So, you don’t like Wagner?

I first heard Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde nearly 30 years ago, hadn’t much of a clue what was going on, but the music gripped me like nothing else has ever done. I got to know all the mature operas very well, over time, but now many moons can pass by without hearing a note. However, once I almost reluctantly, and even with resistance, put one of his great dramas in the CD player, I am swept away all over again.

It’s intoxicating, heady, almost dangerous stuff, but that feeling of being swept away is like nothing else in all music.

I don’t care about Wagner’s family, his character, his beliefs, or what he liked for breakfast. I only care about the works. For me, they’re the greatest and most intense theatre pieces that I know, fathomless, inextinguishable and indestructible. I’ve seen them done superbly well and excruciatingly badly, and I regret more than I can say all the thousands of productions that I never saw and never shall see.

Many contemporary performances of Wagner seem wilfully to flout his intentions to the point where the music and theatre are almost divorced from one another. An “historically informed” production would be an interesting idea (as long as the orchestra also made use of gut strings, etc.) but it’s also worth bearing in mind that Wagner himself was a progressive thinker (at least concerning music and drama) who probably would not have approved of the petrification of his legacy begun by Cosima and continued by their descendants.

The question is whether whatever continuing relevance Wagner’s work has to other times and places is best served by attempting to reproduce his explicit instructions or not. For example, the action of Der Ring des Nibelungen takes place in a kind of mythical primeval past where time is only measured by the events of the story. Is this “timelessness” best expressed by using the pseudo-mediaeval trappings of its early productions? Or do we now have a different idea for what “timeless” might mean? (Wieland Wagner, for example, used the model of Greek tragedy.)

I wonder how many people, on hearing any piece of music for the first time, respond to anything other than the music itself? I bet they don’t usually go around asking whether the composer had beliefs they find repugnant, beat his wife, did even worse things to other people, had his music hijacked by other people who used it for nefarious ends, was a murderer, swindler, you name it … Obviously, if you start looking into the situation further you may well find out that sort of thing, but I doubt that initially it would colour your appreciation of any artist.

Overheard @ Concerts

A violist friend of mine tended to have comments for every occasion. After a run of the mill, decidedly average show she’d say: “Of all the concerts I’ve ever played in – that was one of them.”

Overheard at the end of a London Sinfonietta Prom: “Well, that’s two hours less I’ll have to spend in purgatory.”

I overheard this at Covent Garden, leaving the auditorium at the end of La Traviata about 20 years ago – a little old lady to her companion: “It must be difficult if a singer forgets their lines; at least if you are a dancer, you can jump around a bit.”

After a concert of minimalist music at the Bridgewater Hall (again from my viola playing friend): “That music must have taken almost as long to compose as it took to play.”

Overheard during the first interval of Parsifal: “Don’t worry, it gets jazzier from here on in …”

Overheard during a performance of a piece by Philip Glass: “I’ll be glad when we get to the middle eight.”

A member of the band before Act 2 of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten: “Here we go … another 45 minutes of bloody A minor!”

During a performance of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask Of Orpheus where a female character had to do little more than come to the front of the stage and scream, a man turned to his neighbour and said, “I know exactly how she feels!”

Normally the Promenaders annoy me with their stupid chanting, but I remember a chant from many years ago, after a performance of Melancholia II: “If that was melancholia, give us depression!”

I remember overhearing a lady in a cut-glass accent give her opinion on Wagner during an interval of Der Ring des Nibelungen at Covent Garden: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about Wagner. All he does is keep repeating the same tunes.”

In the early 80s in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, I think it was the BBC Philharmonic (then called the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra). Conductor (probably Edward Downes – can’t remember now) comes on stage to conduct a Shostakovich symphony. A woman sat in front of me turned to her companion and said loudly: “We always have this modern rubbish when he comes here”.

Richard Burton as Richard Wagner

Even the more ardent admirers of his musical genius will concede that Richard Wagner, the man, was obnoxious – fascinating, perhaps, but almost relentlessly obnoxious.
(John J. O’Connor, New York Times)

Tony Palmer directed this epic TV mini series; Charles Wood wrote the screenplay. Vanessa Redgrave plays Cosima.

The scene that sticks in my mind is the one where Richard Burton leans over the concealed pit at Bayreuth, grins at the sweating musicians, and says, “Hello boys”.