Happy birthday Richard Wagner

[Serial_Apologist]

To be precise: the music is largely wonderful. My problem is that this birthday overkill has provided far too much excuse for poor (to my ears, intolerable) singing by people who oughtn't to be let near this music, and for repetitive, cliché'd nattering by commentators. Too much warbling, too much chatter, in short.

But the music: massive, unqualified appreciation here.

As with the case of religion, Wagner is open to much misinterpretation.

[Mr Pee]

I really should have planned ahead a bit better and toasted The Master with a few bottles of this lovely stuff:-

http://www.thebelgianbeercompany.com/Maiselsweisse.aspx

[Tony Halstead]

I have to admit I like some Wagner... but in small doses (e.g. Siegfried's Idyll, Wesendonklieder)

Curiously and coincidentally this is pretty well a summary of what Chris Hogwood said to S. Rafferty yesterday afternoon about 5 hours after S_A's posting. I don't disagree with Mr Hogwood ( and - btw - why oh why has he been denied the Knighthood bestowed on such as Gardiner and Norrington?

[EdgeleyRob]

It was Wagner who got me into classical music in the first place. On May 23 1970, just 13 days short of my 15th birthday, I chanced to hear the Prelude to Act 3 of Lohengrin on Radio 2 of all places, played by the BBC Concert Orchestra. It hit me with tremendous force, like a bolt from the blue, a real Road to Damascus moment. I badgered my bemused mother to get me a record of the piece for my birthday and I duly received a Fontana LP SFL14501 with the LSO/Dorati and the Detroit SO/Paray in various Wagner pieces. I never looked back.

I heard Götterdämmerung on R3 live from Covent Garden on Sept 26 1970 with Solti, Tristan in a Bayreuth recording a week later and the whole Ring later that autumn. To a 15 year old this was heady stuff, more potent than drugs or alcohol, and with the Solti Ring LP's emerging in annual instalments in my Christmas stocking, courtesy of my increasingly bewildered mother, I was well and truly hooked.

Listening to the Ring now or any of it's constituent parts I am instantly transported back to those days in the very early 1970s.

So, on this, his 200th birthday, Wagner demands, and gets, my eternal gratitude.

Lovely story Pet,Britten's Sinfonia Da Requiem and Sea Interludes had the same effect on me in my teens.
That's when my lifelong British music obsession started.

[ARBurton]

Not the most inspired birthday offering at the Festival Hall - decidedly under-whelming first half, and why Walkure Act 3 in the 2nd? Bayreuth didn`t do much better, with Walkure 1 in the first half, but they did at least have the inestimable advantage of Thielemann at the helm. And Westbroek, although not I think an ideal Isolde, made a much better fist of the Liebestod than Bullock in London. IMHO, of course.

[Petrushka]

I'm interested, later on in life, did you ever discuss this with your mother and resolve the bewilderment?

Not really. To her it was just noise, not music at all. Mind you, she certainly did everything to encourage me in whatever I was interested in so I can't complain. Looking back on it, putting Wagner operas on your Christmas list at 16 probably is a bit strange when you've never before shown any such tendency.

[Richard Tarleton]

By coincidence I'm well into Vol 2 of Alan Walker's towering biography of Liszt, "The Weimar Years" - time to remind ourselves of Wagner's debt to Liszt. On a practical level he engineered Wagner's escape from Weimar in 1848 a matter of hours before the arrest warrant from Dresden arrived. Wagner did not set foot in Germany for another 11 years. Walker:

The pioneer work that Liszt did in Wagner's behalf during this long solitude is impossible to overestimate. For five years Liszt was the only conductor in Germany who would have anything to do with Wagner's compositions....Germany's opera houses remained closed to Wagner - with the honourable exception of Weimar. Liszt staged Tannhauser, Lohengrin, and Der Fliegende Hollander many times in Weimar's modest little theatre, and he took on tour....the orchestral overtures and preludes to these operas, which ensured that Wagner's name was kept before the public. He made some matchless piano transcriptions of Wagner's scores, sent money and useful artistic contacts his way, visited him several times in exile.....

The Liszt-Wagner friendship is unique in the annals of musical biography....Quite simply, Liszt recognised in Wagner the greatest musical master of the age, and he took it as his primary mission to convert others to the same point of view....

Walker also analyses the reasons for Wagner (along with just about everyone Liszt helped - Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, and others) ending up biting the hand that fed them - one important reason, he argues, is that they all felt rivalry, and resented Liszt helping others as well as them, whereas "Liszt helped them all, thinking only to improve the general condition of music".....

Anyway, in Wagner's bicentenary year, to Liszt

[cloughie]

As Wagner's 200th has been celebrated with a variety of recordings and transcriptions of his work I would have welcomed Stan Kenton's somewhat irreverent take - the opportunity to release this on CD was taken neither last year to celebrate the Kenton centenary nor now.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=kenton+wagner

[cloughie]

Did anyone hear and not enjoy Susan Bullock in the Tristan Liebestod - a bit too shrill and vibrato laden for me.

[Petrushka]

Did anyone hear and not enjoy Susan Bullock in the Tristan Liebestod - a bit too shrill and vibrato laden for me.

Same here. I found it a painful listen but find it difficult to hear anyone but Birgit Nilsson in this music to be honest. On the positive side, James Rutherford's solid Wotan in Walküre Act 3 was excellent.

[amateur51]

Curiously and coincidentally this is pretty well a summary of what Chris Hogwood said to S. Rafferty yesterday afternoon about 5 hours after S_A's posting. I don't disagree with Mr Hogwood ( and - btw - why oh why has he been denied the Knighthood bestowed on such as Gardiner and Norrington?

I quite agree waldhorn - and could I throw in a mention for the currently unknighted Trevor Pinnock too?

[Beef Oven]

Continuing to mark RW's Birthday. Now playing 'Schwarzschwanenreich', opera in 3 acts Op.7.

[Mr Pee]

Continuing to mark RW's Birthday. Now playing 'Schwarzschwanenreich', opera in 3 acts Op.7.

I don't know any of Siegfried's operas. What are they like?

[Beef Oven]

I don't know any of Siegfried's operas. What are they like?

It's probably impossible to assess Siegfried Wagner's music because of the huge shadow of his father (if Brahms thought it was hard, try this one!).

His music is clearly influenced by his father and his obvious consciousness of this likely to be the reason why he ends up in a more conservative late-romantic idiom that many have likened to Humperdinck. To my mind, there is much more under the surface than Humperdinck, and I say this not just because I'm aware that he's RW's son.

Somehow the music subtly tells you there is more to this than the notes themselves say. He has an ineffable style of his own that is understated due to the afore-mentioned reasons.

Having said this, the opera is delightful and easily congested at 1 hour and 40 minutes. The singing is wonderful to my ears, but many will compare the soloists to Schwarzkopf and Bjorling and say they come up wanting. The orchestra is equally fine (to my ears having been brought up in the 1960s to the strains of the Stones, Velvet Underground and Beefheart), I can tolerate most ensemble!

Put it this way, I'd just as easily put this on and listen to it as any common or garden Verdi opera.

[Mr Pee]

It's probably impossible to assess Siegfried Wagner's music because of the huge shadow of his father (if Brahms thought it was hard, try this one!).

His music is clearly influenced by his father and his obvious consciousness of this likely to be the reason why he ends up in a more conservative late-romantic idiom that many have likened to Humperdinck. To my mind, there is much more under the surface than Humperdinck, and I say this not just because I'm aware that he's RW's son.

Somehow the music subtly tells you there is more to this than the notes themselves say. He has an ineffable style of his own that is understated due to the afore-mentioned reasons.

Having said this, the opera is delightful and easily congested at 1 hour and 40 minutes. The singing is wonderful to my ears, but many will compare the soloists to Schwarzkopf and Bjorling and say they come up wanting. The orchestra is equally fine (to my ears having been brought up in the 1960s to the strains of the Stones, Velvet Underground and Beefheart), I can tolerate most ensemble!

Put it this way, I'd just as easily put this on and listen to it as any common or garden Verdi opera.

Thank you, Beefy, that's most interesting. I shall endeavour to have a listen to some of his music. Your mention of Humperdinck is interesting; I know he was a passionate Wagnerian and musical assistant to Wagner himself- he composed some extra bars of music for Parsifal when a scene change took longer than expected- but I've just read* that he was also Siegfried's music tutor. So your mention of his influence is clearly spot on!

*(In Jonathan Carr's fascinating "The Wagner Clan". I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Wagner-Clan-Jonathan-Carr/dp/0571207901/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369510849&sr=8-1&keywords=the+wagner+clan