With
apologies to Professor Bruns
What’s the good,
what’s the sense, of having a blog? What excuse is there for being a blogger,
of presuming to write something that someone might read, if it is not to
declare, before it is too late the status
of my Wagnerism. It follows
herewith.
First, I must
explain that I fell in the thrall of Rickard Wagner early in high school. In
those years, Wagner’s music and the local trout kept me singing inside. Those
were the years when Lauritz Melchoir and Kirsten Flagstad owned the roles of
Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the titanic Ring
cycle of four operas. I even heard
the insufferable and sublime Melchoir live in concert in Denver, which is akin
to boasting of having heard Caruso.
Well before that
however, one Saturday afternoon, with my church-musician aunt and uncle
visiting from Texas, I lay on the living room floor listening to a live
broadcast of Tristan und Isolde from
the Met. I must have appeared to my musically conventional uncle quite unzipped
by the rapture of the music. I could not
have understood at that time its burning eroticism, but I must have been
sensing something of it: its musically overt sex had to have caught me.
Uncle Pete
remarked, as he passed by and saw me there in my innocent’s ecstasy, that when
I grew up I would not like that kind of music. I thought about that for a
moment and decided then and there that if that is what it meant to “grow up”,
well, I simply would not do it. And so I have not-- which for some readers,
this essay may only go to prove.
When it came time to
go off to the big war, the one book I took with me was a translation of the Ring operas, with Arthur Rackham’s
irresistible and quite erotic illustrations. I wanted somehow to get it into my
bloodstream
Home again in ’45, I
sought more Wagner any way I could get it. My 78 rpm shellac discs of the
overture to Tannhaüser, of Melchoir and Traubel singing the third act love duet
from Tristan, the first act of Walküre, the Met Saturday live
broadcasts, and a dear older tenor friend and his musical family around whose
piano, with open scores of the operas, we actually tried to sing the
stuff.
Then in college I
discovered maybe the greatest Wagnerite of them all, Bernard Shaw, and his
influential book-essay, A Perfect
Wagnerite, a way of hearing and thinking
about the operas as great political-social, as well as musical, dramatic
testaments.
In 1976, came the
Marxist, Bayreuth/Chereau Ring on TV.
It had to be the greatest of them all, set, as it was, in the
industrial/capitalist nineteenth century. Here is where I first heard James
Morris sing the god Wotan. There is nothing under the sun to match his farewell
to his daughter Brünhilde at the end of Walküre.
Then imagine what
it was to be in the Metropolitan Opera
house in Lincoln Center for the entire Ring cycle on as many nights. And James Morris as
Wotan again on all four of them! When he finished his Farewell, and Loge set the
mountain aflame around the guilty and sleeping Brünhilde, the audience like to
tore the place apart.
When I was to retire
from teaching, the Dean hauled me in to say that in my last semester, I ought
to teach something new, a seminar, the idea for which might be something wild
in my dreams of life and death, art and…. all the rest of it.
And so I thought
about how ideas could be performed on stage. I thought first of the ideas in
Wagner’s Ring. What were they and how
might they work on stage? Immediately, then, Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman leapt to mind with its
great third act dream scene, Don Juan in
Hell. And that meant moving forward, and at last, to that masterpiece of
the master of all masters, Mozart, and his Don
Giovanni.
Fifteen kids and I
studied, read, and listened to these immense works for those sixteen weeks. I
recall how delicious it was. I wonder now if I was really up to it….
So now, dear
friends, we must note that there have of late been complete Ring
cycles all over the place. Every city of any count must now produce this
revolutionary work. To top it off, we now have had it in a HD live transmission
from the Met in our local movie houses. Not to mention a new production of
Wagner’s final work, Parsifal, of
which I hope I am worthy.
And, in these late
days, I’m reading what many think is the greatest of all biographies, Ernest
Newman’s gigantic Life of Wagner, in four volumes. In this, my old age, I have come
to see Wagner the man in a different light from that of the journalist’s
obsession with scandal that I had bought into so easily and for so long. For
the gossips, Wagner was always morally reckless, prodigal, luxurious, covetous,
faithless, dunning everyone for cash and a constitutional dead-beat in return.
There is much truth
in this indictment; but in it all, Wagner was the very model of the new artist,
the real artist as the nineteenth
century invented him. This new
artist-exemplary, was granted to be radically different from the rest of
us-- of a higher order and therefore entitled by the sublimity of his calling
to moral privilege. (This idea of the artist is not entirely disappeared.)
Wagner was what he
thought he had to be in order to do what he had to do, which was always against
the most impossible odds ever to oppose anyone who ever set out to re-imagine a civilization. In this
respect Wagner remains Number One in the history of art.
But all this
pales faced with the anti-Semitism that
developed steadily throughout his career. It seriously compromises his ideology
of heilige deutsche Kunst-- holy
German art-- as he so exalted it in his comic masterwork, Die Meistersinger.
For all these
reasons, it was difficult to be of his circle. Few fully understood what he was
up to, even those, like Franz Liszt, who championed his operas, never quite got
it. Still, and only by dint of the most desperate effort, he got his work done.
Even though his vision of the theatre-- a music drama on stage-- failed to
restore German life and art to its ancient glory, purity, and preeminence among the nations. But he reinvented us who love the opera. He gave us a
glorious new sound of music to live in and new meanings to ancient story. He
taught us how to be really serious about life and art-- and how thrilling that
could be!
He was worthy of his
hire.
I am grateful beyond
measure that I found Wagner in my nonage, but regret that I was for so long in
error about the man. He may have been
terribly failed in his vain heroics; yet for singers and orchestras on stage-- and
kids like me-- he was a World Hero.
