Wagner

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Yes I know Wagner is the least unsung composer imaginable (he, of course, would not have imagined it any other way for here is the man who once expressed resentment against a mountain for being larger than himself) and hence inappropriate for this site. But maybe interesting to spread the news that apparently Pentatone are going to undertake recordings of the 10 major music-dramas with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under Marek Janowski, and are hoping to complete the project in time for the 200th anniversary of RW's birth in 2013 (heavens, I reckon in that year we shall have to accustom ourselves to wall to wall Wagner and yet more dripping from the ceiling!)

What reactions to such an ambitious project? My first thought (apart from the fact that the recordings will undoubtedly be acquired to join an existing several metres of Wagner on the shelves) was a sad one: if a record company commits itself to such a project then that must be bad news for all of those unsung operas that call out for a recording? Likewise it will have an adverse impact on potential opera enthusiasts in encouraging people to listen to more and more of the same and persuade them into thinking that 'opera' is more or less synonymous with 'Wagner'. If that prediction is justified then the probability of ever getting a first recording of, say, a Raff opera decreases so much more.

Or have I gone plain pessimistic? Another reaction was to think that a new Janowski recording would have to be even better than exceptionally good to compete with his earlier very distinguished recording of the Ring that came out in the early 1990s on Eurodisc. That Ring, plus several other prestigious Rings, is currently available in mid / bargain priced recyclings. Can the market actually absorb such, as it were, Ring competition? I wonder.

Peter

[Pengelli]

After the praise garnered by their Korngold cd you'd think they'd have a bit more imagination than that. Yes,it is depressing,even IF you like Wagner. What's the point? Do they really think they can better the greatest of all the umpteen recordings of the past?
This is the sort of madness you usually expect from the major labels. Thank god for cd labels like cpo. This month I get a chance to hear a rare 'singspiel' by Humperdinck,(Dornroschen),and who knows what other treasures they might allow me/ us to hear. Personally,like other forum users here,I can't wait to hear a Raff opera!
Incidentally,if you were to stack every recording of Wagners Ring cycle on top of one another,(gravity allowing),not to mention all his 'mature' opera's, I wonder what 'height' they would reach?
Incidentally,wouldn't it be great if cpo were to do some neglected English opera's!

[TerraEpon]

There's plenty of unsung Wagner though -- beyond the early operas, he wrote a symphony and half of another, some orchestral potboilers (gotta love em), a few piano works (including a wonderful Polonaise), and  some choral works and songs.

[eschiss1]

I've heard a few of these, but Wikipedia mentions a - presumably very early (ah, apparently from 1829. Klassika says "verschollen", missing...) - string quartet in D major that I'm wasn't even aware of, and other later works likewise (an unfinished singspiel "Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist" from 1837-8)...
of course the quartet's being missing explains a whole lot... (Klassika page in German contains links to various workpages and seems interesting to have a look-see at - if you don't know German, it's useful to have a browser like Google Chrome that's good at auto-psuedo-translate.) An unsung Wagner work that I haven't heard but hope to, though the one review-of-a-recording I've read was mixed I think (... hrm. it was more mixed about the coupling, Bruckner's Helgoland, I think.) - was Das Liebesmahl der Apostel , WWV 69, 1843.)
Eric

[Gareth Vaughan]

Das Liebesmahl der Apostel is good Wagner, a lovely piece (but then I like Helgoland), but there's an awful lot of unsung Wagner - most of it very un-Wagnerian, more like Weber, especially the piano music (3 piano sonatas, etc. recorded on Vox Turnabout in LP days) and the Symphony in C. The single completed movt of the Symphony in E has been recorded by Sawallisch, together with some other oddments and the glorious Wesendonk Lieder: available here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wagner-Overtures-Marches-Symphony-Siegfried/dp/B0013D8K8C/ref=sr_1_10?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296081817&sr=1-10. And the Bamberger Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, under Karl Anton Rickenbacher on Orfeo have recorded an interesting collection of lesser known pieces, among which "An Webers grabe" struck me as particularly moving. Some of the occasional Marches he produced have also been put on disk, but when it comes to something like the Kaisersmarsch one wonders why anybody bothered! It's truly bad.

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Fully agree, Gareth, about the dreadful Kaisermarsch. I remember once hearing (and inwardly shuddering at) the version for wind band - which is presumably the original work? And just over this last weekend I picked up a S/H Etcetera CD of transcriptions for piano by Tausig of passages from Tristan and Die Walkure....and the Kaisermarsch. Performed by Dennis Henning.

And what an empty, vacuous, bombastic, loutishly swaggering, inflated, and pompous bit of nonsense it is! Hard to believe it is by the same hand as the composer of the quintet from Meistersinger.

However - and without wishing to defend RW in the slightest for this inexcusable nonsense - we need to put its composition in context. He wrote it in 1871, and that year of course was the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war and thereby the end of the French Second Empire and the unification of the German states in the new Reich under Wilhelm I of Prussia. Paris had fallen in January 1871, and to rub that in Prussian soldiers had marched and swaggered in style down the Champs Elysees. How wicked Wagner would have loved that moment! Paris for him meant a defeat after his early experiences in the city, and he was ever eager to inflict any kind of snub that he could. By 1871 his reputation in Germany was beginning to ride very high, and having established himself as a thoroughly Germanic composer engaging with ancient Teutonic myths and legends, it was inevitable that he should join in the nationalist fervour sweeping through the new Germany. RW easily gets the prize as the most opportunist of composers, and little wonder he dashed off the Kaisermarsch for it would hardly do him harm and in fact helped promote his cause (i.e. himself) further.

But no reason at all why we should take it seriously, let alone listen to the thing in either original wind band version or Tausig piano transcription. (I also recall from the Alan Walker Liszt volumes that the Tausig transcription was one of the calling cards and party pieces of the young von Bulow).

Peter

PS I'm beginning to display an education at the hands of Alan in the use of the UC forum! My original question was simply: how do folk respond to forthcoming swathes of Wagner recordings? I'd love to know the answer to that. Instead people have dived off into exploring the odd unsung bits of Wagner. Which could prove fruitful - but it wasn't what I was after!

[mbhaub]

There's only one reason to welcome the new Pentatone recordings: SACD Surround Sound. Janowski is interesting enough, and his Ring on RCA is really one of the best in many respects. I just don't think there are the great Wagnerian singers out there anymore. And maybe the recordings can be made relatively inexpensively given the source and government subsidies. But dang, the shelf space! Personally, I'd rather have set of mp3 disks to really cut down on space. The Nimbus mp3 set of Haydn symphonies is exemplary. But then, I guess you can have SACD surround with mp3.

[eschiss1]

Well... Wagner's Parsifal in what may be one of its better recordings (one of the Knappertsbusch- actually, two of them, I think) I can get at the local public library. (It's not a half-bad public library, though. CDs of Wagner, Casella symphony, Dussek quartets, Carter, really not bad at all.) A new one really needs to "add value" or be free
I respond better to forthcoming swathes of Beethoven recordings, if they promise to add value (excellent performances, excellent insight, a necessity; would prefer that they be of his lesser-known works but a new - excellent - recording of the C-sharp minor quartet can be welcome too and the free recordings of these works at IMSLP, which seem to be rather good (redistributed from the Isabella Gardner Museum series), are more or less free (well, plus internet fees) for people who don't know those works yet... etc. - so not going to complain about that certainly, especially when people are uploading lesser-known and new music to that site too. I think there's a complete recording of a large Berlioz work there- l'Enfance?...)
Eric