Wagner's Warehouse

[Biffo]

Is it all that different from the orginal? I clicked on your link I don't see anything proclaiming remastered, i would have thought they just packed it differently.

This edition was 'de-hissed' in 1997. In the accompanying booklets James Lock, presumably the sound engineer, explains the challenge they had in removing tape-hiss without 'damaging the musical end result'. They lessened the hiss but left in various extraneous noises - creaking chairs etc. How it compares with earlier versions I have no idea.

[aukhawk]

At the time it was treated as a premium project by Decca - just the recording spanning 8 years - and accordingly their production values were set very high, even by Decca's and the VPO's own standards of the time - especially during the latter part of the project.

I unreservedly recommend the book Ring Resounding by John Culshaw who was the producer (pictured below with Brunhilde Birgit Nilsson) - available in all formats including Kindle but s/h hardcopy can be found very cheaply, with lots of good photos of the sessions.  Also free e-book formats, even as pdf, no excuse not to read it.  It's a blow-by-blow account of the whole recording project from first to last - and is a surprisingly good yarn even if you have no interest in Wagner's music or no interest in the technicalities of recording at that time - which is not Culshaw's main focus actually - his story is more about difficult casting decisions and diplomatically 'letting go' some big names, then continually wrestling with the egos of the various artistes and the combined might of the orchestra who were not above throwing their weight around, almost the only person who seemed to give no trouble was Solti himself.
It's a book I've treasured for 50 years - much longer in fact than I've known the recording or the music.

[Biffo]

At the time it was treated as a premium project by Decca - just the recording spanning 8 years - and accordingly their production values were set very high, even by Decca's and the VPO's own standards of the time - especially during the latter part of the project.

I unreservedly recommend the book Ring Resounding by John Culshaw who was the producer (pictured below with Brunhilde Birgit Nilsson) - available in all formats including Kindle but s/h hardcopy can be found very cheaply, with lots of good photos of the sessions.  Also free e-book formats, even as pdf, no excuse not to read it.  It's a blow-by-blow account of the whole recording project from first to last - and is a surprisingly good yarn even if you have no interest in Wagner's music or no interest in the technicalities of recording at that time - which is not Culshaw's main focus actually - his story is more about difficult casting decisions and diplomatically 'letting go' some big names, then continually wrestling with the egos of the various artistes and the combined might of the orchestra who were not above throwing their weight around, almost the only person who seemed to give no trouble was Solti himself.

It is indeed an excellent read, as is Culshaw's autobiography 'Putting the Record Straight'. Reading both you have to bear in mind that there was another massive ego in play - Culshaw's own.

[SurprisedByBeauty]

Amazing that the Wagner thread is so sparse. All the Wagnering must be going on elsewhere?

Well, I got to see the Ring in Budapest last month -- and Adam Fischer and his Hungarian Ntl. RSO were a marvelous surprise (almost as much as Concerto Budapest with Keller). As was the cast, to the extent it was unknown: Superb! Pictures of Rheingold here: Bayreuth on the Danube: The Budapest Wagner Days. Production Photos from Das Rheingold

...and the first part of my review on ClassicsToday here: A Magnificent Budapest Ring: Prelude and Rheingold

[SurprisedByBeauty]

Herr Tesla's Adventures in Brabant"—Piotr Beczala's Lohengrin (Blu-ray)

[Andy D.]

Amazing that the Wagner thread is so sparse. All the Wagnering must be going on elsewhere?

This board is famous for not having a lot of Wagnerians (besides me plus the Wagnerian-named members).

That sounds like a fantastic show and I'm deeply envious.

[ritter]

There has been more Wagner-related discussions in the "Opera and Vocal" section of the forum. For instance, there was quite a lot of postings in the past here (although this too has been relatively quiet as of late). There's also threads dedicated to individual works (e.g. Die Meistersinger or Parsifal).

But yes, we Wagnerians appear to be a small (and select  ) group here on GMG.

[SurprisedByBeauty]

I've been here for over a decade and I never noticed that infamous lack of Wagnerians, despite being half one myself. Perhaps that speaks to how much they're lacking? 

[Andy D.]

There has been more Wagner-related discussions in the "Opera and Vocal" section of the forum.

(embarrassed) Eewps, now I know I've been coming to the wrong topic all these years lol.

[SurprisedByBeauty]

Recent #BluRayReview on ClassicsToday:
Slow Flow Beauty: A Tribute To Hans #Knappertsbusch (Blu-ray)




@ionarts #DipYourEars, No. 251 (Meet Lise Davidsen, the next Hochdramatische)

[Cato]

From the Wall Street Journal: a review by Joseph Horowitz of a 700+ page book by Alex Ross on Wagner.

Great works of art are so powerfully imagined that their intent and expression mold to changing human circumstances. But the operas of Richard Wagner are arguably unique in this regard: No other creative genius in the Western canon so unerringly holds up a mirror to time and place.

In Gilded Age America, Wagner was a meliorist: a source of uplift whose anti-Semitism was minimized or ignored. In Nazi Germany, he was a tool for Hitler. During the fin de siècle decades, when Wagnerism peaked, he was the source of a surging cultural and intellectual wave, at once avant-garde and reactionary, political and aestheticist, nostalgic and prophetic. Thomas Mann's claim that Wagner was "probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art" cannot be dismissed as hyperbole.

Alex Ross's "Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music" takes up Wagner's protean impact with unprecedented scope. In other writers' accounts, Wagnerism ends with World War I in Europe and America and, slightly later, in Soviet Russia (where Vladimir Tatlin's proposed monument to the Third International was inspired by Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman"). But in Mr. Ross's wide-ranging chronicle, Wagner's influence outside the world of music keeps on going: through the Third Reich and Hollywood to J.R.R. Tolkien (whose disclaimer of Wagner's influence "does not withstand scrutiny") and the German artist Anselm Kiefer ("whose decades-long negotiation with Wagner deserves comparison with that of Thomas Mann") and even Pope Francis (whose favorite Wagner opera is "Parsifal"). No previous writer has so copiously chronicled the sheer ubiquity of Wagner in important novels, poems and paintings. The result is an indispensable work of cultural history, offering both a comprehensive resource and a bravura narrative.

While the existing Wagner literature is vast and defies generalization, the best-known studies range from passionate advocacy to equally impassioned denunciation. Mr. Ross, who came late to Wagner, is a centrist—a circumspect, at times even diffident, Wagnerite. He writes: "The behemoth whispers a different secret in each listener's ear." Mr. Ross, the longtime music critic at the New Yorker and the author of "The Rest Is Noise" (2007), is able to become many listeners. Relatedly, there are limits to his degree of engagement—and Wagner is about commitment, however dangerous or misguided. These limits frame and modulate Mr. Ross's extraordinary book.

In a postlude, Mr. Ross confides his own Wagner journey as a 21st-century gay American operagoer and writes: "Many people have gone away from Wagner feeling uplifted, empowered, aggrandized. For me, he has more often brought revelations of my stupidity, my self-pity, my absurdity—in other words, my humanity." Wagner himself was more possessed of "humanity" than is generally asserted or assumed. His was in fact a personality as multifarious as his operas. The dramatist in Wagner created a musical stage peopled by powerful men and powerful women. As Mr. Ross richly details, Wagner's appeal to women and gays is a hallmark of his achievement. Writing about Marcel Proust and Wagner, Mr. Ross observes that "by the nineties, Wagner was well established as a code of gay taste." He calls Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" "one of the supreme Wagnerian creations, yet it is free of bombast, maintaining an intimate mode of address." Writing about Virginia Woolf's mostly concealed Wagnerian dimension, Mr. Ross is again keenly attuned to defining yet elusive subcurrents.

The author upon whom Mr. Ross lavishes the most attention is Willa Cather, whose Wagnerism—in her life as in her fiction—was an explicit leitmotif. As Joan Acocella demonstrated in her 2000 book "Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism," Cather is a writer poisoned in our time by feminist psychosexual readings oblivious of Cather's own milieu. To understand Cather on her own terms requires understanding her formative relationship with Sieglinde, Brünnhilde and other Wagner heroines. Mr. Ross has here furnished a veritable Cather-Wagner compendium. He has also scored a scholarly coup, establishing that Cather's Nebraska piano teacher was the son of a prominent German conductor who once led "Rienzi" in Pest, with Wagner in attendance. Cather's achievement, Mr. Ross summarizes, "was to transpose Wagnerism into an earthier, more generous key. She offered grandeur without grandiosity, heroism without egoism, myth without mythology. Brünnhilde stays on her mountain crag, hailing the sun: no man breaks the ring of fire."

But is that all? In the early 20th century, most American Wagnerites were women, for whom Wagner was an antidote to lives marginalized in a man's world of work and money. And so it was with Cather, whose most insightful Wagner commentary diagnoses Kundry, in "Parsifal." One of Wagner's most original creations, Kundry oscillates between extremes of submission and domination. Cather's Kundry, at the Met, was Olive Fremstad, a Wagner soprano, Callas-like in veracity and intensity, with whom Cather became friends. Of Fremstad's Kundry, Cather writes that it "is a summary of the history of womankind. [Wagner] sees in her an instrument of temptation, of salvation, and of service; but always an instrument, a thing driven and employed. . . . She cannot possibly be at peace with herself. . . . [A] driven creature, [she is] made for purposes eternally contradictory."

Mr. Ross cites this commentary without comment. But read Cather, and read about Fremstad (who twice married abortively, identified with Ibsen's women and chopped wood in Scandinavian forests), and it all fits together. Wagner, for Willa Cather, was more than an inspirational artistic model: He was a therapist, a medium for self-understanding and empowerment.

This dimension of the Wagner experience is equally inescapable in considering the vexed topic of Wagner and the Jews. Wagner was a vile anti-Semite. Adolf Hitler was a confirmed Wagnerite. Whether a direct line links Wagner to the Holocaust is a permanently embattled question. Sifting the evidence, Mr. Ross is again a centrist, for whom Wagner is an influential racist but not a proto-Nazi. That Wagner was in his time notably surrounded by loyal Jewish friends and adherents is a fact requiring explanation.

Among the warmest, most animated reminiscences of Wagner the man is the book-length "Personal Recollections" of Angelo Neumann, the Jewish impresario who, in the 1880s, toured the "Ring" throughout Europe. The news of Wagner's death so stunned Neumann that, as he put it in his memoir, he "reeled into the next room and clutched the bed. . . . I felt within my soul that a god had left this earth." The peculiar intensity of affinity Wagner could arouse in Jews was perhaps most notably evinced by Hermann Levi, who conducted the premiere of "Parsifal" at Bayreuth. To his father, a rabbi, Levi wrote: "The most beautiful thing that I have experienced in my life is that it was granted to me to come close to such a man, and I thank God daily for this."

Or take the case of Gustav Mahler, who, as Mr. Ross observes, once argued that the devious dwarf Mime, in "Siegfried," was "intended by Wagner as a persiflage of a Jew." Mahler then added: "I know of only one Mime, and that is me." There is, however, more to this aside. Mahler also said: "No doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews with all their characteristic traits . . . the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested; but for God's sake it must not be exaggerated and overdone. . . . You wouldn't believe what there is in that part, nor what I could make of it." For Mahler, Wagner exquisitely understood the Jew in Mime.

Mr. Ross ventures in a useful direction in considering the "special appeal" of "Lohengrin" for Jewish listeners: "The opera romanticizes the figure of the itinerant outsider who stands apart from the 'normal' community, much as many Jews perceived themselves within German society." As a lifelong Jewish Wagnerite, I would go the distance: Wagner is the supreme poet of homelessness, the master musical portraitist of marginality. He is Siegmund, an orphan of ambiguous parentage, who exclaims: "I am always unpopular. . . . Misery is all I know." He is Wotan and Tristan, who drop out. He is Hans Sachs, a lonely philosopher of pessimism. He is the cerebral Loge, whose irony is quick and irredeemable. As for Wagner himself, he suspected his actual father to have been Jewish. He fled the law as a political exile. He was always in debt. His enemies were numerous and powerful. His health was poor.

That he was himself a paradigmatic outsider explains many of the most impassioned, most therapeutic manifestations of Wagnerism, beginning with his appeal to gays and women, to whom he seemed, as to so many Jews, "one of us." And so he is also Parsifal, who may be read as androgynous; or Senta, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, driven to flout convention because of oppressive circumstances—because of a brutish husband or clueless father.

If one were to further extrapolate the grand trajectory traced by Mr. Ross, where, finally, does his own "Wagnerism" fit, with its cool intellectualism and tenacious yet circumspect forms of engagement? I would place it alongside Patrice Chéreau's landmark 1976 Bayreuth production of "The Ring of the Nibelung." Chéreau, like Mr. Ross, came late to Wagner. He, too, was an open-ended revisionist, both critical and appreciative. Above all, his production was justly acclaimed, not least by Mr. Ross himself, as an exercise in cultural memory, culling allusions from history and the visual arts—"a panorama of Wagnerism in all its variegated glory."

And what next, for generations to come? Wagner is never cursory: There is no short course. Will there be enough cultural oxygen to sustain another half-century of Wagnerism? The final sentences of Mr. Ross's book sound discomfitingly pregnant. He is writing about the Good Friday Spell in "Parsifal," during which all living creatures "give thanks for the bright instant between birth and death. . . . As Parsifal sings, only the spear that caused [Amfortas's] wound can heal it. The spear is art itself: poetry, novels, painting, dance, theater, opera. . . . The slowness of the music, the ambiguity of it, the radical shiver of its emotions, the disquiet that so many people feel in its face: all this marks Wagner as a contrary voice in modern culture, a warning from the damaged past."

See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wagnerism-art-politics-in-the-shadow-of-music-review-the-outsider-11599836423

[Scion7]

Oh, I can dismiss it as hyperbole!
Great composer, but bloody hell!

[ritter]

From the Wall Street Journal: a review by Joseph Horowitz of a 700+ page book by Alex Ross on Wagner.



See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wagnerism-art-politics-in-the-shadow-of-music-review-the-outsider-11599836423

Most interesting, thanks! I don't agree with many of Mr. Ross' views (in The Rest is Noise), and didn't particularly admire how they were argued and presented, but might take a look at this new book.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Does anybody know that late Wagner was nearly, or totally, a Buddhist, and he even considered making an opera of Buddha's life?

[Scion7]

Well, Leonard, Gray, Schonberg, and Parry say nothing of anything 'Buddha' in their chapters on him - if anything, only the rejection of any religion as a whole.  I haven't picked up any revisionist biographies on Wagner - where did you read this new/surprising fact?

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Well, Leonard, Gray, Schonberg, and Parry say nothing of anything 'Buddha' in their chapters on him - if anything, only the rejection of any religion as a whole.  I haven't picked up any revisionist biographies on Wagner - where did you read this new/surprising fact?

Tristan Chord. Bryan Magee. I don't know if it is true or not, though. But the author is a renowned academic.

Also, related web site here.

https://www.monsalvat.no/india.htm

[Jo498]

Wagner liked Schopenhauer's version of Buddhism, I guess, but I don't think he was a Buddhist.

[ritter]

Wagner thought of composing a Buddhist-themed opera, Die Sieger, (The Victors) not that late in his career. The sketch (not surpassing one page of text) is from the mid-1850s. The idea was used rather cleverly by composer Jonathan Harvey for his very interesting opera Wagner Dream from 2007 (pity that librettist Jean-Claude Carrière's use of the English language is maladroit IMO).

Some Buddhist elements can be arguably detected in Parsifal as well, but there's a stretch from that to Wagner becoming "nearly, or totally, a Buddhist".

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Wagner thought of composing a Buddhist-themed opera, Die Sieger, (The Victors) not that late in his career. The sketch (not surpassing one page of text) is from the mid-1850s. The idea was used rather cleverly by composer Jonathan Harvey for his very interesting opera Wagner Dream from 2007 (pity that librettist Jean-Claude Carrière's use of the English language is rather maladroit IMO).

Some Buddhist elements can be arguably detected in Parsifal as well, but there's a stretch from that to Wagner becoming "nearly, or totally, a Buddhist".

Thank you for the clarification. I am not intending to advocate a new theory or re-write history. My apology if my writing or the subject annoyed your knowledge. Again, I appreciate that you clarified on this matter.

[ritter]

You haven't annoyed me in the least (I just happen to have read Wagner's draft for Die Sieger many years ago). Glad to have been of help

If you are interested in post-serial avant-gardism, that Harvey piece is quite fascinating, and has been released on CD:



Cheers,