Spent

Wo bin ich? Ist's Fantasie, dass ich noch lebe?

Quote courtesy of last week's broadcast; sentiment courtesy of this afternoon's - Die Walküre.
I'm done for. Five hours in a dark room with Wagner on headphones. I'm even now still re-adjusting to the outside world. Even interruptions by the Met quiz and the singers' roundtable (hosted by Voice From Home, Sarah Billinghurst) couldn't really bring me down to earth. I lost track of time. No clocks, and no knowledge of the music to tell me even roughly where I was. I didn't know it was about to end until - it ended. All I wonder is where the Wagner addicts, the people who travel the world in pursuit of Ring cycles, find the emotional reserves to cope. I don't think I could. But then, it is addictive. Given the chance, I'd quite happily have sat through the whole thing again after it finished at 8 tonight. Didn't seem like five hours anyway. Wish it had been longer. Truly. Such music. For once I can offer you absolutely no meaningful comment on the singers because I didn't hear them, only the music itself. This is mindbending stuff. Need...more...but not quite yet. Still feeling a little fragile. I'm recovering with very subdued Bach etc., which is about all I feel up to. The door which Tannhäuser pushed half-open has been blown off its hinges tonight.

Comments

[Sam]

I'm glad you liked Die Walküre, I knew you would. It was a good performance, no doubt. Walküre is surely the best opera in The Ring, in no small part because it's a lot of great music compounded into a perfect length opera (after the fifth hour, Siegfried can get a little long).

[Lisa Hirsch]

Die Walküre is one of the best places to start with Wagner, I think. The first act is nearly perfect. I do think the first half of Act II can be hard to take even with subtitles. But there's such a great story and it ends with such great music.

And just wait until you wrap your head around Tristan. The Act II love duet would get my vote for the most transcendent and beautiful 45 minutes in opera - though I note that Verdi accomplishes about as much musically and emotionally in the 9 minutes of the Otello love duet, a miracle of compact intensity. In any event, I came out of my first live Tristan feeling like I'd been sandbagged - in a good way, of course. That was the magnificent 1998 Seattle production. What the technical crew and director did with the love duet is still about the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a theater.

I would have a hard time picking out the best Ring opera. I love them all; I think they each have strengths and weaknesses. I also like Siegfried more than almost anyone else does - the Wanderer's scene contains some of my very favorite music in the Ring.

[A.C. Douglas]

Whether you're aware of it or not, Sarah, your above described response is, in all its details, *precisely* the response any properly-done (and, indeed, that Met _Walküre_ you heard was just such a performance), late-period Wagner work should provoke in a listener (the comic, _Meistersinger_, of course, excepted).

Most gratifying to read.

ACD

[A.C. Douglas]

Aprops Lisa's comment, re, _Tristan_, I just found this on a Wagner Usenet newsgroup. The poster's name is "Charles":

ACD
---------------------
Just a personal story...In the spring of 2002, I was in the early
stages of my Wagner enthusiasm, having hugely enjoyed Parsifal and then
fallen in love with Meistersinger. For my third work, I borrowed the
Bohm Tristan from the library, and started listening to it at work, at
the gym, at home. When the love duet in Act II began to catch hold of
me, I left this mortal realm and spent the next three weeks or so on a
completely different plane of existence, breathing, eating and sleeping
the opera, a cipher to my wife, a sleepwalker, totally in awe that a
work of art could so transport me. The people and events of daily
existence were mere shadows and my life was lived for nearly a month
within that opera, the inner horizons it opened up, and that
passionately moving performance. I will never be able to objectively
judge that version, but to me it is the strongest example ever of
fervent feeling rendering any issues of technical shortcoming
completely irrelevant. I think we are very lucky to have it on record.

[Sieglinde]

Sarah dear-- Refrain from dipping into the Boehm Tristan. You will be ruined. After Nilsson's electrifying attack and Boehm's urgent pulse, that Liebestod will never sound right again. I really mean it.

[Patrick]

You see, Sarah, we're like a bunch of Wagnerite relatives hovering over our favorite niece, pleased to see you're becoming invested in the family rites… I disagree with Lisa, I think one of the best scenes in the RING indeed, in all of opera is the first scene of Act 2. It’s like some sort of perverse homage from Wagner to his nagging wife. Fricka stands up to Wotan for her traditional values while relishing sticking it to the son of a bitch for cheating on her. Adding insult to injury, she has to put up with her low-life husband’s juvenile delinquent love children, who when not whooping and racing their horses through the halls of Valhalla at all hours are dragging dead soldiers through the entry way, messing up her nice clean floors. Like when your friend Germont convines Violetta that she has to make a 180° turn against her wishes, Fricka confounding Wotan makes for dramatic theater at it’s finest. And then of course like all fathers, Wotan cannot escape the torment of his rebellious teenager.
Sieglinde’s right: beware Tristan, it can unhinge even the most rational mind.

[Bear]

Boehm. It's the techno Tristan, but it is way cool.
Still, though, excavating Grandad's record collection, I stumbled across that old RCA monster, and that was the end of...

A nod to Patrick, but I say venture in. Though it does adhere. Rather permanently.

[A.C. Douglas]

I suppose I should have noted that I posted that newsgroup post from "Charles" only because it seemed so serendipitously apposite to what Lisa said about _Tristan_ generally. I didn't at all mean to put in a plug for the Böhm reading of that work, which reading I find not only "long on ... excitement, but relatively short on poetry," as someone on that Wagner newsgroup neatly put it, but also unregardful of Wagner's score.

Böhm gets it wrong from the very first measures of the Act I prelude (inserting, for instance, sforzandos where none are called for, and which in fact are contra-indicated as they blunt totally the effect of the notated sforzando in the third repetition of the second leitmotif at bar 11), and continues his reading as if he were conducting a score by Beethoven rather than Wagner.

Not the recording to get, by any means, Nilsson's bravura performance notwithstanding.

ACD

[Sieglinde]

Of course, ACD does not prefer the Boehm Tristan. It's a fast, screaming, relentlessly banging reading, skin-deep, of the soap opera kind, definitely not the still, brooding sort. BUT consistent within itself, and what a separate world Boehm makes with Nilsson! If one has money for only one recording, and plan to die the day after the purchase, then that's another story; but Sieglinde suspects dear Sarah will live so long she'd be buying every Tristan recording (studio & pirate) twice over, and so she'll have space for two Boehm Tristans in her collection. This is the danger: its furious pulse is hypnotic, and what it lacks in fidelity (w.r.t. convention) it makes up with boundless verve. You will always look for this quality in all future contact with the work. That's what I mean when I said the Liebestod (and indeed the entire Tristan) will never sound "right" again.

[Lisa Hirsch]

Anyone who plans to buy only one Tristan recording is in big trouble. I've got 12 or 15 of them and all are compromised in one way or another: singing, completeness, sound, or conducting. Some day I'll finish the essay on this that I started a few years back...

[Gregory Peebles]

Yes. There is no such thing as perfect Wagner. What I think Miss Sarah has stumbled onto here is her name. "Prima la musica" is indeed a noble gesture, but with Wagner and all "total art works" something is bound to suffer. So we are bound to buy a thousand recordings. Oh well. So much for the little palazzo on the Via Rialto.
Hojoto

[Jim]

Ah, the Bohm Tristan. As a friend of mine once said, he conducts it like it's Elektra, an approach I have absolutely no problem with. After all, it means it's on 3 CD's, not 4! :-) Ones to avoid: the Bernstein (the music is so slow at some points it disintegrates) and the Price/Kollo/Kleiber (too much studio jiggery pokery). I'll note the rumor that Lyric Opera of Chicago is doing it in 2009 (!!) with Heppner, Voigt and Andrew Davis, assuming either of the singers haven't thrashed their voices by then.