It’s difficult to know when it started, my relationship with
Wagner. And no, I don’t mean the X Factor entrant.
It’s been there for a while, most often hovering in the
background, but occasionally hoving into clearer view.
First, it was only in the vaguest outlines, formed from a CD of
The Other Half’s, a collection of overtures and preludes, together with the
famous Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, although
I really didn’t ‘get’ that at the time.
With Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil, the first
piece that grabbed my attention was the overture to Die Meistersinger von
Nurnberg.
Oh, what a glorious thing that is – and the resolution still
sends me somewhere a little different.
On our trip to Berlin, four years ago, a visit to the Philharmonie
to see the same orchestra, under the baton of Simon Rattle, moved me further on again.
After the world premiere of a piece by Matthus Sammer, the rest
of the concert was highlights from acts II and III of Götterdämmerung. The
singing bits didn’t really grab me, but the orchestral sections left me
gasping, as though a g force had picked me up and shoved me back into my seat
to hold me there, in rapt attention.
As we left the concert hall, The Other Half asked how I was:
“Just trying to teach myself to breathe again,” I managed to reply.
A year or so later, we caught a televised version of a Covent
Garden production of Das Rheingold. Now I had a sense
of the music and the theatricality combined.
The next stage – although not quite immediately – was the
purchase of a Ring cycle: Solti with the Vienna, since that
seems to be regarded as the best. When you're going to splash a lot, it pays to
research first.
Off and on in the intervening years, I have made limited efforts
to start listening to it, but never got very far.
And then, because the nature of some work I’m presently doing
means that I need to block out anything else, yet still have a good half of my
mind free, I put it all on my iPod and started from the beginning.
We’d not quite caught the very opening of Rheingold, and when I
heard it – the 30-second single note; the rumbling of the Rhine as it builds
from the source – I was stunned.
And suddenly, listening to one of the operas with no outside
interference, the vocal passages changed. In context, they made sense and were
far more ‘musical’ than I had previously understood.
Over coffee a few weeks ago, I observed to The Other Half that
there was something daemonic about the music (I use that spelling quite
deliberately). Yet at the same time, I’'s almost religious. That is – religious
without the religion.
I know that it affects people differently, but it gets me right
in the gut. And I suspect that that is, in large part, why people feel either
wild love with or detestation of it.
Bach, for instance, wrote beautiful music, but it doesn’t ravish
you emotionally. Wagner's music can do precisely that.
I don’t think he’s entirely alone in that: there are passages of
Beethoven that, played in a certain way, have a huge emotional power.
A few months before we attended that Berlin concert, we were
lucky enough to catch one of Daniel Barenboim’s nights at the Royal Festival
Hall when he was doing the entire cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas.
I’ve loved old Ludwig since I was introduced to his music at
school, but I had never seen or heard it preformed in such a way.
The huge hall faded away and it became something utterly and
entirely personal. This was not Beethoven the Polite, this was Beethoven the Passionate, Beethoven the Angry, Beethoven the Inflamed.
In general, we seem so often to treat ‘serious’ music ... well, rather too seriously. But that night, with Barenboim (a Wagner fan, incidentally), the music was given back life and a soul, complete with deep, dark depths.
In general, we seem so often to treat ‘serious’ music ... well, rather too seriously. But that night, with Barenboim (a Wagner fan, incidentally), the music was given back life and a soul, complete with deep, dark depths.
But back to the extremes that only Wagner provokes.
Just yesterday, on the forum part of a serious national
newspaper, someone observed that “no right-thinking” person could like it.
Some of the comments in favour were every bit as over the top.
What other composer has ever triggered such extreme responses?
Of course, much is made of Wagner’s own anti-semitism and the
Nazis’ love of Wagner.
My perfect role? |
But with the former, do we so damn Milton, say, for his support
of Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland or Debussy for being inclined to domestic
violence?
And the works themselves are hardly riddled with it – unlike,
say, the racism and anti-semitism and sexism of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Yet
who suggests we should forgo 007?
There are great ironies in Hitler’s adoration of Wagner. Let's take
the Ring cycle: one of the key themes of that great arc of a
story is that of the destructive nature of power and the search for it. Hardly
the stuff of the Third Reich.
Indeed, in a slender volume entitled The Perfect Wagnerite, first
published in 1898, revolutionary Fabian and erstwhile music critic Bernard Shaw
expounded a theory of the Ring as being essentially socialist in
nature.
Now it’s a downright irritating read in many ways – essentially for
Shaw’s incredible ability to be patronising and pompous – but it is an
interesting thesis non the less.
And even if one doesn’t go the whole way along that analytical
route, it certainly suggests that the works are far removed from how we have
come to imagine them through the prism of national socialism.
Not that the extreme negativity about Wagner is new or dates
from after WWII – far from it.
In Buddenbrooks, first published in 1901, Thomas Mann
has the church organist refusing to accompany Gerda in playing Wagner. It is
morally repugnant to him.
There's an irony here too: in effect, it was being considered, by some, to be 'degenerate' – decades before the Nazis used 'entartete' as their excuse to ban and burn and persecute.
There's an irony here too: in effect, it was being considered, by some, to be 'degenerate' – decades before the Nazis used 'entartete' as their excuse to ban and burn and persecute.
So we’re back to personal responses.
German romanticism – of which Wagner can be viewed as the
apotheosis – has elements of a death wish about it: a longing for oblivion.
That
culture was still around well into the 20th century – Brecht’s poem from 1919, Ballade
von den Seeräubern (Ballad of the Pirates), is a perfect example.
And
Wagner goes further, reaching for many his most troubling level in Die
Walküre,
with the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, even though they know they are brother and sister.
I
wonder if all this – the death wish element of German romanticism in general
and of Wagner’s pushing back of conventional boundaries in particular –
prefigures the beginnings of an understanding of psychoanalysis and an imaginative experimentation with exploring the deeper parts of the human psyche?
As
the hold of formal religion diminished, and as philosophy – and German
philosophy was hugely important in this period – moved toward something more
existential (we see this explored at length in Buddenbrooks), then these darker
aspects of human nature were being explored in a different way, outside the
safety of conventional religion.
They
reach their high point in the 20th century, in philosophical questioning of
whether the act of suicide is our only real possible act of free will.
Yet
nobody seems to view such angst as though it was a
contributory factor in later genocide.
Further,
it seems inaccurate to me to characterise this fascination with death as being
somehow entirely secular.
It’s
hardly far away from western Christianity, which has spent centuries creating
a worship of death and suffering: not simply in the figure of Christ crucified,
but in so many of the martyrs of the church.
Think
only, for instance, of all those painted representations of St Sebastian,
erotic even in his suffering; dotted with arrows yet gazing ecstatically at the
heavens, knowing death will come soon and transport him somewhere better.
The
issue, then, seems to be partly the decline of religion, which can be seen to
allow such sentiments and musings. And these were opportunities that Wagner,
among many others, took.
But
moving on, his influence is as wide-ranging as it is possible to be.
We
owe him a debt of gratitude for so many things, from the decision to dim
auditorium lights before a performance to, some would say,
stream-of-consciousness literature (Joyce, Woolf etc).
And
that’s without even beginning to name all the composers who were themselves
influenced by his work: Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Berlioz, Bruckner,
Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg … it’s a very long list.
It’s
easy to forget that his influence moves into the realms of popular culture and
not just ‘high art’.
Wagner
was the first person to use a leitmotif: a recurring theme, often very
brief, that appears throughout a work to suggest something particular to us.
So
forget the ‘Tristan chord’ and think 1975, Stephen Spielberg and a score by
John Williams. Think Jaws and think boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom … a leitmotif, and one that everybody
knows, even if they haven’t seen the film (me).
And
that’s without mentioning how authors such as Thomas Mann took up and used the leitmotif in a literary sense.
But
to bring this back to where we began.
I
hope to see a Wagner opera – in the flesh – later this year.
But
the weekend’s viewing of the New York Met’s latest production of the power of
this Das Rheingold left me in no doubt of his extraordinary genius.
And tdoay, on this 200th anniversary of his birth, I find myself more and more
drawn to both listen more and learn more.
Yet
even for an apprentice acolyte, there is a sense of stepping into unchartered
territory, because with Wagner, everything is about the personal response. And
that is always going to involve an feeling of risk.
Going
right back to the beginning of this piece, I mentioned the Liebestod from Tristan und
Isolde. Now,
until very recently, I had not got caught up in this particular piece.
But
then, as I was warming to it, I came across YouTube footage of a clearly dying Von Karajan conducting a concert performance, with the great Jessye Norman singing.
And
if you needed any convincing of the almost orgasmic (le petite mort?) infectious nature of
Wagner’s music, then here it is.
At
the end of this extraordinary performance, Karajan – haggard and having had to
sit in order to conduct – slips off his stool; takes Norman’s hands and kisses
them.
There – right there – is death and love and beauty, bound up between reality and art.
And
like so much else in Wagner, it is intoxicating and awesome and frightening and
alluring all at once.
Little
wonder then, that his music has, legendarily, driven people to madness.
And
little wonder that, even today, he divides opinion more violently than any composer
before or since.
*
For further reading, I heartily recommend Bryan Magee’s very short, but
wonderfully written, concise and utterly fascinating Aspects of Wagner.
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