Wagner and Shopenhauer: 200 Years On
WAGNER
…the fruits of inspiration and the start of modern music
This prose-poem is a personal reaction, a personal commentary, on the big 200th anniversary year of the birth of Richard Wagner.-Ron Price, Australia:)
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Part 1:
The music and theatre world everywhere in 2013 is and will be especially focused on Richard Wagner. This is the year marking the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 130th anniversary of his death. The Wagner Year celebrations are centred on the towns of Leipzig where he was born, and Bayreuth, which is most closely associated with his work. In honour of this special year, the Bayreuth Festival is further enriched by a broad accompanying programme and a series of special projects. For some five months, from 16 February 2013 to 14 July 2013, Wagner’s works are being showcased. As I write this revision of this post on 21 May 2013, it is less than 24 hours to a special program by one of the world’s leading interpreters of Wagner’s works. The conducting of the Bayreuth Festival orchestra, and an array of outstanding soloists, is the core of a programme in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth.
Part 2:
Richard Wagner(1813-1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor primarily known for his operas, or musical dramas. His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements.
His "Tristan und Isolde" is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music, a musical field now filled with more than a century and a half of endless variety. In 1852 Wagner met the wealthy silk trader Otto Wesendonck who bankrolled the composer for several years, and it was this bankrolling that provided Wagner with some freedom to work and not to worry about money. Money is the life-blood or bed-rock of so much of life, whether it is the genius of a man like Wagner, or ordinarily ordinary and humanly human people like me.
By the end of 1854, Wagner had sketched out all three acts of an opera on his Tristan theme. It was composed between 1857 and 1859 during the same years that Darwin published his Origin of the Species. Tristan and Isolde premiered in Munich on 10 June 1865 at the end of the Civil War in the United States. The impact of the Tristan legend, together with his discovery of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) in October 1854, led Wagner to find himself in a "serious mood created by his reading Schopenhauer.”(2) Wagner utilized that mood to find, to create, the ecstatic expression that inspired the conception of Tristan und Isolde.
Part 3:
This evening I watched the Stephen Fry special on Wagner on ABC1 TV.(1) I have enjoyed Stephen Fry(1957- ) for years, especially his more intellectual interests, although he is immensely enjoyed in popular culture for his part in film and the quiz game QI, as well as several travel programs. Fry is a British actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and activist.
Tonight’s TV program focused, in the main, on "The Ring", a set of four operas based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas. The four operas are modelled after ancient Greek dramas that were presented as three tragedies and one play. Fry has been particularly interested in Greek drama and history most of his adult life, and he links Wagner, the Greeks, and his own set of values for the pleasure of those, like myself, with an interest in that 5th century BC Golden Age. The operas are often referred to as The Ring Cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring. Wagner wrote the music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874.
Part 4:
Fry has also written and presented several documentary series, including the award-winning "Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive", which saw him explore his mental illness. Fry suffers from the milder form of bipolar disorder, BPD II. My BPD I, the more serious form, has given me an affinity with Fry for years partly due to his efforts to de-stigmatize BPD and mental illness in general. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)ABC1 TV, 10;25-11:25 p.m., 19/5/’13, and (2)Wikipedia, 21/5/’13.
And so it was, so it has been
argued, that modern music in
our time made its debut right
at the start, at the beginnings
of those intimations that, over
time, transformed a heterodox,
seemingly negligible offshoot
of the Shaykhi school of that
Ithna-Ashariyyih Shi’ah sect of
Islam into a world religion……
Wagner had absolutely no idea
that his Shopenhauerian moods
were contemporaneous with an
ecstacy that would result in the
realization of a Wondrous Vision
which constituted and resulted in
an emanation of the brightest, the
fairest, fruit of the fairest civilization
the world had yet seen, and aimed at
the political and religious unification of
the planet in the centuries beyond in the
21st century, and the third millennium.(1)
(1) Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Pub. Trust, Wilmette, 1974(1938), p.48.
Ron Price
20/5/’13 to 21/5/'13.
Filling one’s inmost being: With inspiration
The genius of Wagner----Ron Price
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He may set himself a number of goals and pursue them with such energy that his actions are directed more to the goals themselves than to the approbation of others. His world then expands. He is no longer tightly locked into his environment; the resonance within him increases, and he concentrates on more distant objectives. Certainty of the future lifts him beyond the present, creating a greater detachment from the age, enabling him to see himself differently, in a longer perspective....This seems to have been true of the young Caesar. -Christian Meier, Caesar, Harper Collins, 1995(1982), p.100.
His world expanded infinitely in both time and space. He felt lifted into the future, to a time when there was to be a more liberal effusion of grace enabling an acceleration of the march of all that he espoused, his deepest convictions. He felt as if he was only part of his own age, as if he was disappearing into his creations, as if he was creating someone who was in the service of a great idea, with an identity known only in humility and only to God.-Ron Price with thanks to Thomas Merton and Shoghi Effendi.
While He was wafting the fragrances(1)
of mercy over all created things
this genius transformed the world(2)
of opera carrying people away
with his music. His music told
of things to come and listeners
lost themselves in its sounds,
like Tannhauser which he wrote
in 1844 about the inner life of the
artist-mystic-poet-seer, and then
Lohengrin: some mystery, some
impenetrable veil of concealment,
some divine elixir, some crimson-
coloured ruby Ark, some wondrous tongue,
some vast Garden, paradaisical, and some
ultimate retreat, some intoxication that had
come and would again in this world of will.
(1) The Bab and, then, Baha’u’llah
(2) Richard Wagner
Ron Price
18/5/'97 to 20/5/'13
