Introducing Wagner E-Book

Kevin Scott

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 83

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Wagner's operatic works rank with the supreme achievements of western culture. But acceptance of Wagner's musical genius is tempered by feelings of misgiving and many believe the composer's underlying ideas to be indefensible. A self-styled social revolutionary, Wagner thought the world could be redeemed through vegetarianism and Aryan philosophy. Introducing Wagner: A Graphic Guide separates the composer's art from the ideas and the arrogant destructive personal behaviour of the man.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-178578-018-9

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introducing Wagner

1. The Operas

2. The Ideas…

3. The Man

Revolution (again)

A Common Prejudice

The Era of Emancipation and Self Promotion

Wagner Against History…

Endless Melody and the Leitmotiv

Cosima

Self-Abasement.

Beginning of the World

Of the Psyche

Wagner … Wholesome?

Wagner Chronology

Select Bibliography

Discography

Introducing Wagner

In Israel, Wagner’s music is effectively unplayable because of its associations with the Third Reich. Rare performances draw public protest, questions in the Knesset.

In Bayreuth, though, Wagner occupies the right-hand throne to God.

Every July and August pilgrims gather from the corners of the earth to pay him homage at the annual festival devoted solely to HIS music. As fanatical as any world religion, it is a genre of hero–worship known as WAGNEROLATRY.

1. The Operas

There are 13, of which 10 count among the mightiest artistic achievements ever encompassed by man (or woman)—not to mention overtures, songs, marches, symphonies, chamber music and symphonic poems —

THEY DEMAND HEAVY RESOURCES, BUDGETS AND VOICES AND ARE STAGGERING ONE-MAN PROJECTS, IN THAT I ALWAYS WROTE MY OWN LIBRETTT*.

Libretto* The IDEA and story line - often all the lyrics to an opera or operetta the screenplay and script

To compare them with CATHEDRALS is appropriate ~~~~

MARVELS, WUNDERWERKE! …swooned Thomas Mann… NO DESCRIPTIONS BETTER FIT THESE AMAZING MANIFESTATIONS OF ART; AND TO NOTHING ELSE IN THE WHOLE HISTORY OF ARTISTIC PRODUCTION ARE THEY MORE APPLICABLE, A FEW GOTHIC CATHEDRALS ALONE EXCEPTED.

2. The Ideas…

10 bound volumes of essays and autobiographical writings which, for better or worse, have had a major influence on cultural debate in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Wagner wrote not just about aesthetics but about religion, politics, social reform, science, diet and… race.

He was a dedicated anti-Semite.

Some of his ideas were laughably utopian - not least the theory that the world’s ills could be solved by:

SHIFTING ITS NORTHERN POPULATIONS TO WARMER CLIMATES WHERE THEY WOULDN’T WANT TO EAT MEAT AND COULD EMBRACE COMPASSIONATE VEGETARIANISM.

Others were more ominous:

‘ONLY ONE THING CAN REDEEM YOU [JEWS] FROM THE BURDEN OF YOUR CURSE… ……DESTRUCTION!’.

Wagner’s music may have been hijacked by the Nazis: you can’t blame him for the fact that Hitler stole his tunes. But his ideas were an outright gift to the Holocaust and take some explaining…as we shall see.

He also…

• forecast Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical investigation of the power of the unconscious (Wagner’s operas understood psychology before it was invented)

• explored the significance of myth in art long before the modern anthropologist Claude Lévi–Strauss;

• set a new agenda for the arts and their role in society that would influence (in some cases positively overwhelm) not only musicians but writers, painters, dramatists for generations on.

It’s probably not TOO outrageous to suggest that Wagner actually invented MODERN ART.

WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT!

3. The Man

Wagner was a charismatic figure and made extensive provision for personal immortality, starting with an AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH at the age of 29 (he began keeping notes at 22), then A COMMUNICATION TO MY FRIENDS, and finally MEIN LEBEN. These accounts fabricate the myth of Wagner as a messianic artist–hero and distort the true facts.

In truth, he was an arrogant, manipulative egocentric who exploited the loyalties of those who admired him and believed his genius placed him beyond the requirements of reasonable behaviour.

THROUGH MY SUFFERINGS AS AN ARTIST I ACQUIRED A SUPERIOR RIGHT THAT RAISED ME FAR FAR ABOVE THE WORLD AND MADE ME INWARDLY A HALLOWED CREATURE.

What critics make of all this depends on the extent to which his works, ideas and life can be disentangled and considered separately. If nothing else, the lesson of Wagner is that great artists are not necessarily great human beings and often need special pleading from their biggest fans.

‘I FIND AN ELEMENT OF NAZISM NOT ONLY IN WAGNER’S QUESTIONABLE LITERATURE BUT IN HIS MUSIC AND CREATIVE WORK. … AND EVEN SO I’VE LOVED THAT WORK SO MUCH THAT EVEN TODAY I AM DEEPLY STIRRED WHENEVER IT REACHES MY EAR.

THE LIFE: Wagner spent much of it on the run – from creditors, governments and cheated husbands.

He was born in LEIPZIG in 1813 – the same year as his great opera rival Giuseppe Verdi. Anyone around at the time would more likely have remembered 1813 for the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig.

LEIPZIG was a music capital of Europe, famous as the home of J.S.Bach and Felix Mendelssohn. Little Richard was baptized in the Thomaskirche and studied at the Thomasschule where Bach was once the Kantor (choirmaster).

His mother…{Johanna Rosine Wagner née Pätz (1774–1848)} – no doubts here – was a Fallen Woman, the former mistress of a minor German aristocrat. When Richard grew up to write operas, it was probably significant that so many of them featured fatherless children…

For most of his childhood, he wasn’t actually called Richard Wagner but Richard Geyer. To this day, his parentage remains uncertain. His legal father, Carl Wagner, died when he was six months old. He was then adopted with suspicious swiftness by one Ludwig Geyer, who may have been the true father all along. In any event, Geyer died when Richard was eight.

Ludwig Geyer (1779–1821) was an actor and influenced his family accordingly. Five of the seven children in his household ended up professionally involved with THEATRE.

It was Richard’s first love. And, starting as he meant to continue, he thought big.

At 14 he wrote an epic tragedy…

CONSTRUCTED OUT OF HAMLET… AND LEAR! FORTY TWO PEOPLE DIED IN THE COURSE OF THIS PIECE AND I WAS FORCED TO BRING MOST OF THEM BACK AS GHOSTS, OTHERWISE I’D HAVE BEEN SHORT OF CHARACTERS FOR MY FINAL ACT

Music was just an adjunct to his dramatic ambitions, and the music teaching he received was scrappy….But then he discovered

ITS NECESSARY CONSEQUENCE IS NONE OTHER THAN THE ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE, TO WHICH BEETHOVEN HAS FORGED THE ARTISTIC KEY

And with the view to history that Wagner always had, he actively promoted the idea of himself as Beethoven’s natural successor.

Other early influences were the fanciful MAGIC OPERAS that featured prominently in the traditions of Viennese theatre. Mozart’s MAGIC FLUTE (1791) was one, as were related stagings of the supernatural like Carl Maria von Weber’s DER FREISCHÜTZ (1821) and Heinrich Marschner’s DER VAMPYR (1828). Immersed in them, Wagner started and abandoned a teenage opera called DIE HOCHZEIT (The Marriage).

But the following year, aged 19, his career began in earnest with the first of a succession of jobs that took him through the civil service–like hierarchy of German theatres. Starting as chorus master at the very provincial Würzburg, he shuffled off to Magdeburg, Königsberg, Riga and at the same time was writing the operas of his so-called…

FLEGELJAHRE …years of awkward cultural adolescence.

There are three FLEGELJAHRE operas…

DIE FEEN, DAS LIEBESVERBOT and RIENZI.

In 1836, he had married an actress, Minna Planner(1809-66). The relationship collapsed into a cyclic farce of mutual infidelity, desertion (Minna’s first departure came within six months of the marriage) and pursuit across Europe.

In his own life, Wagner found a matchless precedent for all the loveless marriages that feature in his operas.

DIE FEEN [THE FAIRIES] (1833/34) is Wagner’s first completed opera and a German Romantic fantasy steeped in Weber. Musically it’s unremarkable, written in terms that Wagner would soon supersede. But the story introduces three ideas that will return over and again in Wagner’s later work…

* QUESTIONS THAT MUST NOT BE ASKED

But the power of his love proves so great that it rescues her from statuary doom and wins him immortality beside her (as in Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE, 1791 but also in Wagner’s own THE FLYING DUTCHMAN).

DAS LIEBESVERBOT

[THE BAN ON LOVE] 1835/36 was Wagner’s first opera to reach the stage.

DIE FEEN never made it in his lifetime. It had one disastrous performance, and the opera company thereafter collapsed.

The music this time is Italianate. Wagner had recently discovered the ‘bel canto’ operas of Vincenzo Bellini (1801 -35)

and taken to denouncing the comparative Pedantry of Teutonic style…

The story, after Shakespeare’s MEASURE FOR MEASURE, is frivolously comic: a head of state bans love and sexual licence in his land but falls in love himself and is revealed a hypocrite.

But underlying it – and for the first time in Wagner’s work – is a philosophical position:

the hedonistic libertarianism of the…

YOUNG GERMAN MOVEMENT which rejected the inhibitions of bourgeois morality in favour of natural freedom and sensual indulgence. A conveniently packaged rationale for his own extramarital adventures, Wagner recycled ‘Young German’ thinking into his later operas where marriage is usually associated with stagnant relationships in contrast to the ecstasy of less conventional couplings.

AT THAT HOUR IT BEGAN

RIENZI is a messianic Roman tribune who sacrifices himself to cleanse Rome of its ‘degenerate’ nature – an adjective (ENTARTET in German) which would acquire more specific resonance 100 years later in the Third Reich.

Adolf Hitler saw himself as a RIENZI and traced the beginnings of his struggle to cleanse the world to a performance he attended in 1906.

Among his personal possessions he kept the manuscript full score, which is now lost. Perished, probably, in the ruins of his Berlin bunker.

RIENZI is, in its uncut version, the longest of all Wagner’s operas: a Cecil B. de Mille epic of ancient Rome whose grand processions, crowd scenes, ballets took six hours to get through at the first performance.

It was the first success that made his name throughout Europe.