Bear in mind that there is but one redemption from the curse weighing upon you: self-destruction.
Thus spoke not Zarathustra but, of course, music’s great bogeyman Richard Wagner, and no prizes for guessing which race he was addressing. The eclipse of this driven genius has often been predicted, and with friends like Dr Goebbels, there are those that think the moment cannot arrive soon enough – but it never quite does. The plain truth is that for all the bombast of the anti-Wagnerian faction, there exists very little in musical literature that is imbued with greater beauty than much of Wagner’s output. Bleak will be the day when our world may grow indifferent toward Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Such is the uniform beauty of it’s inspiration, that even the nay-sayers will always struggle with the redemptive power, and the rich sense of the soundness and goodness of normal human life that this masterpiece lays before us. The mystery is that such a monster could create such timeless art.
I recently dabbled on Terrence Malick’s latest film The Tree of Life and, though not as impressed as Bryan Appleyard a few days later, I was pretty stunned by the ambition of this singular film maker. The current film follows another epic from 2005, The New World, which compresses the dawn of American history into two and a half hours and contains, as does TofL, a lot of great music, none greater than this early sequence overlaid with the extraordinary Vorspiel, from Das Rheingold, the first opera of the Ring Cycle. The tuba holding that low Eflat, and eight horns: what imagination!
Wagner is known for transforming the scale of opera. He wrote no symphonies, or concertos, very little purely orchestral music, and hardly any songs. The five Wesendonck Lieder therefore sit alone in their exquisite beauty, and here we have the final song of the cycle Traume, sung by the great American soprano Jessye Norman…
The great American film maker Godfrey Reggio’s prophetic trilogy was completed in 2002 by Naqoyqatsi, the visual backdrop here for the serene beauty of the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Wagner’s three act opera of 1845, Tannhauser. Mark Twain, writing from Bayreuth, was captivated by the last act of this ‘music drama’ and wrote ‘ that noble chorus of men’s voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain it was music, just music – music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it’. Wagner can do that to people.
Few would argue that the sheer madness of modern warfare has rarely been captured better than in Coppola’s seminal movie Apocalypse Now. Here, the unhinged Lt Col Kilgore, loving the smell of napalm in the morning, sets the ball rolling, the reel-to-reel in the chopper starts spinning, and out pours one of the best unions of sound and image ever seen, the pulsating Ride of the Valkyries from the 1870 opera Die Walkure, and the insane rush to humiliation by the Hillbillies… ‘the horror…the horror’.
Splendid as ever its now become part of my Sunday music rituals with Private Passions and the Early Music Show.
I always play Wagner skeptics (like my children) the last 15 minutes of Walkure, and it always works – imagine I say pompously either Debussy or pretty much any Film score without this…..
Yes Richard, his influence on Debussy and countless others is impossible to overstate – and, like you, when I hear the last measures of Walkure after a gap, I’m bowled over yet again by the grasp of form, of function (to seduce), and quite simply the beauty of sound.
A peerless selection MM, I shall return to this again later this evening I think, with the sound turned up to 11
Excellent choices mahlerman, although anti semitic, and not many weren’t back then, it was hardly his fault that his music was admired by a bunch of strutting, shouting black clad quasi religious nutters. Although many think the Ring the linchpin of western art the statement needs clarification, The Ring is simply the greatest musical drama ever written, by standing in the centre of the Uffizi’s room 10 and gyrating for a while the linchpin statement may be made to fade a tad.
There was an attempt at the Edinburgh festival to stage the Ring on consecutive nights, the constitution and stamina of Alberto Contador was required, and his wallet.
All of that pales into insignificance however, the mother of a German friend, we were both born in July 1942 and have had many discussions about the early years, worked at the Berlin opera and was there, weeks before the downfall when the finale was the final act of Götterdämmerung, the audience made up of the Nazi parties poo-bahs, including her gaffer, the Gauleiter of Berlin, Herr Doctor Goebbels I would give up my free bus pass to have been a fly on the wall.
malty your comments are to be treasured!!!
Indeed, Worm. I’m hoping someone will bring out a compilation. Now that would get pride of place in the thunder room.
Magnificent – and what a finish!
Wonderful stuff. I suppose that if we judged the artist rather than the art, our cultural pool of accepted greatness would shrink dramatically, as a huge number (the majority?) of great artists/writers/musicians have also been total arses.