Wagner for opera-haters

[Alan Howe]

Not exactly unsung music - but maybe not a very well known way of enjoying Wagner's Ring cycle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQX0MswCnrw&feature=related
...it's available as a Blu-ray.
So, how about a 75-minute Wagner symphonic poem? Corrrrr..........

[kolaboy]

Interesting.
Unfortunately, the only Wagner that I can listen to with anything akin to pleasure is Das Liebesverbot ...

[Alan Howe]

Maazel's re-working of Wagner's music probably won't be to your liking, then. BTW the Blu-ray's a different recording from the one available on Telarc. I'm looking forward to a sonic and visual spectacular!

[Alan Howe]

This is the review that appeared on MusicWeb:

Lorin Maazel made his debut at Bayreuth in 1960, with a production of Lohengrin, so he's no stranger to Wagner. The composer's grandson Wieland (1917-1966) held sway at the Festspielhaus then, dividing critics with modern, minimalist stagings of his grandfather's works. Post-war austerity was one reason for this move from cumbersome naturalism to simpler, more symbolic sets, but implicit in that change was Wieland's firmly-held belief that the essence of these vast music-dramas lies in the music itself.

In 1987, Telarc asked Maazel to prepare a 75-minute distillation of the Ring, which they recorded with him conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker (Telarc CD 80154). Not an unusual request, given that Wagner's lengthy operas have spawned collections of orchestral excerpts over the years. The difference here is that all four works in the tetralogy – Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung – are stitched together into a single, cohesive piece. Purists will blench at the very concept, but in mitigation every note is Wagner's; nothing has been added or recomposed.

Maazel's isn't the only orchestral Ring around; in 2007, Chandos recorded the Dutch composer Henk de Vlieger's arrangement – The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure – but try as I might I just could not engage with it. And there's more of the same from this source; Parsifal: An Orchestral Quest (CHSA 5077) and Tristan and Isolde: An Orchestral Passion (CHSA 5087). These are audio-only, so if it's high-resolution visuals you're after Maazel's your only option. Recorded more than a decade ago, this orchestral Ring has finally made the leap from DVD to Blu-ray, with the tantalising promise of better sound and pictures.

And if that low E-flat drone at the start of Das Rheingold doesn't captivate you, nothing will. Goodness, the Berliners sound magnificent, that opening close-up of cello strings and bow almost holographic in its detail. Don't fret, though, as the camerawork is pretty discreet, the music firmly centre stage throughout. The sound – in two-channel PCM at least – is stunning in its range and focus, the brass especially well caught. I'm certainly not a dyed-in-the–wool Wagnerite, but I've never heard this iconic music sound so glorious, nor sensed the drama unfolding with such grandeur and purpose.

Condensing fifteen hours of music down to 80 minutes is a huge challenge, so it's not surprising that Maazel has concentrated on the usual highlights. Remarkably, though, he's managed to make it all sound so coherent and seamless, something de Vlieger's arrangement doesn't quite do. There's no time to waste, and we plunge straight into Die Walküre; here the Berliners take us on an intoxicating, thrustful 'Ride of the Valkyries', side drum a-snapping and cymbals sizzling to great effect. And even this usually patrician, old-school conductor gets caught up in the surge of 'Wotan's Farewell and Magic Fire Music'; the brass are splendid here, the whole orchestra playing with formidable passion and sweep.

The highlights of Siegfried include the forging of the magic sword – played with real panache – and 'Forest murmurs'; the echt-Romantic bird calls of the latter are most beautifully phrased and recorded. And if you aren't all frissoned out yet, cower to the baying brass as Siegfried slays the dragon, Fafner. At moments like these it's clear that Blu-ray really does represent a quantum leap in terms of recorded sound. Indeed, if it's this good in standard PCM stereo I can only guess what it must be like in DTS-HD Master Audio Surround.

In Götterdämmerung the highlight must be 'Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey', where Wagner is at his most painterly. Some may find Maazel a little too brisk at this point, but there's no denying the virility and thrust of his reading. As for the Berliners, they take such speeds in their stride. Meanwhile, the bass players dig into their strings in the dark music of Hagen's call to his clan, but it's the horns who cover themselves in glory with the music of Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens. In terms of sheer beauty of tone, blend and and articulation, these players really are on the side of the angels.

This extraordinary Ring comes to a close with 'Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music' and the 'Immolation Scene'. The hero's sad cortège has seldom sounded so gravely beautiful – some rich, noble sounds from the bassoons, powerful, grief-struck timps – and Maazel maintains that all-important sense of an epic narrative to the very end. He allows himself a faint smile as the finale approaches – as well he might, for this is an exceptional event. The warm, prolonged applause is well deserved.

As a musical/dramatic entity The Ring Without Words is a resounding success; as a performance, it's as good as it gets; and as a technical achievement, it fulfils the sonic and visual promise of Blu-ray.

Early days yet, but this is already on my list of picks for 2011.

-- Dan Morgan, MusicWeb International

[Mark Thomas]

I'm really pleased to read Dan Morgan's review because I have been a fan of the Maazel Ring reduction since I bought the Telarc CD. It's a grand symphonic poem as Alan says and one which doesn't just string together a series of bleeding chunks, but is a work which has genuine musical logic and coherence. I guess it's a tribute to Wagner too that his vast edifice can survive successfully even such a drastic reduction.

[Amphissa]

I am not a huge fan of opera, and Wagner was never among my favorites. As Rossini said, "Wagner has beautiful moments but awful quarters of an hour."

I was very pleasantly surprised the first time I watched my video of the Maazel Ring amalgam. Maazel has woven all the best music from Wagner into a coherent symphonic poem. I've returned to the DVD several times and should probably extract the audio and burn it to a CD for more frequent listening.

[Josh]

Ever heard Wagner's 1 complete symphony, and the half of a 2nd?  His Piano Sonatas?  OUTSTANDING!  Honestly, Wagner's Symphony in C is one of my favourite symphonies, ever, by any composer.

Not to mention, Die Feen is not bad a bad opera at all.  It's the one exception to Rossini's comment amongst his operas, in my opinion.  I don't personally rate it among my favourites, but I don't think it has anything truly awful in it.  (Then again, I don't think it has any really beautiful moments, either).  Anyway, I may be alone, but I like it.

[Rainolf]

And don't forget the Faust-Overture! There's Beethovenian energy in this piece.

Wagner shurely had the ability to become a great symphonist (as it is best shown by his Meistersinger-Prelude, another Wagner-favourite of mine), but his idea of Musikdrama was against that, what a pity...

[Alan Howe]

To my mind Wagner was essentially a symphonic opera composer; some have even suggested that The Ring tetralogy is the operatic equivalent of a symphony. Significantly, Wagner was included in the recent BBC TV series on the symphony, and not on the basis of his early ventures in the genre. There have also been suggestions that Wagner may actually have been working on a symphony in his final years...

[Balapoel]

Wagner's symphonic efforts:
1 Symphony in C major, WWV 29 (1832) 38'
2 Symphony in E major, WWV 35 (1834) 19'
3 Symphony in d minor (of which the first movement was made into the Faust Overture), WWV 59 (1840) 12'
4 Symphony (fragments) (1847)
5 Romeo and Juliet, Theme for a Trauersymphony in a minor (fragments) (1868)

Also a fragment of an orchestral work in e minor (1830)

[Alan Howe]

And very interesting they are - but nothing substantial survives from his maturity. For Wagner's development of symphonic thinking, we have to look to his operas...

[ahinton]

And very interesting they are - but nothing substantial survives from his maturity. For Wagner's development of symphonic thinking, we have to look to his operas...

That's absolutely right! - and no skin off the composer's nose for the fact that it is so, actually, much as I for one would have loved to encounter a mature Wagner symphony for the concert hall alone...

[Alan Howe]

Quite so. I for one would like to read more about Wagner as a symphonic-operatic thinker. Can anyone think of anything written along these lines?

[Sydney Grew]

Mr. Magee has an interesting passage in his Penguin:

"Greater independence . . . would result in the orchestra's simply going its own way, without reference to anything outside itself, and this would take it out of the theatre altogether and into the concert hall, the home of autonomous orchestral music. We have seen that this last and logical step was one which Wagner decided, in the closing years of his life, to take, and was prevented from doing so only by death. Such evidence as we have about the symphonies he thought he was going to write gives us grounds to believe that they would have been fixed orchestral improvisations, and therefore would not have been traditional four-movement symphonies with their first movements in sonata form, but freely and spontaneously constructed works, probably in a single movement, though perhaps quite a long one. To me this suggests that they might, from the point of view of their structure, have foreshadowed, let us say, Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, which answers such a description and is a symphonic masterpiece."

- Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, Penguin Press, 2000 (page 236)

[eschiss1]

Trying to remember who said/wrote it, but read a convincing argument (or two or three) that some of the difficulties Reger and Schoenberg ran into and tried to solve their various ways (may have) partially resulted from trying to apply some facsimile of older sonata-structures (whether in chamber music or symphonic forms - in Reger's case the latter in his Sinfonietta or his Prolog to a Tragedy) to the greatly expanded harmonic/tonal/... palette one had and could and in their case did make use of with inspiration from Wagner; since the sonata form sort of depends on the opposition of more or less fixed tonal groups for dramatic contrast with less contrast within the tonal groups (so that one can tell where one ends and the transitions begin - or - etc.)... - it can cause problems for composer and listener. And maybe explain, too, in part, why in mature Wagner one really doesn't find a "standard symphony". (Maybe not.)


(Ok, I repeat myself... and not too clearly either case...)