For me, Holy Week usually means it’s time to trot out Wagner’s “Parsifal,” but in light of the death of tenor Peter Seiffert, here’s a delectable clip (at the link) from “Lohengrin,” with Seiffert’s then-wife Lucia Popp. Lohengrin was a Seiffert specialty, a role he sang several times at the Bayreuth Festival. In 2003, his recording of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” with Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin, was recognized with a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. Everyone loves to point out the fact that Popp was 15 years his senior. So what? I’d have married her myself! Popp died of brain cancer in 1993 at the age of 54, a great loss. Seiffert later married soprano Petra-Maria Schnitzer, who survives him. He was 71 years-old. R.I.P.
Grammy-winning “Tannhäuser,” in more immediate sound
While Debussy and the French Impressionists led a revolt against Wagnerism in music, there were others among their countrymen who were enthralled by the power of Wagner’s vision.
One of these was Ernest Reyer, whose family name was Rey, but he added the “er” to appear more Germanic! Reyer, born 200 years ago today, set his own version of the Siegfried story, as related in the Scandinavian Volsunga Saga, which, by way of the “Nibelungenlied,” also provided the basis for Wagner’s “Ring.” But Reyer’s approach to the tale was in the tradition of French grand opera.
The resultant “Sigurd,” composed between 1862 and 1867, was very popular with the French during its initial production at the Paris Opera in 1885. Earlier plans to present it there had fallen through, so that the work received its world premiere in Brussels in 1884. It was also heard in Covent Garden, Lyon, Monte Carlo and, before the end of the century, the French Opera House in New Orleans and La Scala Milan.
What’s interesting is that in the end Reyer’s music seems to bear more resemblance to Berlioz than it does to Wagner. Unable to live on the proceeds from his operas, he actually succeeded Berlioz as music critic at the Journal des débats.
Reyer’s early musical studies were overseen by his aunt, Louise Farrenc, the only woman on the faculty of the Paris Conservatory (beginning in 1842!). He rubbed shoulders with Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier (writing operas on texts of both), but he felt equally at home playing dominoes with the peasantry of Provençal. He claimed that the best source of inspiration was his pipe.
In the 19th century, when your opera was accepted in Paris, it meant you definitely needed a ballet. It was tradition. It provided a danced divertissement for French audiences, who were accustomed to a little light entertainment in the middle of an evening heavy on singing.
Richard Wagner bemoaned the fact, when “Tannhäuser” was accepted there, and he ruffled quite a few feathers when he frontloaded his ballet, essentially “getting it out of the way,” by including it in the first act as a bacchanale – which makes perfect dramatic sense in the Venusberg, the sensual realm of Venus.
Nevertheless, Parisian aristocrats were none too happy, as this conflicted with their dining schedules. (There’s a reason they call it “fashionably late.”) French soldiers too were accustomed to arriving with full bellies and light spirits to ogle dancers during their traditional appearance in a later act.
For this, among other reasons, “Tannhäuser” was met with whistles and catcalls. By the third performance, the backlash had become so intense, with interruptions of up to 15 minutes at a time, that Wagner finally withdrew the opera.
Giuseppe Verdi wasn’t crazy about the whole ballet idea either. Nevertheless, when he was invited to submit “Macbeth,” originally composed in 1847, for performance in Paris (first in 1852, and when he didn’t follow through, for a second time in 1864), he acquiesced. Of course, Verdi being Verdi, it became a much more involved undertaking than he had anticipated, and he wound up revising the entire opera.
Privately, he expressed reservations about the inclusion of ballet in opera, but unlike Wagner, he figured out ways for it to suit the drama AND at the accepted place in an evening’s entertainment. In short, when life gave him lemons, he made limoncello.
Verdi was a canny enough showman to know to give the public what it wanted: cavorting witches!
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, and even giants started small.
Young composers who went on to great things tackle that most daunting of musical forms, the symphony, this week on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.
What’s that? Wagner wrote symphonies? That’s right. He took a crack at writing two of them, in Beethovenian style, before finding his niche as a revolutionary opera composer. We’ll hear his Symphony in E.
We’ll also enjoy an early symphony by Gustav Holst, composer of “The Planets,” and one by an 18-year-old Claude Debussy.
Judging from their mature works, these three would be among the least likely to attempt sonata form.
Impetuous youth! I hope you’ll join me for “Bold Heads on Young Shoulders.” Composers at the start of their careers find the courage to strive for symphonic mastery, on KWAX!
See below for streaming information.
Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
More than any other medium, the movies come closest to fulfilling Richard Wagner’s vision of Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – the all-encompassing synthesis of artistic elements into a kind of “artwork of the future.”
Modern technology has made possible a total immersion of the senses of a sort that Wagner could only have dreamed of. In the right hands, the tools of cinema can handily eclipse the stagecraft the composer worked so hard to achieve at his specially-constructed Bayreuth Festspielhaus, conceived to present works like “The Ring of the Nibelung.” Wagner would have been amazed and delighted at the potential of film, and horrified by its frequent vulgarization.
One thing’s for certain: the Wagnerian concept of the leitmotif – of establishing associations in music between certain themes or thematic cells with onscreen characters, objects, and ideas – was a lesson not lost on film composers. Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and others shepherded the technique from the opera house to the silver screen, and the tradition has been kept alive by composers like John Williams and Howard Shore.
Of course, there have been many times when Wagner’s music was simply lifted or adapted for use in film, from at least Joseph Carl Breil’s appropriation of “Ride of the Valkyries” for the Klansmen in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915.
The power of cinema, with its synthesis of images, editing, sound, and music, can overwhelm the senses. Herbert von Karajan claimed that when he saw “Apocalypse Now” he was so caught up in the helicopter sequence that he didn’t even realize in the moment that he was listening to “Ride of the Valkyries,” a work he had conducted countless times.
Wagner’s legacy is a complicated one. Some filmmakers play to his more disturbing associations. Others poke fun at the grandiosity and portentousness of his music. Others still look past the shortcomings of the man to embrace the transcendence of his creations. Leonard Bernstein summed it up nicely, when he said, “I hate Wagner… but I hate him on my knees.”
Wagner may not have lived to see the movies, but the movies certainly “saw” him, and they carried his vision to undreamed of lengths. But for all that, few of them have been able to achieve his resonance.
Happy birthday, Richard Wagner.
Klansmen ride to “Rienzi” and “Ride of the Valkyries” in “The Birth of a Nation”
Charlie Chaplin’s balletic dream of world domination in “The Great Dictator”
Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in “What’s Opera, Doc?”
“Ride of the Valkyries” in Fellini’s “8 ½”
Ken Russell’s eyebrow-raising “Lisztomania”
Schwarzenegger outruns Teutonic stereotype in “Running Man”
Trek to the vampire’s castle in Herzog’s “Nosferatu”
