries and careers in very different institutions separated rather than united us. And yet, from very early in our academic careers, we pursued studies in the German Lied informed by the insight that the song is a compound genre whose aesthetic character is determined by the interaction of poetry and music and that such studies are most successful when the expertise in musical and literary matters comes together in one individual or, alternately, when scholars of Germanistik and musicology (or music theory) collaborate.

There were additional common underpinnings. Very early on we were united by a dissatisfaction with the state of research on Lieder around 1970, which, with a few notable exceptions, may be characterized as a divide between music scholars, often analyzing the Lied with little or no regard for the poem that inspired the setting (as if a song were just a piece of chamber music), and specialists on Goethe or the German Romantic poets, insisting on the primacy of the literary text (or the interpretation of a particular critic) as determining the quality of a setting. And when attention was paid to the Lied as the setting of a poem, authors commented, almost exclusively, on the images of the poetry or the emotional content of the words and how these aspects found their equivalents and analogues in the musical setting.

While not denying or denigrating the importance of these dimensions in the setting of Lieder, the four authors insist on treating the poem and its setting as a complex phenomenon in which different dimensions of language and music work together (and, at times, also conflict with each other) in order to establish a network of communicative meaning. Meter and rhythm, rhyme structure and sound values, verse structure and stanzaic organization, and the succession and connotation of images establish a complex organism that can be subjected to a variety of interpretations. And the composer, by responding to some or many (certainly not all) of these dimensions, establishes a correspondingly complex organism, the Lied that constitutes an interpretation of the poem.

The quartet’s approach is thus unashamedly structuralist—perhaps no surprise in view of the dominant paradigm in academia during the years when we first formulated many of these essays, but our approach is also open to meaning and expression. We believe that it is futile to neatly separate structure and meaning—in fact, the latter comes into being through the former. And here is perhaps a lesson to be learned, or reaffirmed, at a time when paradigms have changed in the humanities—we indeed live now in a completely different, post-modernist, era. The essays, hopefully, may suggest some ways in which close analysis and factual knowledge can help inform the search for meaning(s), and, vice versa, a search for meaning(s) can invigorate analytical and factual studies.

When did the four authors become a school unified by similar convictions in studying Lieder? There was no fanfare, heralding a new beginning; no manifesto, asserting the righteousness of our cause; not even a conference session in which all four, jointly, introduced their approach on text-music relations to their colleagues in Germanistik and musicology. (It even seems doubtful that we ever got together as a quartet.) And yet, communication and collaboration slowly began to take root more than thirty years ago. Two members of the quartet, Ann C. Fehn and Rufus Hallmark, worked together in the late 1970s on their magisterial study on Schubert’s pentameter settings, announcing their findings at various professional conferences and publishing them in two different essays (condensed in Of Poetry and Song into one chapter).

When Fehn moved to the University of Rochester in 1982, accepting a combined academic and administrative position, she quickly reached out to me (I had just become chair of musicology in the University’s Eastman School of Music), invoking one of our common interests, German Lieder. “Would it not make sense to meet once a week or every other week,” she argued, “to talk about something non-administrative?” The collaboration undertaken as an escape from administrative burdens, was, in a way, an extension of the work Fehn had begun with Rufus Hallmark. From investigating the declamation of a particular poetic meter (line structure, as it were), we moved to larger poetic forms: the ghazel (taking a cue from Harry E. Seelig who had worked on Wolf’s settings of this poetic form), the sonnet (clearly an extension of the pentameter studies by Hallmark and Fehn), and free verse (arguably a follow-up to Seelig’s unpublished lecture on Goethe’s “Ganymed”).

It was especially the infectious energy, gentle persuasiveness, and generosity of spirit of Ann C. Fehn who inspired the scholarly collaborations that, in due time, led to dialogues and lectures at professional conferences and, finally, also to publications of an interdisciplinary nature. It is futile to speculate about the directions that the collaborative efforts of the four authors might have taken, if the life of Ann C. Fehn had not have been cut short, at age 44, in November 1989 after a long illness. But so many of the essays collected in Of Poetry and Song owe their existence to, or were inspired by, her intellectual curiosity, organizational skills, and, ultimately her astute insights on issues pertaining to the German Lied, that the symposium may be considered a record, a memorial as it were, of a collaboration of scholars that saw its heydays in the late 1970s and 1980s and whose echoes have continued in the work of the three surviving members up to today. For that reason the book is dedicated to the memory of Ann C. Fehn.

Of Poetry and Song is edited by Jürgen Thym and published by the University of Rochester Press this month. For further information about this or the previous 74 books in the Eastman Studies in Music series, please visit our website.

‘Que la musique sonne’

There are few composers - at least among those who lived beyond their three score years and ten - whose musical output can be contained on two CDs. Edgard Varèse, whose work is celebrated over three evenings at the Southbank Centre this weekend, completed and published a relatively modest amount of music, but his influence on the work of a wide range of musicians continues - 45 years after his death.

Anyone captivated by the range of Varèse’s music - whether through the Southbank or Sage, Gateshead, celebrations or Riccardo Chailly’s award-winning recordings - should investigate Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary edited by the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann. ‘No-one interested in this composer, or indeed the 20th century modernist adventure as a whole, should be without [this book],’ wrote Bayan Northcott in BBC Music Magazine in 2006.

Exquisitely illustrated with material from the Varèse archive, the book contains essays by a range of contributors. There are, of course, pieces on the major compositions, alongside others on the lost early works - destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire; the influence of jazz on his work (it is said that Charlie Parker begged Varèse to teach him composition); the truth about that mythical phone call from a teenage Frank Zappa; his influence on American music; the Whitney connection and his New York patrons; even the art collection of Varèse and his wife, Louise.

One of the most thrilling pieces is ‘Converging Lives: Sixteen Years with Varèse’ by his pupil, assistant and music executor, Chou Wen-Chung. In 1937, Chou was a refugee at 14,

Somehow, despite the chaos and the smell of death around me, I learned of Ravel’s passing, and it dawned upon me that not all composers were dead historical figures. Transfixed by the idea that there were actually ‘living’ composers, I resolved to be one myself.

Some years later, having studied music at the New England Conservatory, Chou found himself in New York, searching for a teacher. He met Colin McPhee who told him, ‘Varèse is your choice,’ but warned him ‘Varèse is a volcano. His music consists of explosion after explosion…you must resist him or you will be buried.’

Varèse telephoned and invited me for a visit. When he asked to see my music, I was embarrassed to show him the first movement of Landscapes (1949)…In this piece I had tried to let fragments of ancient Chinese melodies drift across the sonic space of a western orchestra without conforming to western concepts of musical structure. So I could hardly believe it when I heard him say, ‘Come next week at the same time.’ Wondering how I could afford his tuition, I hesitated. He exploded, offended that I thought he was offering to teach me for money. He then explained how he had benefited from Debussy, Busoni and Romain Rolland without paying ‘a sou’. All he wanted was for me to ‘pass on the heritage’. Then he added with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘but perhaps you will find me a big old Chinese gong someday?’ He did not have to wait for long. In his later years, he was often shown in photos playing the enormous tam-tam I gave him. After his death, Louise gave me his favourite Chinese gong which he had bought on the street in Paris at about the time he finished Ionisation. This exchange of a tam-tam for a gong must have some symbolic meaning.

Chou goes on to describe how he came to edit Varèse’s work after his death, including a definitive version of Amériques for Chailly. ‘His art rests on a delicate balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian, or logical construct and metaphorical suffering,’ he claims. ‘While I would spare no effort collecting information regarding Varèse’s intentions, planning and sketches, I would also attempt to examine every issue from his viewpoint emotionally as well as rationally.’

The book ends with a series of statements from other composers, including Pierre Boulez (‘Was he ever tempted to imagine that he was born too late in a world too young?’), Elliott Carter (‘After his death he was played much more frequently and with greater care. How he would have been cheered by this!’), Dieter Schnebel (‘I can still picture him, fifty-five years [after encountering him at Darmstadt] as if he were standing before me.’), Peter Eötvös - who collaborated with Frank Zappa, shortly before the latter’s death, on some as yet unreleased recordings, and others.

Anyone within reach of London or Gateshead this weekend should treat themselves to the music of Varèse, a pioneer who remains unique, and this superb book. How many other composers have influenced jazz musicians, composers such as Birtwistle and Schnittke, and rock musicians from OMD to Can to jazz-rock combo Chicago?

Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, edited by Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann, is published by the Boydell Press in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation. There is a limited quantity of this lavishly-produced volume left, and further reprints are unlikely. More information about the Southbank concerts may be found here.

A very European American composer

In this final extract from Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered the interviewee is the pianist, John Browning (1933-2003). Browning premiered Barber’s Pulitzer prize-winning Piano Concerto in 1962 and had chalked up almost 150 performances by 1969. Browning’s relationship with the composer was warm and collaborative, as this fascinating interview - conducted in New York City in 1981 - reveals:

JB Sam and I met in 1956. I was making my debut with Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, and his Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance was being premiered. And then Schirmer’s commissioned the Piano Concerto and Sam called me and said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ and I said, ‘Of course. I would be very honored.’ I didn’t get the last movement until about ten days before the premiere, so I was practicing about fifteen hours a day trying to get it memorized because it’s frightfully difficult.

PD What discussions did you have with Sam Barber about the kind of music it might be? Did he come to you with sketches?

JB Sam had a very interesting way of writing for artists. He would have any of us for whom he was writing a work come up to the country house at Mt. Kisco and play through everything we knew for three, four, or five days. Mr. Horowitz did it, Miss Price did it, I did it. And he would get a feel of what he thought our strong points were. For example, Horowitz taught him a tremendous amount about the sostenuto pedal, the middle pedal, and he began to use that a great deal. I brought up things my teacher Rosina Lhévinne had told me about flutter pedals and dividing runs two octaves apart instead of one, which makes a much bigger sound. So, in a way, we all contributed in our fashion to ideas he then went with. For example, he ended the first draft of the first movement pianissimo, and both Mr. Leinsdorf and I, in hearing it, thought: 'Maybe we could suggest that it might end fortissimo so the slow movement would come out of nowhere.' And Sam was always wonderful in that way; he always listened to the performer, and if he hadn’t wanted to change it he wouldn’t have, but he thought 'it’s a good idea,' so he did.

PD Were there other places like that?

JB There were some passages in the last movement that were almost unplayable, particularly at the tempo that it goes. And I said: 'Sam, I just cannot seem to get through them. Can’t we do short cuts? I think it will be just as effective.' And he said: 'Let’s take it over to Mr. Horowitz. If he says it can’t be done, then it can’t be done.' And we took it over. Mr. Horowitz said: 'Sam, I’m afraid John is right. It cannot be played at that tempo.' [laughs]

PD He’s sometimes described as a conservative composer. What kind of a composer does that make him?

JB I think, perhaps like a good performer, a good composer wants a work to succeed—just as we try to make the performance of a work as successful as possible. Now, there have been composers whom we have called 'ivory tower' composers who, it seemed to us, were not writing with the public in mind—people like John Cage. I think in the case of Barber and certainly Britten, these were men who cannot be viewed as contemporary; they must be viewed as we would view Bach or Rachmaninov, who was certainly not a twentieth-century composer. It doesn’t matter when he wrote. It just doesn’t matter. The music is of its own genre. And I think Sam is very much the same way. Certainly, there were contemporary things, but I think Sam achieved a rather eclectic sound—he sounds actually less American than, say, Copland. And yet it was Nadia Boulanger who taught Copland and many other Americans, but Sam never worked with Madame Boulanger.

PD Does it matter that he doesn’t seem to be American—or perhaps he does to you?

JB I think that in some of the early works like Knoxville, where the poetry was very clearly American, then the sound was more so. As he went on I think the later works became far more Scriabin-ish, far more into a kind of European sound, not that wide-open spaced sound we think of as being American.

PD What is the Barber sound?

JB I think the one thing that stands out is the absolutely superb mastery of counterpoint. Really, Sam was a contrapuntal composer. When one looks at the fugue of the sonata, I do not know of another piano fugue as successful since the Brahms Handel Variations or as well written. He studied Bach every day, and he was so comfortable in these forms that they were a natural language. One had the feeling that he was every bit as comfortable with a four-part fugue as Bach was, that he could have written it down like a good crossword puzzle, in ink! That kind of security. I think later on particularly the harmonies were very turn of the century—very Russian almost—but with functional basses. As I say, Sam was perfectly capable of writing twelve tone or dissonance if he wanted to. He always said, “I never want to get trapped in a form or a method.”

PD What sort of a person was he?

JB He was a very complicated man. He had a very dry wit. He could be very aloof and very snobbish; he could also be very 'old shoe' and very comfortable. He loved to have prominent friends very well placed, but he did not use them in a bad way at all. Of course, he and Gian Carlo Menotti had a long association for well over thirty years. I think Sam could be very difficult, at the same time very loyal: he was wonderful to me, he was wonderful to Miss Price. He stood by his artists, if that makes sense. He was an extremely intellectual man; he read constantly; he was fluent in German, French, Italian, Spanish—absolutely fluent. He was truly a very cultivated man. He, in a sense I think, almost thought of himself as more European, oddly enough, because he had lived a great deal in Europe, with the house in Santa Cristina in the Dolomites. He loved Europe, the boat trips of the old days, the European atmosphere. He was a man who became increasingly irritated by the square, modern buildings. He would have been much happier in a nineteenth-century house.

The complete interview with John Browning - as well as others with the likes of Copland, William Schuman, Leontyne Price and Barber himself - can be found in Samuel Barber Remembered, published by the University of Rochester Press.

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.

Artist Unknown

A friend tells me that she’s just bought the Beethoven piano trios on CD, so naturally I ask, ‘Who’s playing them?’ ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘No idea. I’m afraid I didn’t look at the names of the players.’ Why do people seem to think the performer is irrelevant?

A relative of mine recently confessed that although he was becoming quite familiar with the classics of the piano trio repertoire, he doubted whether he would be ever able to discern any difference between performances of those works by different groups. When I express dismay, he says, ‘But surely there can’t be much difference between top-level musicians playing the same works. Aren’t you all aiming at the same result?’ By that I suppose he meant that all musicians are trying to arrive at a perfect realisation of that holy text, the musical score. But there’s another way of looking at it, one expressed beautifully by musicologist Christopher Small when he pointed out that one might as well turn this perception on its head and consider that it’s the job of composers to give musicians something to play. At the end of the day, you can’t hear music unless it is played, and it is the character of the playing which most impacts on listeners at the moment of performance. Personally, I wouldn’t put the performance above the score in order of importance, but I do think the performance is crucial. Well, I would think so, wouldn’t I? But as well as knowing that a good piece can be ruined by a bad performance, and that a bad piece can be greatly enhanced by a good performance, I also truly believe that a great performance can bring a good piece to a new level.

I remember hearing Italian soprano Cecilia Bartoli in a programme of rather trivial Italian arias of the baroque and classical periods. Any thought of the music’s triviality was however completely driven away by the energy and commitment she gave to it, performing it as though she thought it was utterly fascinating. I remember thinking that it was an object lesson in how to perform second-rate music, and in fact I’ve learned from her example.

But even music of the finest quality can reveal new aspects of itself and even become transcendent in a fabulous performance. My husband Bob still remembers his awe on hearing Carlos Kleiber conduct Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden in the 1970s. It’s an opera he’d previously heard in fine performances with other singers and other conductors. However, in Kleiber’s hands the opera suddenly struck him as a miracle of expressive coherence in a wholly unexpected way. Even though he knew the music very well, he was so gripped by the performance that he remained glued to his seat long after the performance had ended, unwilling to break the atmosphere. Later on, he heard that Bernard Haitink had attended the same performance with a fellow conductor and had said to his companion, ‘Well, that was the finest evening in the opera house that you or I will ever experience.’ Yet what remained for Bob was not the sensation of Kleiber’s personality but the conviction that Verdi’s Otello was even better than he had realised. When he could bear to listen to it again, performed by other people in later years, the effect was not the same. He realised that the alchemy at Covent Garden had been created by music brought to boiling point by particular musicians.

Of course, this kind of experience is not confined to music. How many schoolchildren, bored and irritated by having to study Shakespeare, conclude that there’s nothing in it for them until one day they get the opportunity to see a really good performance of one of his plays, when all of a sudden a door is kicked open in their minds.

This is an extract from Out of Silence by Susan Tomes, scheduled for publication later this month. It is a diary of a year in her life as a performer. Taking as its inspiration Schumann's remark that ‘I am affected by everything that goes on in the world, and I think it all over in my own way’, it aims to show how a working musician mulls over and draws energy from the events of everyday life.

Janáček, the Old Avant-Gardist

Leos Janáček is increasingly recognised as one of the major operatic masters of the early twentieth century. In an intriguing new book, Derek Katz challenges prevailing views of the composer’s relationship to Slavic culture and demonstrates that the operas are deeply indebted to various existing traditions. The first chapter , ‘Finding a Context’, looks at Janáček’s work from a number of viewpoints, including the one in this short extract:

One of the final chapters of Miloš Štědroň’s 1998 study Leoš Janáček and Music of the 20th Century is entitled “Young Conservative—to Old Avant-Gardist?!?” Despite the intriguing punctuation, at the end of this chapter Štědroň did indeed conclude that Janáček grew into an avant-gardist and declared that Janáček’s music of the 1920s is one of the most radical manifestations of European music from the first three decades of the century. This view of Janáček’s career as culminating in an avant-garde, or modernist, period is a widespread formulation with a long history. In a 1983 essay, Milan Kundera wrote of Janáček, “A solitary conservative figure in his youth, he has become an innovator in his old age.” Kundera described Janáček’s late works as “audacious” and suggested that he must be heard in the company of composers thirty and forty years younger, like Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Krenek, and Schoenberg. Similarly, the opening narration of Jaromil Jireš’s 1986 documentary film about Janáček declared that “Leoš Janáček was born deep in the mid-nineteenth century. His music belongs wholly to the avant-garde of the twentieth century. Although he was thirty years older than Bartók or Stravinsky . . . Janáček’s works rank amongst the most progressive of modern European music.”

In particular, the idea that Janáček was somehow generationally displaced can be traced back to the composer’s lifetime. In an enthusiastic 1925 essay, Erwin Schulhoff, almost exactly forty years younger than Janáček, wrote that as “astounding as it may seem, the septuagenarian Janáček belongs to the latest generation of composers, whose struggle he has also fought.” Hanns Eisler also noted Janáček’s late fecundity, remarking after a 1927 performance of the Sinfonietta that Janáček was “entirely unique amongst current bourgeois composers” and “still astoundingly full of creative strength as an old man.” In September 1926, Janáček travelled to Venice to hear a performance of his first string quartet at the annual International Society for Contemporary Music festival. Other living composers whose works were performed at the festival included Roussel, Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg, Ravel, Malipiero, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, Ladislav Vycpálek, Louis Gruenberg, Ibert, Honegger, and Hindemith. These twelve composers, although a heterogeneous group in most ways, shared at least one trait: all were younger than Janáček. In fact, most were significantly younger, with only Roussel and Vaughan Williams within twenty years of his age. Put another way, their average age was forty-four in 1926, while Janáček had turned seventy-two in July of that year.

Another, rather more idiosyncratic, tribute came from Henry Cowell, who visited Brno and lectured at the Club of Moravian Composers in 1926. Apparently the meeting with Janáček was a success, for in August 1927 Cowell invited Janáček to be an honorary member of The New Music Society of California. The letter of invitation, although addressed to “Mr. Janarchek,” does describe him as “without doubt one of the very greatest of living composers, without reservations.” Cowell had already collected Bartók, Bliss, Malipiero, Hába, Krenek, Schnabel, Berg, Casella, and Milhaud as honorary members; all were at least a quarter-century Janáček’s juniors.

The image of Janáček as an aged modernist has become firmly entrenched in standard music history texts. John Tyrrell’s entry for Janácek in The New Grove Turn of the Century Masters, for instance, asserts that Janácek’s late works belong “in sound and spirit with the music of the younger generation around him.” Similar judgments can be found in many standard surveys. Jim Samson, in The Late Romantic Era, describes Janáček’s musical style as “a radical new language” and “strikingly original,” while Donald Jay Grout calls Janáček “individual” and “exceptional” in his A Short History of Opera. More recently, Richard Taruskin titled his section on Janáček in The Oxford History of Western Music “The Oldest Twentieth-Century Composer” and points out that “his music is more often (and more tellingly) compared with that of Debussy, Stravinsky, or Bartók” than with that of Mahler or Richard Strauss.

Janáček Beyond the Borders by Derek Katz is published by the University of Rochester Press and available from your local music specialist bookseller.