Sounds & Fury

Read This

A Survey by New Yorker music critic and blogger, Alex Ross, of the thinking and conjectures, past and present, concerning the impact of recordings on music, music-making, the live music concert, and audiences, actual and potential, for musics of all kinds.

And Yet Another Ordinary-opera Opera-lover Succumbs...

...to the transcendent, overwhelming magic of the Sorcerer of Bayreuth.

I think we just might have here another Wagnerian in the making.

Daunting

Read this — all of it — if you dare. I did, and while not over my head, it said, by way of an examination of philosophical thought from Descartes forward, rather more than I needed or cared to know about the theater, not exactly a favorite art form of mine.

That notwithstanding, some fine insights to be found in this four-part essay / proto-book, and worth the read.

Maazel's 1984

(Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 12:58 AM Eastern on 26 May. See below.)

I spent the better part of this afternoon giving a cold and casual listen to the BBC3 Webcast from Covent Garden of Lorin Maazel's new opera, 1984.

I read most of the Brit critical press' coverage of the opera's premier performance, and came away a bit shell-shocked as, in the past two decades or so, I've rarely seen in the mainstream press such vitriol and outright condemnation hurled at a major new work. This opera must surely be one humongous turkey, I thought to myself on reading the reviews. I mean, like, Wow!, a turkey and a half, fer shur.

While I freely confess that a cold and casual listen, and via a Webcast to boot, is no proper way to assess any new work, much less a work as complex as an opera, I came away from that Webcast thinking the Brit critics nothing short of hysterical in their savage assessments of the piece, which assessments I now suspect had less to do with the work per se, and more to do with things political and extra-musical. The opera is, on first hearing at least, nowhere close to being a turkey. True, the music is, for a not insignificant part of its length, derivative, or even imitative, of a half-dozen other composers I could identify. But so what? As with all works of art, the ultimate gestalt is all that matters and all that counts, and in that department 1984 seemed to me, on this first cold and casual hearing at least, to be just dandy, though hardly, or even approaching, a work on the order of a masterpiece such as, say, Peter Grimes.

In this work, I think Mr. Maazel has nothing to be ashamed of.

Nothing at all.

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Update (12:58 AM Eastern on 26 May): To forestall more eMail inquiring what I meant by "cold and casual," cold means I listened to the opera with no preparation whatsoever, and casual means I listened only half-tuned-in, so to speak. It's a technique I've used for more years than I can remember on a first hearing of a CD or radio broadcast of a work new to me, especially a contemporary work. I sort of half-listen while going about my business with other things to see whether something about the work will jump out at me and compel my full attention. Sounds like a crude test, I know, and I suppose it is, but while it's hardly fail-safe, it's astonishing how often it's predictive of my ultimate response to the work on a careful and considered hearing.

Update (7:53 PM Eastern on 25 May): Professional oboist and blogger Patricia Mitchell of Oboeinsight, who also listened to the BBC3 Webcast, has another view of 1984. Needless to say, I disagree with Ms. Mitchell's take, generally, and her,

Oh. Really ugly moment. Bad voice. "Why there's no you ..." in case that tells any of you where I am in the opera. (Am I dissing a great singer? Oh dear. I hope not! It's probably just the poorly written part, similar to Star Wars poorly written dialogue which makes the actors look abominable. Yes?) "I'm so blue without you. So bluuuuuuuue." Bad poetry too. "Tell me why, tell me why ... there's no yoouuuu." Ah. Now we move to the blues. I get it. She's blue so the trumpets play the blues. Got it.

I think, badly misses the point. That old-fashioned, 1950's, dopey pop love ballad she's above making sport of was, I immediately understood, supposed to sound like an old-fashioned, 1950's, dopey pop love ballad. That was the whole point of it given where it comes in the story (the point where, if I was following correctly, the two "sexual criminals," Winston and Julia, confess their Big Brother forbidden, old-fashioned love, vowing never to betray each other).

Or so I understood it.

The Voice Of Experience

A first-rate post by former concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and blogger Ilkka Talvi of Of Music And Men on performance anxiety ("nerves") and it's variable consequences, and a few comments on pharmacological remedies for same.

Considering the source, worth the read.

The Sawkins-Hyperion Thing

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:02 PM Eastern on 24 May. See below.)

I last week read a blurb on the Gramophone classical music website concerning a British appellate court victory by a musicologist, a Dr. Lionel Sawkins, in a lawsuit instituted originally by him against Hyperion Records, a classical music label, for copyright infringement involving a CD produced by Hyperion which used four editions of scores of the music of French Baroque composer, Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726) edited by Dr. Sawkins, and didn't give the matter too much thought, nor consider it more than an interesting oddity, and that only because the players in the case were not your usual suspects almost all of whom are typically pop-music types involved in the biz in one capacity or another.

Then I read blogger Pliable of On An Overgrown Path responding to the news on his blog with sympathy and some concern in behalf of Hyperion. Then this more temperate response to the news from blogger and musicologist Charles T. Downey on his blog, Ionarts, also expressing sympathy and concern for Hyperion, and finally this from Alex Ross on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, echoing the sympathy and concern for Hyperion, and roundly criticizing Dr. Sawkins and the decision in his favor.

It then struck me, clever fellow that I am, that I was perhaps missing something interesting and important about this case that I ought not to have missed, and so followed a link in Charles's post to the text of the Judgment in the original lawsuit, also won by Dr. Sawkins (it was, of course, Hyperion who subsequently brought the appeal before the appellate court), and saw that the case was indeed interesting, but the decision hardly one to elicit sympathy and concern for Hyperion Records as, to my way of thinking after reading the facts of the case, Hyperion had brought this entire thing down on its own head by its own corporation-think stupidity, small a corporation though it is, with a little unsolicited assist from the double-dealing interference of a certain Mr. John Pulford, chairman and a non-executive director of Ex Cathedra, the choral and orchestral group that performed the four Sawkins-edited Lalande works on the copyright-infringing CD.

In the light of reading the original Judgment, I saw in the above-linked responses of all three bloggers certain misunderstandings concerning the Judgment in this case, but was determined to stay out of it on this blog as I figured my limited time here would be better spent (and lots more fun) writing on aspects of Bach, Mozart, and Wagner, and beating up on Eurotrash types and pop-culture sympathizers, than in getting involved with writing about music-biz legal and business matters to the extent I'm competent to write of either (I've not been a businessman for ages, and have never been a lawyer, but am fairly familiar with the general principles of copyright law). I was, however, moved to eMail a very brief note to Alex suggesting that if he'd not already done so, he read the original Judgment in this case in its entirety before posting anything further on the matter. Alex assured me he had read the entire document, which then brought an exchange of several more eMails which resulted in this post by Alex which noted my eMail promise to expand on this blog a bit more on the matter of copyright.

So...

Perhaps the most important single thing to understand about any copyright case is that the term, "original work", which term in copyright law refers to a legal test of a work in determining whether that work is capable of securing copyright, does not mean the same in copyright law as it means in the practical-world. The court of origin judge in the case at issue provided in his Judgment a fairly thorough treatment of just what constitutes an original musical work in British copyright law as his job in this case was centrally twofold: 1) to determine whether Dr. Sawkins's editions of the four Lalande pieces in question met the statutory test of original musical work within its meaning in British copyright law, and were therefore capable of securing copyright; and 2) to determine whether Hyperion infringed any copyright thereby secured by Dr. Sawkins in those editions by Hyperion's recording and producing the CD in question as was alleged in the court action brought by Dr. Sawkins.

As the Judgment noted, "The amount of skill and labour necessary to establish a copyright is not very large and is often expressed in negative terms ('not insubstantial'). Nor need it involve inventive thought, although the use of inventive thought is obviously likely to confirm the originality of the work." In determining whether a work meets the statutory test of originality, "[t]he question to ask in any case where the material produced is based on an existing score is whether the new work is sufficiently original in terms of the skill and labour used to produce it," and is not merely an updated copy of the existing score irrespective of how much skill and labor may have been used to produce that copy. On this test, three of the four Lalande editions produced by Dr. Sawkins and used by Hyperion met the statutory test of originality within the meaning of the term in British copyright law, and so were deemed to have acquired protected copyright status. Once that key legal question was decided in Dr. Sawkins's favor, it was a veritable tiptoe through the tulips to establish that Hyperion had infringed the copyright in those three editions by producing the CD in question.

This test of originality would, of course, be considered, and be considered rightly, by any musician in the practical world to be perfectly imbecile. But such practical-world objections are entirely moot in the matter of the determination of the capability of a work to secure copyright as that's a legal matter exclusively, having to do only with making a determination of whether the work in question is original within the meaning of the term in copyright law, and is not at all concerned with making a determination of the work's aesthetic worth, unique creativity, or other such matters of art. As the Judgment, citing analogous but non-musical precedent cases, noted:

To secure copyright for [a] product [in our present case, that would be the Sawkins editions] it is necessary that labour, skill and capital should have been expended sufficiently to impart to the product some quality or character which the raw material [in our present case, that would be the extant Lalande mss and scores] did not possess, and which differentiates the product from the raw material.

and,

The word "original" does not ... mean that the [new] work must be the expression of original or inventive thought. Copyright Acts are not concerned with the originality of ideas, but with the expression of thought .... The originality which is required relates to the expression of the thought. But the Act does not require that the expression must be in an original or novel form, but [merely] that [it] must not be copied from another work - that it should originate from the [new] author.

And by such reasoning is the originality of a work determined in British copyright law for the purpose of securing copyright protection.

Alex, in this post, posits a hypothetical literary case:

Suppose a certifiably authentic new Shakespeare play is discovered. The text is mostly intact, but it's water-damaged in a few places, and some lines need to be guessed at. Perhaps large parts of it use some kind of shorthand which must be deciphered, but once the method is figured out it's all perfectly clear. Perhaps parts of the play were scattered all over the globe and it took a scholar many years to assemble them. When it's all put together, ... it's a ragingly magnificent tragedy on the level of Hamlet....

and then asks the question:

[W]ould the scholar [then] dare to claim copyright?

Alex guesses the scholar wouldn't because the play is certifiably written by Shakespeare. But, applying the above principles of British copyright law, the scholar would have to be an idiot to not secure, then claim and enforce copyright status for his work, copyright to which, as a matter of law, his work would be entitled.

And, finally, on the matter of a copyright owner being referred to as the work's "author", that's nothing to get riled up about as it's merely a legal designator, and in the case of an edition of an existing work, refers only to the "authorship" of the copyright edition, not the underlying original work.

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Update (1:02 PM Eastern on 24 May): Alex Ross, his busy schedule notwithstanding, has entirely too much time on his hands.

It's Baaack

One of our favorite opera-queen blogs, Trrill, that is, and blogger Nick Scholl offers up a few historical tidbits on Wagner, and on Wagnerian opera in America.

Eurotrash Redux

(Note: This post has been edited to add a footnote and an appendix, and to correct certain errors in the original text, as of 10:59 AM Eastern on 21 May.)

A few years ago, a brave and adventurous opera-loving friend of mine left his home in the wilds of the all-American Southwest, and headed for the wilds of Berlin, Germany and the Wagner Festtage armed with tickets for performances of all ten (count 'em!) of Richard Wagner's canonical operas to be given serially over a two-week period at the Deutsche Staatsoper with Daniel Barenboim conducting, and with productions by the postmodern director Harry Kupfer. Although a lover of opera, my friend had never before seen any of Wagner's works staged, and, indeed, was generally unfamiliar with the libretti and music of these as well, his opera experience being confined mostly (but not entirely) to the operas of the Italian repertoire as is generally true of the majority of opera lovers.

And I trembled for him.

I trembled for him not because I thought he'd be out of his depth coming from the soap operas of the Italian rep with their largely melodramatic plots and organ-grinder music, but because without my having seen any of the Kupfer productions I knew the stagings would be thoroughly grotesque, perfectly idiot, essentially divorced from Wagner's own stage directions, and, much more to the point, divorced from the essential vision of Wagner's libretti and music. Such are all postmodern stagings of Wagner's operas of which I've knowledge — which stagings have earned the well-deserved appellation, "Eurotrash" — with their willful and wrongheaded revisions for social and political "relevance," and their invariable hijacking of Wagner's works as vehicles to promote and put on display the Konzept and "personal vision" of the director.

I don't want to be misunderstood here. As I've pointed out on this blog previously, I'm no traditionalist or pedant arguing for the importance of staging, or the need to stage, Wagner's operas in accordance with Wagner's own stage directions. Arguably some of the most profound stagings of Wagner's operas ever were the spare, abstract productions of his grandson Wieland, a theatrical genius in his own right, in the 1950s through the early-1960s, and they were anything but in accordance with Wagner's own stage directions.

No, I don't argue on traditionalist grounds. What I argue for is the importance of staging, and the need to stage, Wagner's operas in accordance with the essential vision embodied in Wagner's libretti and music. In other words, in accordance with the essential vision of the music-dramas themselves. If a director wants to put his own Konzept and "personal vision" on stage let him compose his own operas for the purpose, and leave Wagner's alone. Where Wagner's operas are concerned, it's Wagner's Konzept and vision as expressed in libretti and music that are of importance, not the director's.

You may wonder just how grotesque these postmodern atrocities can be. Let me again on this blog, but here in more detail, take as example that mother of all postmodern Wagner productions, the 1976 Bayreuth Festival (Centennial) production of the Ring, conducted by Pierre Boulez, and directed by the Wagner-ignorant Frenchman Patrice Chéreau, a man who had no knowledge of Wagner's great tetralogy beyond its name before his hiring by the Festival's long-time director, the aesthetic and musical blockhead, Wolfgang Wagner (grandson of Richard, brother of Wieland, and, since WW II, the Festival's guiding "back-room" business genius). So Wagner-ignorant was Chéreau, in fact, that at first he thought the Ring simply an ordinary opera — a single opera(!).

When Chéreau was done his work, in place of Wagner's epic, Nature-dominated, world-encompassing cosmic drama, we were given a squalid little quasi-Marxist morality play (as I once characterized it on a previous blog of mine) on the evils of power- and money-greedy capitalism and its exploitation of the masses in which, for instance, in Das Rheingold, the great primal river Rhine becomes a late-19th- / early-20th-century water reservoir and hydroelectric dam, the child-like and delightful Rhinemaidens, cruel and immoral street trollops, and the male gods, top-hatted, exploitative, late-19th- / early-20th-century power- and money-grubbing barons of industry (the three succeeding music-dramas — each treated as a separate, isolated work, thereby effectively destroying the organic unity of Wagner's tetralogy, the tetralogy's timelessness and universality already destroyed by Chéreau's Das Rheingold — each employed other historical references: Italian Renaissance aristocratic for Walküre, proto-space-age-industrialist for Siegfried, and post-WWI-pre-WWII for Götterdämmerung).

It's precisely the sort of idiot business one would expect of an avant-garde Frenchman (well, O.K., any Frenchman), but, sad to report, it was a then quarter-century-dead Irishman who at bottom was to blame. Chéreau, clueless from the beginning, had to rummage about for some ideas for his new production, and found G.B. Shaw's tendentious socialist tract, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (Shaw's socialist reading of the drama of the Ring). The ignorant Frenchman took the bloody silly thing seriously and swallowed it whole, and then, like a good fundamentalist, regurgitated it on stage in all its literalist glory as Wagner's(!) Ring.

And none of this is even to begin to speak of conductor Pierre Boulez's reading of Wagner's score which so appallingly and willfully disregarded or misunderstood what Wagner had there written that three-quarters of the Bayreuth orchestra walked out on him in rehearsal in protest, and only a direct appeal to them by Wolfgang Wagner to the effect that their walkout threatened the very economic survival of the Bayreuth Festival brought them back. Even so, the entire orchestra refused to join Boulez on stage at the end of the premier performance as is traditional, but instead pointedly remained seated in their regular seats hidden below stage in the Festspielhaus's famous "invisible" orchestra pit.

That's how grotesque these postmodern atrocities can be.*

So, how, then, did my opera-loving, Eurotrash-innocent, Wagner-naive friend fare at the Festtage? Here's the report he filed after his first-ever live experience of Tristan und Isolde:

Just back from Tristan. Oy. I am drunk, demolished, destroyed, melted, eviscerated, smashed und smoked. My underwear is nuked. And I don't even wear underwear. But it's all nuked, fried, baked, boiled, blasted, und beschlugendstidendest. Liebestod. I died. I am dead. But I'm resurrected. As Wagner. The vampire. He lives. In me. Bastard. Genius. He's emptied me out. And filled me up. With music-drama. Knew I shouldn't have drunk that potion.

Sigh

[...]

The production sucked. Idiot Kupfer. Fool. Boob. Pinhead. Moron. Vandal. But Wagner squished him. Like a steamroller over an ant or cockroach. Wagner triumphs. The bloody vampire. The blessed, deathless vampire. I'll spot him a pint of my blood any day, knowing I'll be repaid in full, and then some. Tomorrow Meistersinger. Then Parsifal. And then... and then?

Oy.

Seems I needn't have trembled for my friend at all. He not only nailed that son-of-a-bitch Kupfer right off, and without any help from me, but understood Wagner's great work in spite of the idiot production.

But then, knowing my friend as I do, it's no more than I should have expected of him. I'm not, however, as sanguine about other Wagner innocents exposed to these self-involved, self-serving corruptions of these great works of art, and so post this caution — another in what's become a sort of series here — for as the saying goes: forewarned is forearmed.

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*For brief descriptions of other grotesque Eurotrash Ring productions, read on.

Sonofagun

Well, well. Fancy that.

The Morning News, one of the most venerable and widely-read online daily magazines on the Web, just published its 2005 Editors’ Awards for Online Excellence, and guess what we found there.

This:

Favorite Treatment of the Classical Musical World as Vital Sport

Erudite, widely read and passionately listened, and argumentative until the last glass is broken — it’s how we’d love to describe ourselves, but it’s better fit for A.C. Douglas who writes Sounds & Fury, a blog that makes the classical music world seem like a soap opera with better background music. Anthony Tommasini should take self-defense classes.

We don't know whether to proffer our thanks to editors Andrew Womack and Rosecrans Baldwin, or — in the spirit of that famous composer (either Verdi or Berlioz; we can't quite remember which) who on being told that a number or movement of his newest work was met with such wild applause, shouts of Bravo!, and calls for an encore that it brought the performance of the entire work to a halt, declared, "How could I have gone so wrong!" — reassess our past writings here with a careful and critical editorial eye to determine what we can do in future to prevent any further such honors.

On reflection, we choose the former rather than the latter.

Thanks, guys. Our honor.

Fairly Interesting

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:43 PM Eastern on 21 May. See below.)

Well, this is fairly interesting. Here are two bloggers arguing from opposite sides of the work of fiction fence, but who both seem to share the curious notion that the actual writing in a work of fiction is somehow separable or exists apart from the work's story: this blogger by implication (he, in fact, seems to be saying that in a work of fiction, story is not necessary at all), this blogger explicitly.

As it happens, the latter blogger is again harping on a theme he set forth in a post some time ago, and on which post I then made comment, leaving the identity of the blogger anonymous. What I wrote then is pertinent still, and will serve as apposite commentary on the present posts of both bloggers linked above. That commentary can be read here.

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Update (5:43 PM Eastern on 21 May): Blogger #1 (Daniel Green) responds.

So That's How It All Started

In practice, even such drama as was possible to Metastasian* opera [Italian, c. 18th century] tended to be crushed by the weight of commercial conditions attendant on a genuinely popular art. If French opera suffered under the dictatorship of aristocratic critical doctrine, Italian opera suffered from the lack of any effective control beyond that of vulgar taste for vocal virtuosity. Metastasio's excellently ordered librettos, furthermore, were as stultifying as they were convenient; the composer, instead of blundering around with dramatic problems and perhaps solving some of them, merely provided his two dozen arias according to the specified sentiments of love, vigor, apprehension, and sdegno. To quote Sir Donald Tovey on this subject, "The scheme was fatally easy for small musicians and did not stimulate the higher faculties of great ones, while great and small were equally at the mercy of singers." This, of course, was the final limitation: the strong control exerted by the singers' interests. Great virtuosi knew only too well that the public paid only to hear their voices, and they were permitted to translate this confidence into an elaborate system of abuses.

—Joseph Kerman, from: Opera As Drama

*Metastasio, the great 18th-century (1698–1782) Italian poet and dramatist.

Oops (Administrative Note)

In checking over our exclusive Culture Blogs listing (on the sidebar), we discovered that three fine culture blogs had somehow disappeared from the listing (We think it happened when we made a change to the number of items allowed). They've now been re-listed. They are: Marcus Maroney: Sounds Like New, Brian Sacawa: Sounds Like Now, and Fred Himebaugh's Fredösphere.

Apologies to these three fine gentlemen and their blogs for the error.

Eccentric?

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 12:24 AM Eastern on 12 May. See below.)

In the event you weren't already aware of the fact, composer, blogger, and all-around wit Fred Himebaugh of the Fredösphere is a rather, um, eccentric fellow. Witnesseth this little item. Oh, and Fred thinks Mozart an overrated composer as well.

Did I say eccentric?

Well, best to leave it at that, I suppose.

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Update (12:24 AM Eastern on 12 May): Blogger David Sucher of City Comforts, in an update to this post of his, thinks my implied stance above vis-à-vis the architecturally brilliant Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps reflects that of "the man in the street wearing a baseball cap." My withering response to that outrageous remark may be read in the comments section of his post.

Everything You Wanted To Know...

...about proper audience etiquette at the classical music concert but were too embarrassed to ask can be read right here. Sam Bergman, violist in the Minnesota Orchestra and a leading member of the musician’s orchestra committee, the news editor for Arts Journal, a mini-blogger extraordinaire, and a rabid baseball fan*, tells all — spot-on and hilariously.

• Upon entering the auditorium, the usher will hand you a program book. This contains interesting information about the music we'll be playing. If it's the Mozart and Beethoven, you can skip it unless you really care a lot about the minutiae of composers' lives. Having known many composers, I can pretty much assure you that they are very odd people, and the less you know about them, the more comfortable you will be. However. If you took the daring route, and are attending a performance of some seriously new music, you should glance over the program notes, especially if the title of one of the pieces suggests that there might be a story behind it. Sometimes, the story is pretty cool, and sometimes, it involves really awesomely dark stuff like murder and suicide and rape and so on, and you'll honestly get a lot more out of the big crashy, boomy sections if you know what's supposed to be going on.

• If the concert you have chosen includes a work with a chorus or a solo singer, the program book may also contain several pages of lyrics, both in the original language of the piece, and in English. It is perfectly all right for you to follow along with these lyrics during the performance. But do keep in mind that there are 2,499 other concertgoers in this room with you, and they have all been given the same program book as you, and it therefore stands to reason that they will be coming to page turns at the same time as you. And while one person turning a page is a relatively quiet operation, 2,500 people doing it sounds like a flock of pigeons descending on a loaf of Wonder Bread, and we don't need that. It won't kill you to turn the page a little early or a little late. Just watch the people on either side of you, and turn when they're not. It won't matter, since everyone else will still be doing the pigeon thing, but you will be able to bask quietly in the pride that comes with not being a clueless moron.

• By accepting the program book in the first place, you have entered into an implicit agreement with the orchestra to keep it on your lap. Because, due to an astonishing anomaly of acoustical law, a 32-page program dropped on a floor during a concert makes the same amount of noise as the complete works of Shakespeare dropped off the top of the Empire State Building onto a Chinese gong. You don't want this.

Really do RTWT. Money-back guarantee if you don't love it — and, if you're not a regular concert-goer, learn from it.

* Biographical data taken from Drew McManus's intro to the Bergman piece.

Shit!

John Simon, who has been theatre critic at New York magazine for newly [sic] 40 years, has been dismissed from that position, the critic told Playbill.com.

"I expected it," he said May 10, when asked if New York editor Adam Moss' decision took him by surprise. "Then again, my birthday is coming up, so I didn't think it was a very good birthday present."

Jeremy McCarter, theatre critic for the New York Sun, was named as Simon's replacement. McCarter's first review for New York will appear June 1.

Simon is known equally for his considerable erudition, his longevity as a critic (he is 79) and his vituperative style. His stinging reviews—particularly his sometimes vicious appraisals of performers' physical appearances—have periodically raised calls in the theatre community for his removal.

Why does this seem to have about it the stench of another triumph for pop culture and the proles?

RTWT here.

(Link via About Last Night)

Now, Really, Richard, Was That Absolutely Necessary?

The incest in Die Walküre, that is, the second music-drama of Wagner's tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Why was it necessary that Sieglinde be Siegmund's long lost sister, and why did Wagner make incest a feature of their relationship? Surely, Sieglinde being just another, totally unrelated female in distress would have served the very same purpose, would it not?

For the answers to these questions we must consult the urtext — the score (music and text) — to see what it has to tell us as it's the only source with the authority to answer such questions, and the only source that counts. We can't make appeal to Wagner's original sources as they're his business exclusively and none of ours, as is anything even Wagner himself might have said on the matter prior or subsequent to the score's completion, as anything they might have to tell us concerning this matter is certain to be misleading at best, and therefore worse than merely worthless.

On consulting the score, we can, straight off, say for certain what the reason for the incest is not. It is not to fulfill a wish by Wotan, Siegmund and Sieglinde's immortal father, that any issue of Siegmund's and Sieglinde's coupling be a pure-blood Wälsung, nor is it Wotan's wish to create a royal race of his direct descendents by that coupling. Quite apart from the fact that neither Wotan nor anyone else in the Ring had anything to gain by either of those outcomes, there's zero warrant, or even so much as a suggestion, in the entire Ring for such assumptions.

We can also rule out the possibility that Wagner was merely attempting to épater les bourgeois by the clear and pointed presentation of incest in a serious artwork for the stage à la the avant-garde types of today and yesteryear. That Wagner intended the brother-sister incest to be outrageous and shocking is certain, but not to us, the audience. Rather, he intended the outrage and shock for certain of those inhabiting the world of the Ring for reasons dramatic, and did so neither willy-nilly nor faute de mieux.

What the score tells us is essentially this: that the brother-sister incest provides the central instance of how Wotan's manipulative plan to regain Alberich's ring by creating a human "free hero" (i.e., free from the influence of the gods, and therefore his own man) went quickly and wildly in directions beyond his control or even imagining, and produced consequences as dire as they were unintended, all traceable in direct line back to Wotan himself ("Zum Ekel find ich ewig nur mich / in allem was ich erwirke!" "With loathing, I find always only myself in everything I create!"); directions determined by Fate which rules the world; a world not ruled, as Wotan then believed, by Wotan, his destiny, and his wishes.

It was beyond Wotan's control that instead of a single human male (his "free hero"), his coupling with a mortal human woman produced instead twins, one of whom was female. It was beyond his control they were separated when children by an act also beyond his control. It was beyond his control that when they again met (the meeting arranged by Wotan himself) they would fall in love. And it was beyond Wotan's control that instead of Siegmund merely taking the magic sword Wotan left for him for the instant purpose of defending himself against Sieglinde's forced-upon-her husband, Hunding, while freeing his sister (Wotan, we are given every reason to believe, loved Sieglinde as well as he loved her brother), and which magic sword was later to be used by Siegmund to slay Fafner so that Alberich's ring could be recovered, Siegmund would instead take the sword to save Sieglinde not only as the act of a brother freeing his sister, or even merely the act of a virtuous male saving a female in distress (and himself as well), but the act of a lover saving his beloved who, again beyond Wotan's control, was subsequently made pregnant by her coupling with her brother, and so carried within her yet another Wälsung.

And it was most certainly beyond Wotan's control that his true wife, Fricka, the goddess of marriage and the domestic hearth, would take all these gone-wrong events, and use them (in Act II of Die Walküre ) as legalistic, moral, and deceit-revealing cudgels to force Wotan to finally admit to himself the sheer duplicity of his ill-conceived plot to gain for himself Alberich's ring, and force him as well to agree to sacrifice his beloved Wälsung son (and by implication, also his equally beloved Wälsung daughter), and forswear forever all his dreams of limitless power, the limitless power that would be his by his possession of Alberich's ring, and thereby change the entire course of the cosmic drama that is Der Ring des Nibelungen.

And what was the moral core of Fricka's cudgel?

That's right. You guessed it. The incestuous relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde, for even in the pre-historic world of the Ring such a thing had never before occurred; was in fact something virtually unthinkable.

My heart stops beating; my brain reels!

cries Fricka to Wotan.

Marital intercourse between brother and sister!
When did it ever happen that brother and sister were lovers?
[...]
Is it the end, then, of the everlasting gods
since you brought those wild Wälsungs to birth?
[...]
Laughing, you let go your rule over heaven
so as to gratify the mere pleasure and whim
of these monstrous twins,
your adultery's dissolute fruit.

after which brutal if justified verbal pummeling Wotan begins to see that his cause is hopelessly lost even as he attempts subsequently by sophistic arguments — arguments that become progressively more and more lame — to win his case for Siegmund's and Sieglinde's love and all that came before and eventually resulted in it, and all that he expects will come after, and as well begins to see that he must save himself and the gods from his own gone-wrong, self-interested and self-profiting actions, to the duplicity of which he heretofore had blinded even himself. In short, the incest of Siegmund and Sieglinde serves as a veritable epitome of things-gone-wrong that's central to the propelling of the drama to its inexorable tragic end.

And so now we have the answer to the question that provoked this inquiry, and that answer is, Yes, boys and girls, it really was absolutely necessary.

Interesting But Hardly Surprising

The Guardian has up an article today using as its hook the upcoming publication of a new book entitled, What Good Are the Arts?, by John Carey, emeritus professor of English Literature at Oxford university. The article is a series of comments by various creative and performing artists on the question, not one of whom is a classical musician.

Why am I not surprised.

O tempora! O mores!