RICHARD WAGNER
RICHARD WAGNER
(Leipzig, 1813 – Bayreuth, 1883)
Classical biographies of great composers, especially in the past, were often sub-titled with two short nouns: the man and the work, often clearly separating the biographical story from the artistic production. This is something that certainly cannot be done with a surgical cut, since the work of a man is the direct consequence of his own life, but a subdivision is in part possible and feasible. This naturally also happens with Wagner, who possesses a truly impressive bibliography, more comparable to that of Napoleon than to that of Beethoven: that is, something like 10,180 publications in the year of his death. I say this because I don't want and I don't have to go into the merits of the life of an artist who is certainly the most talked about, the most loved and the most hated in the entire history of music. And this time I don't even try to indicate a biographical study concerning him. Everyone do and judge for themselves. As far as I am concerned, I have only two questions on the table, namely: how could the late nineteenth century give such credit to this artist and why did he have such an enormous influence during and after his life? Answering in two words is not easy, but I'll try. That in the mid-nineteenth century, after two and a half centuries, the Opera Theater was in need of a reform was by now clear to everyone. Verdi himself, after 1848, took a progressive road that would lead him to the extraordinary results of the late operas, which if they had been taken as a model would have guaranteed many more years of life to the musical drama. But Wagner presented himself as a unique and dogmatic reformer and demanded that everyone conform to his new concept of theater in music. He did it with two simple expedients: the first, which is the part of genius, with a music so new and so shocking as to leave virtually everyone annihilated; the second, the work of the idealist, marrying that music to an illusory dramaturgy, based on mythical-philosophical assumptions of no consistency, but which, opposed to the Italian and French melodrama (which cut everything a bit) seemed astonishing divine intuitions . Then, basing himself solely on an ontological process, i.e. the guilt-atonement-redemption axis, he conceived and created seven Musikdramen of immense length, elevating the figure of the musician to the role of lay messiah and making music a monotheistic religion. For much less, Schumann had gone mad. Thus, in the general crisis of values that gripped the West in three quarters of the nineteenth century, the majority of composers born in the middle of the century saw in Wagner that guiding star which, once followed, would have led to the threshold of an unimaginable future. With this illusion of linear progression, the Italians in Italy denied Verdi and the whole evolution of melodrama; in Germany, the Germans disregarded Brahms and the formal development of Austro-German music. In France, Debussy's belated reaction was manifest, advertised, in some ways misunderstood but, in turn, the origin of a process that would lead to catastrophe. Thus, many, too many walked in Wagner's footsteps: Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Schönberg and the Second School of Vienna, producing in the end, above all through the evolution of chromaticism, such a rift between production and public tastes from reduce music to an icy intellectual branch of a sectoral type. If Wagner had guessed this he would be horrified: but atonality and dodecaphony, at the register of history, turn out to be his descendants. Outside the Germanic area, however, many escaped Wagner's gravitational grip: in France, Bizet; in Bohemia, Smetana and Dvorak; in Austria, the Strausses; in Russia, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. In Italy, the only one who managed to go his own way and survived was Puccini, and the reason for this is so simple that musicology has sometimes forgotten to explain it to us. That is: by adhering to the Wagnerian concept of Drama in music, Italian composers found themselves in the happy position of being able to disobey the obligation of Verdi's melodic declamation, or of the melody, or of the ideas, or of that thing that made certain authors great and many others don't. Composing an opera without a melodic design is exactly like conceiving a fresco without being able to trace a shape: then the abstract technique of the daubs is enough, and daubs were almost the entire corpus of post-Verdian Italian composers, devoted to a declamatory generic and a symphonic contribution of pure trade. And, without melody, our melodrama became something else, which the public finally disowned. Today Wagner's dramaturgy in the German language is, for non-German speakers, an insurmountable limit, and even a fair knowledge of the text in translation does not improve things. The librettos written by Wagner himself - in such an archaic German that we Italians can only get an idea of them by evoking the courtly poetry of the early Carducci - are only marginally dramatic scripts adhering to the narrative progression of what happens on stage. In most cases, however, they represent the possibility offered to the author for declarations of preceptual intent, ethical prayers and vaguely prophetic sermons. Inevitable consequence: in Wagner the action is petrified, the dynamic tension is often non-existent, the rhythms are stranded in a sort of cyclical time, within which the same characters always appear and disappear, bearers of stentorian perorations or introspective macerations. The music, however revolutionary and of absolute beauty, within the Musikdramen is diluted and remains subtended by the declaimed with the task of connective tissue: the famous Leitmotives , which are the only beacons that illuminate tedious and endless nights. Ultimately, Wagner was a great symphonist unable to write librettos suitable for representing the great tragic epics he imagined, and he ended up expressing above all artifact values of mythological heroism through dehumanized archetypes: fossilized supermen tormented by ancestral sins or inferior races of hominids that are difficult to define in anthropological terms. In him, man does not exist, or rather, his literary representation exists, entrusted to dialectical rhetoric, brought to maniacal levels of perennial tautology. Listening to Wagner's music through discs – I'm talking about the Complete Works – is one of the most heroic experiences an Italian music lover can face. Personally, and I have already written about it, except for the cases of Mozart and Weber, I find that the German Opera is one of the greatest cultural failures of the West, precisely because it is a genre that has wanted to take root , more with evil than with good, on a land that was not only unsuitable, but refractory to this kind of plant. The desperate attempt to evoke the concept of singing (instrumental as well as vocal) in the German Opera was then the almost secular ordeal of at least three generations of performers, and only Toscanini and Karajan have achieved an appreciable result in this sense: partially or wholly. But let's get to the discs. First of all, it should be said that, given the complexity of the instrumentation and staff of the Wagnerian orchestra, the period of acoustic recording (up to 1925) was more marred by recordings that failed to communicate a minimum of the dynamics, colors and timbral mixtures of Wagnerian scores. It was only starting from the first electric recordings that discs of some historical importance and above all of some acoustic verisimilitude were obtained. Richard's own son, Siegfried, provided it from the Bayreuth temple, and between 1926 and 1927 he recorded a selection of his father's Overtures and Preludes for British Columbia. To tell the truth, they are excellent recordings, both from the point of view of the sound recording technique and from the interpretative point of view. Siegfried, though high priest of the temple, in fact represents the furthest example imaginable of the so-called Bayreuthian historical school, which has caused damage to Wagner comparable to that which Verismo inflicted on Verdi. No tribunician rhetoric, therefore, in the 1926-27 recordings, but a search for the theatrical effect entrusted above all to expository clarity and the articulation of sound levels. Not surprisingly, three years later, and in the fight against a real tangle of vipers, Siegfried will break any hesitation and install on the podium of the temple none other than Toscanini, sending home all the Mucks and Elmendorffs who were demeaning the executive level of the same capital Wagnerian. That Toscanini was not Siegfried's obsession but a need for renewal of all Wagnerian dramaturgy, was seen in 1933, when, as soon as he came to power, Hitler himself personally took the trouble to obtain from the Italian director the certainty of his participation in the Festival. But in a historic gesture, Toscanini didn't even answer him. Until the 1950s, however, Wagner's recording history was mainly entrusted to vocal recitals or operatic extracts. Not that almost complete engravings of some Operas created before the end of the Second World War are lacking: The Flying Dutchman , 1944; Tannhauser , 1930; Lohengrin , 1942; Tristan and Isolde , 1928: but these are in any case incomplete versions and generally entrusted to the Vestals of Bayreuth, except for the first of them, the Flying Dutchman directed by Clemens Krauss, a recording of sure value which is still available on the market today . However, like and more than the other opera composers, Wagner too had to wait for the birth of the microgroove in 1948 to see the complete recording of his works, the length of which has always required authentic productive adventures both in financial and musical terms. In this way, from the early 1950s, the studio productions curated by Furtwängler ( Tristan and Isolt and The Valkyrie ) and Knappertsbusch ( The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Parsifal are remembered above all today). Between the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, with the advent of stereophony, some of the most important record companies of the last century were created: the two versions of the Tetralogy directed by Georg Solti (1958-1965, Decca) and by Karajan (1966-1969, Deutsche Grammophon). These are two fundamental moments in the history of the disc, which the two great interpreters will carry on in the following years with the practically complete recording of Wagner's catalogue. But at this point I think it is above all wise for those who don't know or know little Wagner to address him through the first Operas, the more "Italian" ones, namely Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.
Tannhäuser ( Kollo , Dernesch , Ludwig , Braun , Sotin ) Chorus of the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor: Georg Solti ( Decca, 1971)
Tannhäuser is the high point of Wagnerian romanticism, its most theatrically concise and vibrant creation. It is part of the Dutch-Tannhäuser-Lohengrin triptych, in fact the Wagnerian Trilogy certainly best known in the 19th century, the one that the extremists of Bayreuth, faithful to the dogmas of pure musical drama, always looked at with a sense of detachment and perhaps censorship. Trilogy not yet fundamentalist, therefore, Trilogy still open to the theatre , only partially polluted by idealistic peroration, partially alien to a full-blown messianism. It was and generally remains the part of Wag-ner's production most understood and loved by Latin culture, the one which, in the Italian version, was known and appreciated above all in Argentina, Spain and sometimes also in the United States. The influences of the Italian and French Opera are still evident in the singability, the taste for effect, contrasts, a certain external grandeur, and above all a greater expressive essentiality. However Tannhäuser is an Opera that suffers from a small and discontinuous discography. The first recording of it, from 1930 and in the Paris version, was staged in Bayreuth and unfortunately appeared under the direction of Karl Elmendorff instead of that of Toscanini. Bayreuth was in fact an exclusive with British Columbia and Toscanini had been recording for a few years for the American Victor. It was perhaps the first sensational example of a clash between majors and resulted in the loss of a capital document. After that first version, however, it will be necessary to wait twenty years for Deutsche Grammophon and Urania to prepare the first two editions born for the microgroove in 1949 and 1951 , both of good orchestral standing but decidedly lacking in the vocal one. In this way, between inadequate casts, hybrid editions, conductors unable to guarantee the dramatic tension that this work requires for over three hours, the range of possible choices is practically reduced to the Decca production directed by Solti or little more . It is one of the best-made recordings in recording history and forms an integral part of the Tetra-logy completed a few years ago by the Hungarian conductor, and he makes use of this experience for the overall layout and for the great scenes of the second act. Supported by a magnificent recording, the Decca production of 1971 offers the complete edition of Paris of 1861 and makes use of the greatest singers of those years . Of Solti's Wagner I limit myself to saying that the multiform atmospheres that the director evokes in the Tetralogy, distributed over more than fifteen hours, are concentrated here in three. It is a degrading and overlapping of states of mind, interior and exterior pictures, panic glimpses. With a tight rhythm up to the point of excruciation, languor, mystical exhortation, ecstatic evanescence, jolts alternate. Very skilled at arousing changing atmospheres , Solti extracts the fleshiest fruits from Wagnerian music , and Tannhäuser exalts these organizational qualities to the maximum, to the point of allowing him to sign one of his most convincing Wagnerian recreations on disc .
Lohengrin (Thomas, Grümmer, Ludwig, Fischer-Dieskau, Wiener) Vienna State Opera Chorus and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor: Conductor: Rudolf Kempe (HMV-EMI-WARNER, 1962) (King, Janowitz, Jones, Stewart , Nienstedt) Bavarian Radio Choir and Orchestra Conductor: Rafael Kubelik ( Deutsche Grammophon, 1970)
Lohengrin is the last bridge, the definitive passage from the Experimental Trilogy to the Musical Drama, the prologue to Tristan and Isolde and the Ring of the Nibelung . In fact, it is here that the Leitmotif takes its decisive form, the Wagnerian sign gloss, source of infinite variations and metamorphoses, and above all it is here that Wagnerian poetry is clearly divided into strophic and lyrical parts, consequently opening up to that declaimed dram -matic that from then on will be the very cornerstone of Wagner's theater. However, Lohengrin is an ambivalent creation, balanced on the relationship between ideal and reality, myth and history, fantasy and concreteness. The protagonist (a sort of Nordic anonte son of Parsifal guardian of the Grail) is, according to the composer himself, the prototype of the modern artist (Wagner, therefore), forced to see himself degraded by the baseness of human impulses, burdened by power, mocked from mediocrity. A creation of this kind, in which the singing still prevails over the orchestra, could not fail to find confirmation above all in the area of Latin culture, accustomed to a more pragmatic and substantial melodrama but also eager to escape into the fantastic and the unreal. It was in fact with Lohengrin that Wagner, in 1871, made his entry into Italy, in fact unleashing that Wagnerian question which pitted the supporters of Verdi-Tradition against Wagner-Progress , and which was so harmful for our culture, and not just music . Lohengrin , in the local rhythmic versions, nevertheless found a place of exceptional importance, above all thanks to a tenor tradition which, starting from the Bologna performances of 1871, continued up to the 78 rpm recordings by Del Monaco in 1949. Both recording versions indicated at the beginning are of high importance. The edition directed by Kempe is the most earthly, the one that in a certain sense renounces the mystique to concentrate on the narration, naturally giving great prominence to the reasons for the song and the lyricism inherent in the relationship between Lohengrin and Elsa, which is the same path followed by Kubelik, although the stamps of ineffable beauty of King and Janowitz transpose this reading into a rose of heavenly Dantesque beatitudes.
Tristan und Isolde (Suthaus, Flagstad, Greindl, Fischer-Dieskau, Thebom) Covent Garden Choir and Philharmonia Orchestra Conductor: Wilhelm Furtwängler (Columbia-EMI-WARNER, 1952)
(Windgassen, Nilsson, Talvela, Wächter, Ludwig) Bayreuth Festival Choir and Orchestra Conductor: Karl Böhm ( Deutsche Grammophon, 1966)
I have sometimes asked observant Wagnerians (there are still some) which of the master's works they would like to keep among all. No one had doubts: Tristan and Isolt . I was not surprised, since this is Wagner's most human creation beyond purely structural and musical innovations. It is in fact nothing more than a love story. Of course, so are the others: Elisabeth and Tannhäuser, Elsa and Lohengrin, Eva and Walter, Siegfried and Brunhilde, but this one has risen, through the poetry of Goffredo di Strasbourg and Wagner's drama, to a universal model of sentimental unhappiness, as Abelard and Heloisa, like Romeo and Juliet. However, despite this common vicissitude of the human heart, Tristan is not a work that we can make our own with a few simple hearings. First of all, the libretto must be read thoroughly, trying, as far as possible, to penetrate the prosodic sense of the original. Then it should be listened to for a long time, at least to familiarize yourself with the music: like this, without even keeping an eye on the text; then, as we began to feel it ours, through the simultaneous reading of the original and the translation. Only then can a video version also be accessed. Other methods, especially with Wagner, do not exist, on pain of boredom. Now, even the slightest mention of a historical-critical exegesis of Tristan is not possible. You would have to be mentally ill to do it, above all because there is an immense literature on the subject, and in any case it is unimaginable to condense into a few pages the infinite philosophical, poetic and musical problems that such a creation entails. So let's move on to the phonographic production, saying that before the HMV edition conducted by Furtwängler there is nothing that is worth listening to today, except for scattered pages in the interpretation of the great German singers of the 78 rpm era. And we come to Furtwängler, whose Wagnerian lesson, after 70 years, is now consigned, with the laurels of an honorary degree, to the record archives. I would say, no regrets. However, his Tristan and Isolt can still tell us a lot, and this above all thanks to him, to Furtwängler, and not so much to a Kirsten Flagstad at the end of her career, mythical and senile like a Brunhild who survived the collapse of Walhalla; or a Ludwig Suthaus that listened to today shows all the wrinkles of an old retired tenor. No, this time, the merit lies in the mythical-sacral vision of the director, who uproots the two protagonists from any temporal collocation (high or low Middle Ages, whatever you prefer) and places them - once again in a Dantesque way - in a circle that a canticle from the Comedy . They are exactly like Paolo and Francesca, this Tristan and this Isolde sculpted by Furtwängler's ample and painful phrasing. They come to meet us from disìo called on the wings of an infernal storm. They tell us their desperate story, then disappear into the chasms of the final blessing. It is not the only possible edition of this cosmic drama precisely because it is human, but it is still, many years after its production, one of the most touching, and to which it is nice to turn both to get to know it and to find it again. The Bayreuthian reading of Karl Böhm is on a completely different level: incisive, dry, essential, far from the morbid complacency into which Bernstein will fall in the 1980s or from the Jungian neuroses of a Kleiber. It is no coincidence that one of the mortal enemies of this Opera is that superstructural process which pollutes its interpretations with additions of psychoanalytic or anthropological extraction of dubious origin, effectively transforming a Drama into music into a medical-scientific conference of the Adorno type. Come on, let's be serious! All in all we are at work, and the less intellectual rhetoric we put into it, the better it is for everyone. Therefore, stemmed by Karl Böhm's Lutheran common sense, we listen to the extraordinary voices (in the etymological sense of "out of the ordinary") of Wolfgang Windgassen and Birgit Nilsson: we will never hear a Tristan and an Isolde like this again. Until today, at least.
Orchestral Pieces, Overtures and Preludes from: Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg The Ring of the Nibelung, Parsifal and Siegfried's Idyll Philharmonia Orchestra Conductor: Otto Klemperer (Columbia- EMI-WARNER , 1960-1961)
The Ring of the Nibelung (orchestral excerpts) Cleveland Orchestra Conductor: George Szell ( CBS-SONY, 1968)
Overtures and Preludes from: Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolt The Mastersingers of Nuremberg The Valkyrie, Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods, Parsifal NBC Orchestra Conductor: Arturo Toscanini ( RCA, 1949-1952)
Overtures and Preludes from: The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Parsifal Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor: Herbert von Karajan ( EMI-WARNER, 1974-1975)
Although not equipped with massive doses of common sense, honestly I don't feel like recommending this or that version of the Ring lightly and dreamily of the Nibelung , the Mastersingers and Parsifal . I've already seen it done in ancient guides of the homeland, which formally didn't take into account addressing an audience of possible Italian listeners. In fact, for those who do not know Wagner superficially, the approach with the later Musikdramen could be fatal without a whole series of preliminary precautions. In short, with Wagner we are facing nine thousand metres, and you can't go up nine thousand meters without training and oxygen. It's more or less the same thing here. I would add that the type of operatic drama-maturgy of the German composer, as I have already said, devoid of a recognizable melodic design and expressed in a language that is incomprehensible to us, can only be a source of discomfort and boredom if faced head-on. Therefore, before approaching colossal creations such as Götterdämmerung or Parsifal it is better to get to know the first Operas in depth and above all to listen – and this is not only easy but it is essential – all the orchestral excerpts and preludes that I have listed above. It is music of unrivaled beauty, capable of deeply upsetting anyone who listens to it. Free from any theatrical constraint, brought back to the clarity of the symphonic tract, it can truly penetrate each of us, reaching layers buried in our most secret individuality. It is an experience that anyone who loves himself must have. However, beware of interpreters. There are many anthological discs dedicated to Wagner, and rightly so, for the past eighty years, legions of conductors have recorded groups of more or less extensive symphonic extracts. However, the indications given at the beginning are not arbitrary. The anthology edited by Klemperer in 1960 in London is perhaps the most complete and organic for understanding the entire Wagnerian parable, from Rienzi to Parsifal . Personally I don't consider Klemperer one of the key conductors of Wagner's Opera. The testimonies he has left us, albeit highly authoritative, can be reduced to the Dutch steering wheel and a selection of Valkyrie . Few to understand his approach, even if in the end Klemperer interpreter of Wagner can be traced back to the noble part of the more austere Bayreuthian tradition. Given the character, rocky and uncompromising, here we are faced with a tragic and powerful, dark and severe Wagner, immersed in an Aeschylean-style dramaturgy, of large and stony dimensions: however never rhetorical, never over the top or unnecessarily emphatic. The suite of symphonic pieces from the Ring of the Nibelung conducted by Szell in Cleveland is, unlike Klemperer, an explosion of timbral light and a sumptuous run-up of the most famous moments of the endless Nibelung cycle, thus concentrated in a poem symphonic of variegated beauty. However , a reflection on the audio testimonies left by Arturo Toscanini and those collected in Karajan's corpus of Wagnerian recordings requires a space of considerable dimensions, since these testimonies cross and seal no less than a century of interpretative exegesis. Especially the studies of Giuseppe Pugliese, scattered in encyclopedic articles and in specific essays, have thoroughly analyzed and developed the poetics of the two conductors against the background of the Wagnerian universe. Such essays are not readily available, but anyone interested in the subject will eventually have to turn to them. As far as possible I will give some extremes in the bibliography. To stay with us I can only add that the recordings of Toscanini and Karajan are essential for understanding the deepest soul of Wagnerian dramaturgy, the one linked to singing as an indispensable expressive vehicle, beyond any demonstrative bombast and any intellectual interference in the world theater by the German composer.