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Reactions of outsiders to the DC Ring, which I raved about in my last post.
The Valkyrie, end of Act 2. Battle under an overpass, with Fricka watching from above.
By “outsiders” I mean three people outside classical music, three people who all happen to be arts professionals, in different ways, but who don’t normally go to hear classical music. And certainly not Wagner.
Each saw just one of the Ring operas. One loved it; don’t know specifics beyond that.
Another saw Rhinegold (the DC Ring used the English names of the operas, though they were sung in German). She thought it was silly — all those gods and giants.
Which leads me to wonder (and when I have a chance, i’ll pursue this with the woman in question): Does she think Lords of the Ring is silly, too?
Not mythic enough?
If she might have liked Lord of the Rings — if she doesn’t have a blind spot for mythic fantasy — maybe the DC Ring wasn’t mythic enough, to justify its mythic characters to her. Maybe that’s because of its contemporary, American setting. Or because of the somewhat chamber music approach that Phillipe Augin took in conducting the music.
Maybe if the music had been bigger, and the production more epic, this newcomer to the Ring would have been more convinced.
Or maybe the giants weren’t strong enough on stage, weren’t giant enough, rough enough, mythical enough. Maybe they seemed too ordinary. I thought, as an experineced opera person, that they were really well sung and acted, by Julian Close and Solomon Howard.
But maybe I was making the kind of allowance I normally make when I see opera, not expecting it to look as convincing as a play or a musical would, or a movie, or even a bad TV show. That’s a persistent problem, one I’ll discuss in my next post. It’s one of many reasons classical music doesn’t seem to inhabit the world everyone else lives in.
So maybe this woman expected — reasonably, given everything else she’ll see — that giants in an opera should really be giant. And found the opera silly because they weren’t.
Someone who loved it
Finally, our third friend, new to the Ring, who saw Valkyrie and was very deeply moved.
One sign of her deep immersion in the performance — and of the production’s strength — was her reaction, when I told her that the first two scenes in the opera (Wotan/Frick, and then Wotan’s long monologue) were often thought boring, even by convinced Wagnerians.
She could barely believe that. Because she’d been so powerfully affected.
And I have to say the staging in both those scenes was completely convincing, by the standards we expect in films, TV, and theater. So there was nothing for an insider to make allowances for, and nothing to put an outsider off.
A great dramatist
One more thing I said to this friend was that Wagner was a great dramatist, on a par with Shakespeare. I said that to put him into a world she already knows. She knows what a great creator of theater does. She just didn’t know that Wagner was one.
And this is a sadness. Our friend is hardly alone in not knowing Wagner. Because of the way classical music has removed itself from current culture, we have by now maybe two generations of people — from age 55, let’s say, down (or even age 60 down) — who know great drama, who know Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekhov, who know great films. But who have no idea that any opera composer is on that level.
That’s a great loss for our wider culture. And one of the reasons that we need to bring classical music back.
Although here’s a troubling thought. I fully believe classical music will be reborn. But I think the classical mainstream, as we know it — with constant performances of all the familiar works — will to some extent fade away.
We’ll have fewer performances of old music, and more of new music. Which would make us more lively and more powerful artistically, and of course more in tune with contemporary life.
But then what will happen to giant standard works like the Ring? For these to be done well, they have to be done often, and singers and instrumental players have to be educated thoroughly in the old repertoire.
How will that happen in the new age that’s dawning? I don’t have an answer, and — much as I welcome what’s to come, and think it’s necessary — I’m wistful about what we might lose. How can we keep what’s precious about what we have?
Am I missing something? I only see 2 friends referenced: one who saw Rheingold and one who say Die Walkure.
There’s a quick reference to another who saw Rhinegold and loved it. But whom I didn’t talk to, so I can’t comment on how the piece struck her.
That’s the basic, scary question, isn’t it? How can we change things without losing what we love?
Change always involves loss, so this is a serious question. One reason classical music is so resistant to change is that it identifies itself with beloved works. Of course it is reluctant to do anything that might reduce the presence of those works—even if the change brings vitality or artistic excitement. Still, I think music, any music, is healthier if it identifies less with particular works or particular artists and more with stuff like attitudes, values, relationships, or processes.
Your post reminds me about other reactions from arts lovers unfamiliar with opera. About a beautiful Magic Flute, some non-music arts journalists said, “It’s just too silly for us.” This made me realize that any art form requires you to ignore certain things. At an art museum, you have to ignore the sterile atmosphere and the lack of context, and maybe you have to ignore the people in your way. At an opera, you have to ignore various kinds of non-realistic-ness. At a concert, you might have to ignore strange rituals, strange clothing, strange audience behavior (depending on the kind of concert). At a movie you ignore that your point of view and reaction are being relentlessly manipulated.
Whatever kinds of art we like, we are so used to the things we have to ignore, that we don’t realize we are ignoring anything—until we bring along a neophyte. Perhaps one aspect of arts that are central to a culture is that many, many people don’t realize that they have to ignore anything. Perhaps the art’s very popularity causes most people to get used to the things that have to be ignored. Or maybe one aspect of popularity is that the things to be ignored align pretty well with what the larger culture already ignores. Maybe.
Anyhow, it’s clear to me that classical music performances require people to ignore lots of things, and newcomers are often put off by those very things. These things are not essential to the music; they are habits of presentation, traditions, rituals. But the people who present classical music are so used to those things that they don’t realize that anyone could possibly (or reasonably) have trouble with them.
YOU WROTE: “… maybe the DC Ring wasn’t mythic enough, to justify its mythic characters to her. Maybe that’s because of its contemporary, American setting. Or because of the somewhat chamber music approach that Philippe Augin [sic] took in conducting the music.”
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I preface my following comments by confessing I’ve only read detailed descriptions of the staging of the DC _Ring_ along with viewing WNO’s production photos, and I’ve never heard Phillipe Auguin conduct anything, much less anything by Wagner. That notwithstanding, I feel perfectly confident in conjecturing that the problem for this woman “outsider” was all your above. Everything I’ve read of this staging says Wrong!, Wrong! Wrong! on so many levels and in almost every respect. This production is NOT Wagner’s _Ring_ by any interpretive stretch (and, no, I’m no so-called “traditionalist”) and billing and promoting it as such is flat-out fraudulent — fraudulent to the point that in a just world it would be actionable at law. To add gross insult to gross injury, realizing Wagner’s _Ring_ score with a “somewhat chamber music approach” is perverse beyond toleration. Wagner’s musical rhetoric in this work forbids such an approach. That such an approach comes at the hands of a Frenchman is no surprise. The French have no sympathy for or understanding of mature Wagnerian rhetoric (i.e., from _Rheingold_ forward) and the closest a French conductor (and I very much include Boulez here) should be permitted the podium when mature Wagner is on offer is front row, center, parquet.
How damaging would a “somewhat chamber music approach” be in the case of the _Ring_? Well, are you aware of how Wagner himself viewed the very essence of his music-dramas (i.e., again, those works from _Rheingold_ forward)? He viewed them as “acts of music made visible.” In other words, if the music and staging are wrongly realized in a Wagner music-drama — in themselves and/or in their gross mismatch — in the very way they’re apparently realized in the present DC _Ring_, what one ineluctably ends up with is nothing less (or more, for that matter) than an utter dramatic and aesthetic catastrophe vis-à-vis that Wagner music-drama.
ACD
AC, if you haven’t read it, you might be interested in Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, which I believe (objectively, I think, though Patrick is a friend) is up to now the definitive study of Wagner staging.
Patrick suggests that Wagner’s intentions couldn’t be realized on stage with the means available in his time. (We know, from Cosima’s diaries, that he didn’t like the Bayreuth staging of Parsifal.) And that only with what we might call more “modern” approaches could those intentions be realized.
Patrick writes with such knowledge and in such detail that I’d be wary of dismissing jim, as you did poor Phillipe Augin, from afar. You might disagree, but I think you’d enjoy reading what Patrick says. Which in any case covers far more than the particular thought I mentioned.
I have indeed read Patrick Carnegy’s most excellent book and warmly recommended it on S&F in 2012, which is not to say I agree with all his conclusions. (BTW, Wagner also hated the first staging of the _Ring_ (i.e., his own) and vowed to fix it next time around. Unhappily, he never got the chance.)
ACD
Just read Anne’s interview of Philippe Auguin on his approach to conducting the _Ring_. I find it hard — no, make that impossible — to believe that this conductor realized the score of Wagner’s _Ring_ by taking a “somewhat chamber music approach,” as you put it. I took you at your word, thereby my “dismissing him … from afar,” as you also put it. After reading what he had to say, I think he approached the score precisely as it should be approached which makes me very much want to hear how successfully he was able to translate his approach into his realization.
ACD
AC, I’m glad you see what a fine artiwt Auguin is.
Though I think it’s worth reviewing what happened here. I said Auguin took a “chamber music approach” to the Ring, and you then visited Alberich’s curse on him, for two reasons, one of which you don’t mention here. The first reason was the “chamber music approach,” and the second was Auguin’s nationality. He’s French, and in your view that alone made it impossible for him to conduct Wagner correctly.
All this, of course, without your ever having heard him conduct.
In passing, I might wonder now if you’d retract (or at least modify) your blanket dismissal of all French Wagner conductors.
But we also might visit the “chamber music approach.” You now can’t believe Augin could have conducted in any way those words might describe, and you want it known that the words came from me. And that, I guess, in your view I must have been wrong.
That description, of course, was widespread in DC, from people who heard (or now are hearing) Auguin’s Ring. I believe the phrase came to me from Anne, who was the first person I heard use it. I readily agreed.
So it’s worth noting that “chamber music approach” allows for many nuances. The phrase, for instance, might mean a great transparency in orchestral sound. Or it might mean a lighter sound for much of the score.
And there pretty obviously can be degrees of chamber music-ness. If Augin really did take a chamber music approach, how far did he take it? Was it true everywhere, or only sometimes, and was it a matter of transparency, or weight of sound, or something else?
One thing Augin said might be relevant here. I haven’t yet read Anne’s interview, but she’s talked with me a lot about her conversation with Auguin. One thing she quoted to me from him was a thought about the Rheingold prelude. That there shouldn’t be a crescendo, or any speeding up. That any change in the sound should come simply from the addition of more instruments to the texture.
That seems, at least to me, consistent with a “chamber music approach” (putting the phrase in quotes, as I’ve been doing, to emphasize that the words can have many meanings).Certainly it suggests something different from, let’s say, what Solti does in that prelude. And one might say, knowing the performance practice of the early recording era (which wasn’t long after Wagner’s death), that it might have seemed natural to musicians in those years to speed up when excitement mounted.
Wagner himself said tempi should constantly change, when new musical ideas were introduced.
I cite all this just to show a concrete example of Auguin’s intentions, and how they might be understood, or objected to. I don’t believe (though I don’t have the score in front of me) that there’s any indication in the Rheingold score to speed up or grow more intense during the prelude. But Wagner apparently also wanted changes in tempo that aren’t marked in his scores.
His intentions, in any case — any composer’s intentions — should be approached with some humiltiy. I wouldn’t, myself, want to claim to be the guargian of what Wagner wanted. As Auguin said to Anne (again, I don’t know if this was in the interview), Wagner’s intentions can be hard to understand. The funeral march in Gotterdammerung is marked “Feurlich” (hope I’ve got the German right), which tells us something about how the music should feel, but not how fast it should go.
As far as I know, the things we know most clearly about Wagner’s intentions, because he wrote about them most clearly, are, first, that the singers should use endless dramatic nuance, particularly in long monologue-like scenes, like the third act of Tristan, or the second scene of the second act of Walkure. And also, as I’ve mentioned, that tempi should change whenever there’s a new idea in the music.
These things don’t happen in the majority of performances, in my experiences. But I don’t see people denouncing these performances for violating Wagner’s clearly stated intentions. Instead, we get anger about staging concepts, and, from you, about a chamber music approach.
I don’t, AC, want to appoint myself your life coach, but I think there might be lessons in this exchange for you. Lessons, perhaps, in humility, in the possibility that it might be better not to issue such strong decrees about things (like Auguin’s conducting) you don’t really know about. And also the possibility that you might, quite simply, be wrong on occasion (like the rest of us), and that Auguin might indeed take something that could be described as a chamber music approach, and even so be the deeply insightful Wagnerian you now see that he is.
To issue, as you’ve been known to do, such strong decrees seems reminiscent, at least to me, of Wotan or Alberich. And we know from the Ring what happened to them. We might, just possibly, keep in mind what might be Wagner’s deepest intentions in the Ring, the surge of forgiveness with which the work concludes, as Wagner seems to say that what the world needs most is redemption by love.
Greg—
Thank you for your detailed response.
Let me first respond to the French conductor business.
I never said that because Auguin is French “that alone made it impossible for him to conduct Wagner correctly.” What I said was that it wouldn’t surprise me that a wrong approach to reading and realizing a Wagner score came about at the hands of a Frenchman. I said that as it’s been my experience over the years that the French have no sympathy for or understanding of mature Wagnerian rhetoric. That’s not the same thing as saying it’s “impossible for [a Frenchman] to conduct Wagner correctly,” is it.
Next, onto the “chamber music approach” business and why it’s a thoroughly wrongheaded approach to the score of the _Ring_.
You say that the phrase chamber music approach “allows for many nuances” but there are two things that phrase ALWAYS denotes or at very least implies: great transparency in the realization of the musical fabric and a reading/realization of the music _qua_ music both of which are dead wrong in the case of the score of the _Ring_ (or the score of any Wagner music-drama, for that matter). By his words in Anne’s splendid interview, Auguin made it clear he understood that in a Wagner music-drama the music exists NOT principally _qua_ music but as the articulator of the drama and that Wagner’s orchestration was NOT meant to be realized transparently as in a chamber music work but in the “massing”, so to speak. Or as I on occasion put the matter, to realize the music of a Beethoven quartet transparently is to reveal the genius of the music and its creator. To realize the music of a Wagner music-drama transparently is to reveal how the sorcerer accomplished his illusions and thereby rob them of their considerable magic.
Lastly, on the huge Prelude-length crescendo of the _Rheingold_ Prelude I had this to say, in part, on S&F in 2003 in a piece I’ve removed from the Web as I intend to make the piece (a detailed analysis of the dynamics of the Prelude) part of a book on the _Ring_ that’s about a quarter finished:
=== Begin Text ===
Wagner, for excellent reasons, purposely omitted explicitly notating the huge (i.e., huge in extent), Prelude-length poco a poco crescendo of the _Rheingold_ Prelude. Had he done so, he would have effectively destroyed the carefully and brilliantly crafted poco a poco crescendo that’s built into the very orchestration of the Prelude itself and attains naturally — so naturally that a conductor would have to virtually shackle and then manhandle the entire orchestra to keep the crescendo from attaining. The very last thing Wagner wanted in the Prelude was for that huge poco a poco crescendo to sound as if the musicians were by their own individual actions producing it. Wagner wanted it to sound, as Heinrich Porges put it in his report on the rehearsals for the first _Ring_, like “a phenomenon of nature developing quite of its own accord — so to say, an impersonal impression. Nothing must be forced; there must be no sense of a conscious purpose imposing itself.” Ergo, the purposeful absence of an explicit notation of that intended Prelude-length poco a poco crescendo.
=== End Quote ===
That, dear sir, is NOT so much “consistent with a ‘chamber music approach’,” as you put it, as it is a recognition and appreciation of the genius and intimate knowledge of orchestras and orchestration possessed in highest degree by the Sorcerer Of Bayreuth, as Wagner has rightly been called.
Peace.
ACD
A.C. DOUGLAS WROTE: “…to realize the music of a Beethoven quartet transparently….”
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Oops! Senior Moment. “Beethoven quartet” should have read “Beethoven symphony”.
Sorry ’bout that.
ACD
In rereading my prior comment I noticed my closing line is somewhat ambiguous. That closing line read, “…what one ineluctably ends up with is nothing less (or more, for that matter) than an utter dramatic and aesthetic catastrophe vis-à-vis that Wagner music-drama.” It more clearly should have read: “…what one ineluctably ends up with is nothing less (or more, for that matter) than an utter dramatic and aesthetic catastrophe vis-à-vis that Wagner music-drama as Wagner envisioned it.”
ACD