New to Wagner - Just purchased this big box set.

[Elgarian Redux]

My teaching assistantship at Buffalo was the Music History for non-majors, and the professor's prime example for Wagner was the closing scene for Die Walküre, so I've known where this was headed. Now, having seen the whole, I find it magnificent.

Fabulous. I'm so pleased the effort was rewarded.

[Karl Henning]

Just finished Siegfried. Now I know whence the Siegfried-Idyll. Highly gratifying. Separately: "May your end be blissful, immortal race!" A meaning of "immortal" with which I was hitherto unfamiliar....

[Florestan]

Separately: "May your end be blissful, immortal race!" A meaning of "immortal" with which I was hitherto unfamiliar....

Reminds me of these lines from a Romanian nationalist song:

The brave Dacians, immortal race,
Once ruled this land.

Makes one wonder how did king Decebalus manage to kill himself...

[Elgarian Redux]

Just finished Siegfried. Now I know whence the Siegfried-Idyll. Highly gratifying. Separately: "May your end be blissful, immortal race!" A meaning of "immortal" with which I was hitherto unfamiliar....

Hey, you are ripping along! Hoorah!
(Just between you and me, Siefried is the part of the Ring that I find hardest to get involved in.)

[Karl Henning]

Götterdämmerung Gotta say: I love the color of that  opening chord. I'm really just starting it. I've got a Henning Ensemble rehearsal at 6:30 and then my Utah première at 9:30.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Götterdämmerung Gotta say: I love the color of that  ooening chord. I'm really just starting it. I've got a Henning Ensemble rehearsal at 6:30 and then Mt Utah première at 9:30.

Three oboes, three clarinets, four horns, and a bass trumpet.

[Karl Henning]

Three oboes, three clarinets, four horns, and a bass trumpet.

Do they make bass trumpets anymore, or what is swapped in?

[Karl Henning]

The featurette, "The first Ring for television" is narrated by Twilight Zone veteran Geo. Grizzard ("The Chaser," "In His Image.")

[AnotherSpin]

Götterdämmerung Gotta say: I love the color of that  opening chord. [..]

I was reminded of Baudelaire's words on Wagner's music: "...it seemed to me that this music was mine, and I recognized it in the way that any man recognizes the things he is destined to love."

[(poco) Sforzando]

Do they make bass trumpets anymore, or what is swapped in?

Adler and Piston (great name for someone discussing brass instruments) both say it is in effect a trombone with valves. It is scored for by Wagner, Strauss, and Stravinsky among others.

[San Antone]

Adler and Piston (great name for someone discussing brass instruments) both say it is in effect a trombone with valves. It is scored for by Wagner, Strauss, and Stravinsky among others.

Valve trombones are common.

[Karl Henning]

Adler and Piston (great name for someone discussing brass instruments) both say it is in effect a trombone with valves. It is scored for by Wagner, Strauss, and Stravinsky among others.

I was thinking tenor trombone.

[Karl Henning]

Valve trombones are common.

I think they should exist, if only so that "slide trombone" should not be pointlessly redundant. 😉

[(poco) Sforzando]

My teaching assistantship at Buffalo was the Music History for non-majors, and the professor's prime example for Wagner was the closing scene for Die Walküre, so I've known where this was headed. Now, having seen the whole, I find it magnificent.

I just listened to the whole of Walküre the other day (in the very fine Leinsdorf version with Jon Vickers at his greatest), and while I find much of the second act (at least Wotan's monologue) musically something of a letdown, Act One is practically perfect - the most ardent love music Wagner ever wrote, Tristan nonwithstanding, and Act Three despite some klunky bits is pretty good too. ("Boring!" we are told.) All I could think while experiencing that huge four-hour time span was, "My God, that man could compose!" One does not have to be a Wagner fanatic to appreciate what he achieved in this and the other Ring operas.

[Karl Henning]

I just listened to the whole of Walküre the other day (in the very fine Leinsdorf version with Jon Vickers at his greatest), and while I find much of the second act (at least Wotan's monologue) musically something of a letdown, Act One is practically perfect - the most ardent love music Wagner ever wrote, Tristan nonwithstanding, and Act Three despite some klunky bits is pretty good too. ("Boring!" we are told.) All I could think while experiencing that huge four-hour time span was, "My God, that man could compose!" One does not have to be a Wagner fanatic to appreciate what he achieved in this and the other Ring operas.

Indeed.

[Karl Henning]

I just listened to the whole of Walküre the other day (in the very fine Leinsdorf version with Jon Vickers at his greatest), and while I find much of the second act (at least Wotan's monologue) musically something of a letdown, Act One is practically perfect - the most ardent love music Wagner ever wrote, Tristan nonwithstanding, and Act Three despite some klunky bits is pretty good too. ("Boring!" we are told.) All I could think while experiencing that huge four-hour time span was, "My God, that man could compose!" One does not have to be a Wagner fanatic to appreciate what he achieved in this and the other Ring operas.

Well, and this was the risk I walked into with open eyes: my scoffing days are done. 

[San Antone]

I think they should exist, if only so that "slide trombone" should not be pointlessly redundant. 😉

There are several, but one famous jazz musician who made a career playing one:

Robert Edward "Bob" Brookmeyer (December 19, 1929 – December 15, 2011) was an American jazz valve trombonist, pianist, arranger, and composer.

[Karl Henning]

Götterdämmerung Gotta say: I love the color of that  opening chord. I'm really just starting it. I've got a Henning Ensemble rehearsal at 6:30 and then my Utah première at 9:30.

It's long enough since I did any reading about Der Ring, that I'd clean forgot Gunther, Hagen and Gutrune, so the freshness of this episode is an added bonus.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I expect this new comment will once again rouse the same meagre yet indefatigable little bunch of my detractors, who never seem to tire of their noble mission. Still, I shall say this.

In European mythological thought, particularly in the works of Karl Kerényi and Carl Jung, the incest motif, such as the brother–sister union in the Volsunga Saga that inspired Wagner's Die Walküre, is understood symbolically rather than literally. It expresses the union of opposites within the psyche, a process of renewal and transformation that leads to the emergence of a more complete self.

Kerényi regarded such mythic unions as giving rise to the "divine child," a symbol of indestructible life and spiritual regeneration. Jung interpreted these motifs as expressions of psychic rebirth: the return of energy to its unconscious source to create new consciousness. In Die Walküre, the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, twins born of Wotan, follows this pattern. Their child Siegfried embodies the liberated hero, born to renew a corrupted and decaying world, which to my mind is the central motif of the entire cycle.

However symbolic you may wish to be, I see no reason to discount the literal interpretation. I doubt most operagoers would see the Siegmund-Sieglinde union as only symbolic: "Oh, so brother and sister had a baby together? That's incest!" "Yes, but it's symbolic incest." "Oh, then it's all right." And of course we can be sure that Siegfried and Brünnhilde got it on after the curtain falls down following the close of his eponymous opera, and since she's his grandfather's daughter that would make her his aunt, pretty incestuous too though no one mentions that inconvenient fact.

As for your statement that "Their child Siegfried embodies the liberated hero, born to renew a corrupted and decaying world, which to my mind is the central motif of the entire cycle," I would certainly agree that "renewing a corrupted and decaying world is the central motif," but is Siegfried really the "liberated hero"? Certainly Siggy has no ambition to wield the power conferred on him by the ring, but he still falls prey to the ring's curse by committing two murders in Act Two of Siegfried, and after drinking Hagen's potion, he spends much of Götterdämmerung not as a hero but as Hagen's pawn.

It's really not Siegfried but the former Valkyrie and now fully human Brünnhilde who redeems the world at the close of the cycle, sacrificing herself and restoring the ring to the Rhinemaidens while Walhall goes up in flames and Hagen is drowned in the Rhine.

And so regardless of any European mythological thought, I don't think the facts of Wagner's story bear out your theories.

[AnotherSpin]

However symbolic you may wish to be, I see no reason to discount the literal interpretation. I doubt most operagoers would see the Siegmund-Sieglinde union as only symbolic: "Oh, so brother and sister had a baby together? That's incest!" "Yes, but it's symbolic incest." "Oh, then it's all right." And of course we can be sure that Siegfried and Brünnhilde got it on after the curtain falls down following the close of his eponymous opera, and since she's his grandfather's daughter that would make her his aunt, pretty incestuous too though no one mentions that inconvenient fact.

As for your statement that "Their child Siegfried embodies the liberated hero, born to renew a corrupted and decaying world, which to my mind is the central motif of the entire cycle," I would certainly agree that "renewing a corrupted and decaying world is the central motif," but is Siegfried really the "liberated hero"? Certainly Siggy has no ambition to wield the power conferred on him by the ring, but he still falls prey to the ring's curse by committing two murders in Act Two of Siegfried, and after drinking Hagen's potion, he spends much of Götterdämmerung not as a hero but as Hagen's pawn.

It's really not Siegfried but the former Valkyrie and now fully human Brünnhilde who redeems the world at the close of the cycle, sacrificing herself and restoring the ring to the Rhinemaidens while Walhall goes up in flames and Hagen is drowned in the Rhine.

And so regardless of any European mythological thought, I don't think the facts of Wagner's story bear out your theories.

I haven't any particular theories on the matter. My post was merely a comment on the preceding posts by other participants.

As for symbolism in operatic plots, and not just Wagner's, it is undoubtedly present; to argue otherwise would be rather odd. After all, opera is not a documentary film.