Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Wagner

Wagner Yannick and Tristan A Mixed Reaction

May 22. Richard Wagner’s birthday. Anyone else looking forward to this endurance test with the Philadelphia Orchestra? 4 and ½ blissful hours of blood clot-inducing “Tristan und Isolde.”

This tongue-in-cheek teaser has been receiving a mixed reaction. I happen to think it’s very funny, but on message boards, music chats, and social media, it’s been getting more than its share of vitriol. Evidently, there are some real Yannick haters out there. And I am sorry to have to admit, classical music still does have its stuffed shirts.

Thankfully, I spend as little time around them as I can. In fact, I’m not sure how close I am to any of them in real life. But you know how it is. These guys can come across as the most unassuming, mildest-mannered people, but give them the anonymity of the internet and they all turn into monsters.

It’s okay to have opinions – I’ve got plenty of them myself, and by no means am I satisfied with everything Yannick conducts, strictly from an interpretive standpoint – but lighten up. It’s just a teaser, and it’s supposed to be fun!

This “Tristan” is unlikely to be on a level of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s or Victor de Sabata’s, but it is an opportunity to hear one of the world’s great orchestras play Wagner’s hypnotic, narcotic, viscerally intense, revolutionary score without the distraction of the seemingly-inevitable, nihilistic Regietheater nonsense productions you’re likely to encounter these days at virtually any opera house that’s going to attempt a staging.

The Everest of “Tristan” is littered with the literal corpses of those who have attempted the climb. Not only have singers destroyed their voices, but conductors have actually died. Felix Mottl and Joseph Keilberth both dropped dead while conducting the second act. The very first Tristan, heldentenor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died suddenly at the age of 29, after only four performances.

In an interview given shortly before his death, Giuseppe Verdi said that he “stood in wonder and terror” before Wagner’s “Tristan.” Is it any wonder that Yannick is getting himself into shape?

May 22, 2025
Stokowski Wagner Parsifal Good Friday Spell

On Leopold Stokowski’s birthday, a transcendent performance of the “Good Friday Spell” from Wagner’s “Parsifal”

April 18, 2025
Remembering Peter Seiffert A Wagnerian Tribute

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

Walther’s Prize Song from “Die Meistersinger”

April 15, 2025
Ernest Reyer Wagner’s French Rival

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.

Happy 200, Ernest Reyer (1823-1909)!

Overture to “Sigurd”:

Sigurd’s entrance:

December 1, 2023
Opera Ballet Scandals Wagner Verdi

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!

You go, Joe! Happy birthday!

Totally Goth witches’ chorus from “Macbeth”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b4tKhV5mcg

Act III Witches’ Dance from Taiwan:

“The Three Witches from Macbeth” (1827) by Alexandre-Marie Colin

October 10, 2023

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