A Question Of Rhetoric

After a particularly frustrating extended search, I posted the following whine on several classical music lists on which I'm an occasional participant:

For all the hugely complex works written by Wagner, I can find at least one conductor who gets all or most of the tempi right all the way through. Why, then, is it (seemingly) impossible to find even a single conductor who gets the tempi right for the relatively simple (Dresden) Overture to _Tannhäuser_? Even though I've never seen the score of this work, I know they all get it wrong, and get it wrong in precisely the same way: they turn the majestic chorale — first and closing episodes both — into a _Marcia Funebre_, the tempo almost the same for both appearances, and so the tempi of the _Venusberg_ center taken proportionally too slow as well.

Is a puzzlement.

I saw nothing particularly untoward in what I'd there written. Simply your standard-type whine. But I was called out immediately by more than one participant on my declaration that I'd never seen the score. How, then, could I know that all the conductors I've heard get it wrong, especially since, by my own admission, I've never heard it done right?

How indeed. And yet I was, and am, perfectly certain of the thing, my ignorance of the score itself, and my never having heard the work done right, notwithstanding. The question is: Why, and by what authority, am I so certain?

The answer, it turns out, is a fairly simple one to state, but not at all simple in operation. And that is that by long experience of Wagner's works, and study of the scores of his mature works, I've become so intimately familiar with Wagner's musical and dramatic rhetoric that I've become hypersensitive to any false realization (as opposed to interpretive variation) of his rhetorical voice.

So, what did I find amiss with all the readings of my experience of the Dresden (1845) version of the Tannhäuser overture?

The explanation goes like this (and with apologies to the Wagner-innocent, but one must know the opera in order to appreciate the following):

In the overture's opening episode, the chorale (called the "Pilgrim's Chorus") represents merely the weary progress of the pilgrims, first toward, then away from an imagined physical point; i.e., a pretty much matter-of-fact affair. In the closing episode of the overture when the chorale reappears with a ff return to triple measure in the trombones rising above, against, and in opposition to the furious, frenetic, and insistent ff rapid runs of duple measure 16ths in the strings (representing the dithyrambic claims of the Venusberg), it's not merely a recap of the chorale of the overture's opening episode but its apotheosis, a declaration of the triumph of the spiritual over the ensnaring claims of the flesh promoted within the Venusberg.

In all the readings of this overture I've heard to date, the chorale's appearance in the overture's opening episode is taken almost as broad, slow, and triumphant (in the trombones) as its reappearance in the overture's closing episode, which is, of course, rhetorically absurd, both musically and dramatically, and, further, serves to blunt that closing episode leaving it nowhere to go dramatically except into the dumper. The Venusberg episodes (the overture's center episodes) are then taken too slow as well, both as a matter of proportion (with the too-slow opening chorale), and also as a misguided attempt at the sensuous rather than the dithyrambic for the Venusberg center as a whole, which is also wrong rhetorically, both musically and dramatically.

All this I knew almost instinctively ("almost" because there was nothing really instinctive about it at all, my sense of it made possible by my experience with Wagner's works as explained above). So how come these expert conductors didn't know this almost instinctively as well? My guess (and it's nothing more than a guess) is that the majestic chorale and its orchestration are so musically and dramatically seductive in themselves that a conductor must get a virtual grip on himself to not let the thing get hold of him for its own sake, and therefore disconnected from its musical and dramatic context and ground. And it's that getting a grip on oneself the conductors of my experience failed to do.

Interestingly enough, unlike the case with most of his works, Wagner left conductors an explicit and major clue pertaining to the performance of this overture; a clue ignored by all conductors known to me.

And the major clue? Under Wagner's own direction (Wagner was considered a premier conductor of his time; generally, not merely of his own works) the performance duration of the Dresden Tannhäuser overture was 12 minutes. The shortest performance time of all conductors of this work of my experience? Fourteen minutes.

Maestros take note (NPI).