Wagner

[jmnixon95]

Who here is a fan of Richard Wagner?

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Me, and a new fan at that. I just started getting into opera and classical music a few months ago, and Wagner is one of my favorites. I love his dark sound. I'll be seeing his Die Walkure simulcast from The Met in a couple months or so.

[Lokasenna]

One of the greatest composers the world has know, and probably the greatest opera composer of them all. I love Wagner!

Also, I think the Ring is quite possibly the single greatest artistic undertaking in human history. Utterly wonderful!

[stlukesguild]

:iagree:

[mal4mac]

I went through Solti's Ring Cycle, with the translation to hand, and it was one of the worst artistic experiences of my life. There are a few (very few...) instrumental sections I like (Ride of the Valkyries ...), but that's only a few minutes totally outweighed by many hours of tedium. It's not that I dislike classical music in general. I really like the greatest works of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, etc. Any thoughts of how one might get to enjoy Wagner?

"Wagner has wonderful moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour" - Gioachino Rossini

"One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' from a first hearing, and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time." - Gioachino Rossini

"Richard Wagner was a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain

"I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time." - Oscar Wilde

[Patrick_Bateman]

I went through Solti's Ring Cycle, with the translation to hand, and it was one of the worst artistic experiences of my life. There are a few (very few...) instrumental sections I like (Ride of the Valkyries ...), but that's only a few minutes totally outweighed by many hours of tedium. It's not that I dislike classical music in general. I really like the greatest works of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, etc. Any thoughts of how one might get to enjoy Wagner?

Wagner is love or hate as you would expect with the bombastic style and pretentiousness of his works. I go further and belong to the 'thoroughly detest' camp.

If you enjoy loud, overstated percussion, discordance and ostentation then Wagner is for you.

[Calidore]

I've seen three Wagner operas so far.

* Tristan& Isolde -- Total snooze, literally. It took me a week to watch it because I could only handle 15-30 minutes at a time before nodding off

* Flying Dutchman -- Liked this a great deal, partly for the staging (which set it in a sewing sweatshop and left doubt whether the story was a figment of the desperately bored heroine's imagination), and partly for the casting of the Dutchman, an imposing-looking beefy black guy who really looked the part. His entrance--chained to the front of his ship, which crashes through the sweatshop wall--was an attention-getter also.

* Das Rheingold -- As a prologue, just fine. It never felt overlong. I'll get to the rest of the Ring cycle eventually.

One thing I've found about my own taste in operas is that I put story and presentation over the music.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

One thing I've found about my own taste in operas is that I put story and presentation over the music.
If I'm not mistaken, music is probably the area one should invest most in. Opera stories are usually poor.

I'm wondering, though, how is Wagner "pretentious"? I've never really understood saying "so-and-so is pretentious" when it comes to music, which seem, to me, the most subjective form of art. It's all sound. Some sound pleases the ear and some doesn't. Let's look at the definition:

"pretentious: attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed"

How can one be pretentious when it comes to music? When one writes/performs a piece of music, you're hearing that person's potential. There's no real way to fool someone into thinking something sounds good.

[stlukesguild]

I went through Solti's Ring Cycle, with the translation to hand, and it was one of the worst artistic experiences of my life. There are a few (very few...) instrumental sections I like (Ride of the Valkyries ...), but that's only a few minutes totally outweighed by many hours of tedium. It's not that I dislike classical music in general. I really like the greatest works of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, etc. Any thoughts of how one might get to enjoy Wagner?

One of the possible problems is that Wagner is a far removed from Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Bach as Rimbaud or Whitman are from Shakespeare, Petrarch, Ronsard, or Dante. The older composers, like the older poets, employ a clear and immediately recognizable structural forms. Beethoven certainly pushes the forms... but Wagner moves into something seemingly sprawling and free-form. In many cases one may do well to first explore the Romantic compositions of Schubert (8th and 9th symphony), Hector Berlioz (Symphony Fantastique), Mussorgsky (Pictures at an Exhibition), Rimsky-Korsakov (Scheherazade), Tchaikovsky's late symphonies, Bruckner's late symphonies, almost anything by Mahler, Puccini's "through-played" operas such as Madame Butterfly, or Richard Strauss' tone poems before confronting Wagner... and then I would suggest a good highlights collection or recording of overtures.

I would also note that how one responds to Wagner in many ways will be impacted by one's experience with opera. The traditional opera involves most of the dialog (and action) being carried out during recitatives that are spoken or half-sung. In between these moments of dialog and action we are presented with songs: arias, duets, trios, etc... not unlike the structure of a musical. Wagner employed a "through-composed" style in which the narrative is non-ending and set to a symphonic-like structure of music. Wagner, however, employs a very broad musical structure. If we look at Beethoven's 5th symphony, for example, the work is structured upon a simple 4-note motif: bum-bum-bum-buuuuum! This motif travels through a traditional sonata frame-work. Wagner employs simply motifs... indeed each character is defined by a motif that repeatedly shows up in different forms... but Wagner's structure... like Bruckner, Mahler, or even late Schubert (like most Romantic composers) is far more sprawling or slow to develop.

I personally came to Wagner through Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde and I was immediately seduced:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-qoaioG2UA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch3o0qV6TiA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkrGhpKZN6o&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mOA8pZ_I4M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kWlTCx6m_k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXgcWx8_tsk&feature=related

Wagner's Ring is so full of exquisite music... and brilliant drama... yet perhaps not unlike Dante's Comedia, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, or Joyce' Ulysses it is not a work that all can easily jump into. Still...

What an opening to the whole:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WVeyClUtr0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwW28AS30PU

By the way... for all the negative quotes concerning Wagner by other composers, you can find dozens admitting to how overwhelming and inspirational his music was. Wagner was a towering figure... similar in status to Picasso... in the sense that almost no artist after him was able to ignore his achievements. Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Debussy, Bruckner, Delius, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Verdi, Puccini, etc... are but a few composers who admitted to Wagner's impact... even if later they turned away.

Wagner is love or hate as you would expect with the bombastic style and pretentiousness of his works.

I don't find Wagner any more "bombastic" than Beethoven, Mahler, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok or any number of other Romantics or Modernists. At the same time, his passages of great theatricality are carefully balanced with passages of slow-building tension and others of delicacy and quiet beauty. As for "pretentiousness"... well "pretense" is only a detriment when the work fails to meet its lofty aim, and a great many would agree that Wagner certainly achieved what he set out to do.

If you enjoy loud, overstated percussion, discordance

Again, I don't see the "overstated percussion"... surely it has nothing on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9LWHEf0VFo&feature=related

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogJFXqYEYd8

or even this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW4C2h3lPac

As for "dissonance"... well Wagner is certainly one of the composers who pushes the limits of tonality or traditional harmony... but there is nothing truly dissonant in his music that even begins to approach what Debussy, Weinberg, Scriabin, Bartok, and Schoenberg work do a few years later:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmkDMTU-hb4

[OrphanPip]

I appreciate Wagner, but I just can't engage with his work. I'm more engaged by his influence on composers like Puccini and Strauss.

[Lokasenna]

Nicely put, Stlukes!

[mal4mac]

One of the possible problems is that Wagner is a far removed from Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Bach as Rimbaud or Whitman are from Shakespeare, Petrarch, Ronsard, or Dante. The older composers, like the older poets, employ a clear and immediately recognizable structural forms. Beethoven certainly pushes the forms... but Wagner moves into something seemingly sprawling and free-form. In many cases one may do well to first explore the Romantic compositions of Schubert (8th and 9th symphony), Hector Berlioz (Symphony Fantastique), Mussorgsky (Pictures at an Exhibition), Rimsky-Korsakov (Scheherazade), Tchaikovsky's late symphonies, Bruckner's late symphonies, almost anything by Mahler, Puccini's "through-played" operas such as Madame Butterfly, or Richard Strauss' tone poems before confronting Wagner... and then I would suggest a good highlights collection or recording of overtures.


I've heard, repeatedly, many of the works of the romantic composers you mention and really like most of them - and it's usually an instant liking. I recently thoroughly enjoyed listening to Bartok's complete string quartets, Faure's complete piano music, Vaughan Williams complete symphonies (superb! Except for the first ... that may indicate the main problem - it's not that I don't generally 'get' modern music it's that I generally don't like opera or choral music. (But I do *love* Mozart's Operas, the music is just so good that it puts the problems I have with Opera in the shade... and because I'm steeped in Mozart's instrumental music perhaps I just "get it" enough to enjoy it.))

Thanks for the Puccini suggestion, I have a DVD somewhere that I keep intending to play... Might Karajan's Tristan be a good place to start again with Wagner? I've owned it for ten years without being able to face playing it!



If we look at Beethoven's 5th symphony, for example, the work is structured upon a simple 4-note motif: bum-bum-bum-buuuuum! This motif travels through a traditional sonata frame-work. Wagner employs simply motifs... indeed each character is defined by a motif that repeatedly shows up in different forms... but Wagner's structure... like Bruckner, Mahler, or even late Schubert (like most Romantic composers) is far more sprawling or slow to develop.


I mostly don't like Mahler - I make exceptions for his 2nd and 4th symphonies, and bits of others. Maybe I'm deaf to all but the most obvious leitmotifs - I'll try and listen out for them... might make it at least an interesting game!

I don't find Wagner "bombastic" or "pretentious" - I like Ride of the Valkyries! - but I found 90% of the Ring uninteresting & unmusical ("Fat Germans shouting at each other..."), where I find 90% of the instrumental work of other great composers very interesting and very musical... so I find it difficult to drum up the motivation to listen to Wagner again at all, heck I could be listening to Haydn's piano trios (my current exploration ... they are 99% wonderful!)

I have an orchestral highlights disk of Wagner - one of my favourites disks. Mahler's 4th is one of my favourite symphonies. So I think I should persevere with these composers. Thanks for the tips St Luke...

P.S. I like Debussy and Bartok, but haven't heard anything I like by Schoenberg (maybe haven't hear the right pieces...) How do you get to like Schoenberg?

P.P.S. The Prelude to Tristan is wonderful ... maybe I'm worried it will be spoiled for me when the "singing" begins... Listening to the first singing example you give, I just don't like the voice of the male singer. Maybe that's my main problem. If you just don't like the singer then listening to an Opera for four hours is going to be very wearing, however good the music...

[stlukesguild]

Disliking classical operatic and choral singing certainly puts you at a distinct disadvantage as far as coming to appreciate Wagner. I never really had to confront this. I was raised in the Lutheran Church with my mother performing in the choir... lot's of Bach... and so I developed a love for classical vocals early on.

As for Schoenberg... to honest I don't really like him myself... although I have given his work repeated efforts. I like what I have by Webern and Berg... but find Schoenberg heavy-handed and lumpen most of the time. I have made such efforts to come to terms with him because I understand how talented he was from his earliest efforts:

Veklarte Nacht:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ry77PoGV8Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWjkfuTYpmA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYduxH6KkDA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SafZqIhFbUs&feature=related

Pelleas und Melisande:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i2Ea79xh3E

Gurrelieder

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUlmF5Oxqo8

(Of course this work is largely choral/vocal)

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

If you enjoy loud, overstated percussion, discordance

Again, I don't see the "overstated percussion"... surely it has nothing on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9LWHEf0VFo&feature=related

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogJFXqYEYd8

or even this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW4C2h3lPac

Or this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG13hWknobU)! :lol:

P.S. Love that Bartok, StLukes. I love dissonance.