Sounds & Fury

Kinder!, macht Neues!

In an article by composer Annie Gosfield written for The New York Times's Opinionator's The Score column, we were struck particularly by this graf:

When I first moved to New York, a friend and colleague proudly announced to me that he no longer played experimental music. He was a great improviser who coaxed wild sounds out of his instrument, but he was content with where his work had led him, so he stopped exploring. I found it both funny and disturbing — here was a guy who was willing to get on stage and work his way through a strange vocabulary of very original sounds. Why would he give up experimenting? It convinced me to keep turning over rocks to see what kind of musical wildlife I could uncover in the dirt, and to avoid getting comfortable with any single approach or style. Sometimes it means experimenting with a new sound, technique, or combination of instruments, or investigating a way to express myself while writing for a more traditionally trained group of musicians. I’ve managed to strike a balance between having enough confidence in my own music to develop my own sound, but enough curiosity and restlessness to continue to change it. If there’s a formula to writing music, I haven’t found it, and I hope I never do.

What struck us was its almost verbatim echo of sentiment of these famous grafs by Richard Wagner in an 1852 letter to Franz Liszt the closing exhortation of which is invariably quoted out of context by Eurotrash regies to justify their grotesque outrages in the staging of Wagner's music-dramas:

How about [composer, Joachim] Raff? I thought he was writing a new work, but no; he is remodeling an old one. Is there no LIFE in these people? Out of what can the artist create if he does not create out of life, and how can this life contain an artistically productive essence unless it impels the artist continually to creations which correspond to life? Is this artificial remodeling of old motives of life real artistic creativeness? How about the source of all art unless new things flow forth from it irresistibly, unless it is wholly absorbed in new creations? Oh, ye creatures of God, do not think that this making is artistic creating. It betrays no end of self-complacency, combined with poverty, if we try to prop up these earlier attempts.

[...]

Children!, do something new!, new!, and once again new! [Kinder!, macht Neues!, Neues!, und abermals Neues!]. If you stick to the old, the devil of barrenness holds you in thrall, and you are the most miserable of artists.

As true today — and will be tomorrow — as it was a century and a half ago and before.

But Slovenly Is Slovenly, Ragged Is Ragged, And Wobbly Is Wobbly

Some may have noticed we've been uncharacteristically silent concerning the Los Angeles Opera's Regieoper production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, staged, costumed, and directed by Achim Freyer. We've been silent largely because, unlike most Regieoper productions which can easily — and safely — be dismissed as Eurotrash on just a glance at the production photos, this staging is not only fascinating and visually-arresting, but impossible to judge from production photos alone, even with an accompanying video trailer, as one perceives almost instantly that its sense, if sense it makes (and we're not at all certain it does), can't be grasped by viewing it in bits and pieces as it's too conceptually complex, and therefore can be judged fairly only within the context of the whole, and that only in the theater.

That perception of ours could, of course, be entirely false, and the staging, fascinating and visually-arresting as in itself it well may be, could effectively work to make of the Ring a travesty, and prove to be yet one more case of a self-indulgent, self-involved, self-important Regie vandalizing Wagner's magnum opus in order to imagine himself making the work of poor, old-fashioned Wagner more resonant for and more relevant to 21st century sensibilities. We've read enough commentary about this production, however, to suspect that's not the case here, and so we've remained cautiously (and prudently) silent on the matter.

But something else about this production caught our attention, courtesy of Pasadena blogger George M. Wallace of A Fool In The Forest who, in this post, has some glowing comments to make about the Freyer production generally. In his post, Mr. Wallace has, along with several included LAO production photos, embedded an LAO video trailer of the Siegfried, and what struck us immediately was just how ineffectual, even shabby, the music-making is — all of it, from the orchestra on down (if you imagine our sense of direction has abandoned us here and gone the wrong way round, remember, please, this is a Wagner music-drama we're speaking of, not a Verdi opera).

We readily concede the unfairness of making such a judgment based only on what amounts to nothing more than a disconnected, three-minute collection of sound bites, but slovenly is slovenly, ragged is ragged, and wobbly is wobbly, and one dreads being exposed to anything more prolonged from these performers.

So, have we now reached the point in opera where the music is simply a do as best one can do with what one has to hand excuse for presenting mind-bending and eye-boggling staging? On the evidence of this video, it would seem so, and if so, O tempora! O mores!

A New Entry In The Classical Music Blogosphere

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 12:09 PM Eastern on 15 Oct. See below.]

Even though he didn't see fit to include Sounds & Fury on his new blogroll of classical music blogs, we'll be adding Alex Ross's new New Yorker blog, Unquiet Thoughts, to ours. Alex's other blog of long-standing, The Rest Is Noise (also listed on our blogroll of Culture Blogs), will remain intact, but more as a blog devoted to Alex's excellent book of the same name, and to other books by him that may be forthcoming.

Our congratulations and best wishes to Alex on his new venture.

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Update (12:09 PM Eastern on 15 Oct): Gracious as ever, Alex eMailed his apologies for S&F's inadvertent omission from Unquiet Thoughts's classical music blogroll. The oversight has been seen to, and S&F now takes its proper place on the blogosphere's premiere classical music blogroll.

Not So Postmodern

We've just finished reading for the second time the second edition (1947) of musicologist and music historian Edward J. Dent's classic (and brilliant) 1913 study of the Mozart operas, Mozart's Operas: A Critical Study, and found it just as rewarding a read as we did first time around. This time, however, we found ourself smiling at a graf on the penultimate page of the book that previously somehow evaded our notice. Writes Dr. Dent talking about current (1913) German stagings of Die Zauberflöte:

For the interpretation of Die Zauberflöte, we ought naturally to pay considerable respect to the traditions of the German stage; but we have the authority of many German critics for believing the older "traditions" to be extremely corrupt, and we have the evidence of our own senses ... for the vanity and pedantry of modern German producers and conductors whose one aim seems to be to produce the opera in a way that no one has ever seen before, regardless both of tradition and of the original libretto and score.

And here we've always imagined the willful, self-indulgent, self-involved distortions of the intent of the original creator of an opera as made manifest in that opera's score (music and text), which distortions are the hallmark of Eurotrash Regieoper everywhere, to be a pernicious excrescence endemic to our postmodern age alone.

Anything But Wagner: A Response

We experienced Wagnerians have, over the years, become largely inured to the badmouthing of Wagner and his music-dramas, and tend to merely shrug our shoulders, turn our back, shake our head, and walk on as such badmouthing issues typically from the mouths of TOFs (True Opera Fan; a bit like a teenage movie fan, only worse — much worse), from the mouths of those whose knowledge and understanding of Wagner and his music-dramas are of the superficial or pop sort, or from the mouths of outright morons. So it gave us something of a start to read such badmouthing coming from one whose blog posts suggest he's none of the above, but is, rather, a fairly knowledgeable operagoer and a man of some considerable intelligence.

We speak here of a rather lengthy essay (lengthy, that is, for a blog post, but perhaps not for its original online publication site on which it's no longer extant; ergo, the blog reprint) written by physician, university professor, opera-lover, and blogger Neil A. Kurtzman, MD of Music and Medicine titled, "Anything But Wagner".

There is, of course, no gainsaying another's expression of his likes and dislikes of anything whatsoever. But when an expression of one's dislike takes the form of this apparently half-in-earnest response by Dr. Kurtzman to a lament by his Wagner-loving first cousin, the daughter of his father's brother, that she could find no one in the family to go with her to a Wagner opera that reads: “I hope you get the Wagner gene from your mother or that it’s a mutant.... I’d hate to think that it might be lurking in my DNA waiting to pounce on an unborn descendent” (see below for our comment on Dr. Kurtzman's "proposal" of a literal "Wagner gene"), we may be forgiven for suspecting there's something fueling Dr. Kurtzman's intense dislike of Wagner's music-dramas other than aesthetic antipathy.

And sure enough, even a cursory reading of Dr. Kurtzman's essay makes that something plain and clear: ignorance — ignorance of Wagner the man and artist, and, much more pertinently, ignorance of his music-dramas; an ignorance grounded solidly in the superficial, the stereotypical, and the questionable.

Here, for telling instance, is Dr. Kurtzman's opening salvo:

Of Some Possible Interest To Wagnerians — Present And Future

Having purchased one of the very first IBM PCs produced (c. 1981), and equipping it with a modem as soon as that device and the software necessary to run it became available for home-user use, we've had a long experience of online discussion groups (called in those pre-Internet, pre-Web days, a Bulletin Board System, or, more familiarly, a BBS), and, generally speaking, found participation in such groups to be enormously satisfying as long as we were careful in our selection of which BBSes to join.

Well, BBSes have long gone the way of the dodo, and so-called eMail "lists" and Usenet — a kind of internationally organized and distributed BBS which actually predates the BBS format and was the first of its kind — are fast going the same way as they're relatively clumsy to use, and limited to posts employing text only, and plaintext at that. The online forum is today the de facto standard online discussion group, and there are gazillions of them out there, most of them cluttered intolerably with whiz-bang "features" and a plethora of sub-forums, and therefore the haunts of kiddies of all ages, and so to be scrupulously avoided (unless you're a kiddie, that is).

Given their in-gazillions presence, one would expect that one could find a worthwhile, non-cluttered, non-kiddie-populated online forum devoted solely to discussions centering on one's special interests whatever those special interests might be. Turns out, that's sometimes a lot harder to do than it might appear. We've, for instance, searched for years for such an online forum devoted solely to discussion of the works of Richard Wagner, and found none. The best we could find was, ironically enough, not an online forum, but a Usenet newsgroup (newsgroup is the Usenet term for forum of which Usenet has thousands). But as we above noted, Usenet is relatively clumsy to use and limited in expression. We wanted something better, but it didn't seem to be out there.

Until now, that is.

All the above has been merely a long-winded way of introducing a spanking new online forum (it went online just yesterday) called, The Wagner Group. It has no user posts as of this writing, and but a single member: our good self. TWG is an online forum that's absent every kiddie magnet the software permitted us to remove, has an absolute minimum of online-forum clutter, is powerful but simple and intuitive to use, and is devoted solely to discussion of the works of Richard Wagner.

So, if the works of Richard Wagner are your thing, or you think they might have the potential to be, stop by TWG, register (it's absolutely free, and "guests" — i.e., the non-registered — have only read-only access on TWG), and contribute a post or four to start the discussion going.

Say What?

In a piece examining whether one should hold and judge separately the artist as a man from his created works, Los Angeles Times classical music critic Mark Swed had this to say about the difficult case of Richard Wagner:

I believe we lose much in separating the artist from the art. Wagner the man is all over his operas, and that is what makes his operas universal.

Quite apart from the demonstrable fact that in the case of transcendent genius such as Wagner's it's never the case that "the man is all over" his created works,* how Mr. Swed comes to the conclusion that that's what makes Wagner's operas universal is beyond our capacity to understand as just a moment's reflection would expose the utter absurdity of such a conclusion.

We might suggest to Mr. Swed that he rethink that conclusion, and while he's at it, rethink as well a number of other ill-informed statements concerning Wagner that pepper this article.

* Or as T.S. Eliot put it, "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates."

The Awful Text Of Wagner's Ring

Well, this is most refreshing, and not a little encouraging: a contemporary German opera director who knows his proper place.

I don’t like to play one profession off against another, but [in opera,] if the composer isn’t at the center, there’s something rotten. A director is only a manager. Our names should come last, after those of the conductor, the orchestra, the soloists.

Quite right, of course.

The above quote is from German director Sven-Eric Bechtolf in an interview with Wilhelm Sinkovicz, "the rapier-sharp critic of the Austrian daily Die Presse," on the occasion of Herr Bechtolf's staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Vienna State Opera this past May, and as quoted in an article by Matthew Gurewitsch for The New York Times focusing on a CD recording by Herr Bechtolf of a reading of the complete text of the Ring — sans music. Says Herr Bechtolf of Wagner's text:

Each character [in the Ring] is like a figure in a fairy tale. But take them all together, and you see the complex structure. Wagner’s language is full of alliteration, which to modern German ears sounds funny and strange. A lot of people say that the music is great, but the text is awful. So it’s an interesting experiment to see if an audience can just listen to the words without bursting out laughing all the time. And from my live readings it seems to be that people can tolerate long stretches of it surprisingly well.

Herr Bechtolf's reading of the Ring's text for its own sake follows in a long if sporadic tradition of such readings going back to Wagner himself who initially viewed his texts for the Ring (which he called "poems") as great epic-dramatic poems in their own right. He subsequently, and quite early on after his completion of the full text of the Ring, was disabused of that idea after he'd finished the full score of the music for the first of the Ring music-dramas, Das Rheingold, the first music written for the Ring. Wrote Wagner in a lengthy, detailed letter to one of his closest confidants, conductor and composer August Röckel:

The completion of [the full score of] the Rheingold (a task as difficult as it was important) has restored my sense of self-assurance.... I have once again realized how much of the work's meaning (given the nature of my poetic intent) is only made clear by the music! I can now no longer bear to look at the poem without music.

Nor should we be expected to be able to do so as, like all first-rate libretti, the superbly constructed text of the Ring is merely the armature about which the music-drama is constructed as we've on numerous previous occasions here on S&F taken the trouble to point out; an armature designed to provide the concrete narrative and factual detail which music alone is incapable of expressing, and which armature never competes dramatically with the music which is the principal carrier and transmitter of the music-drama's dramatic core.

Misguided and purblind critics of the literary and dramatic quality of Wagner's Ring text (as well as the texts of his other music-dramas), take note.

Wagner: The Intuitive Physicist

In 2004, physicist John Smith, along with colleagues Joe Wolfe and Elodie Joliveau, published a study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that revealed for the first time the physiological cause of the so-called "soprano problem", a curious phenomenon that causes sopranos to invariably mispronounce lyrics when singing powerfully in the top half of their range. Smith and Wolfe soon realized that "composers could actually avoid the problem completely by pairing words with notes at which the vowel sounds resonated naturally in a singer’s mouth."

Smith felt that through [his] obsession with perfection, Wagner might have come to understand the relationship between vowel sounds and pitch necessary to overcome the soprano problem.

[...]

So one evening in his garden while he was recovering from surgery, Smith took up a pen and paper and went through Götterdämmerung note-by-note, lyric-by-lyric, recording which notes were paired with which vowel sounds. In the early hours of the next morning he wrote a computer program to determine with statistical certainty whether Wagner had in fact used a vowel-pitch matching technique. Looking at the program’s first results, he was amazed. There was a clear relationship.

After Smith’s discovery, he and Wolfe began analyzing more of Wagner’s work. “It’s quite a tedious job, but sitting in the garden reading Wagner is not a bad way to spend your time,” Smith says. In all, Smith and Wolfe looked at four of the composer’s works, including Tristan und Isolde and three operas from Wagner’s magnum opus, Der Ring des Nibelungen. In each case they found a statistically significant correlation between the music and lyrics [i.e., between the notes and the vowel sounds]. For comparison they also looked at operas by Mozart, Rossini, and Strauss and determined that, in these compositions, no such correlation existed.

RTWT here.

Atque In Perpetuum, Hildegard

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:32 PM Eastern on 19 Aug. See below.]

The splendid Wagnerian soprano Hildegard Behrens is dead. She was 72. Notable as much for her striking stage presence and expressive acting as she was for her fine if more lyric than heroic soprano voice, she brought to her Wagner roles a convincingness too rarely seen onstage. Even though long off the Wagnerian stage, her absence from the world of opera will be sorely felt.

Atque In Perpetuum, Hildegard. Ave Atque Vale.

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Update (1:32 PM Eastern on 19 Aug): Obit from The New York Times here, and from the Telegraph here.

A Perennial Objection

We suppose we should have anticipated this and remarked on it in this S&F post concerning the Erda episode in Das Rheingold to forestall eMail voicing an objection that's been voiced perennially since Wagner's time; viz., How is it that Wotan and the rest of the gods still find themselves in mortal peril for the next three Ring dramas following Das Rheingold even though Wotan obeys Erda's warning in Das Rheingold to rid himself of Alberich's ring to avoid an irredeemably shameful end for the gods? Wagner, it's contended, surely screwed the pooch here as he makes nonsense of his own text.

Well, we didn't anticipate, and the eMail objections have already begun to arrive in our Inbox. So let us belatedly set this matter straight in an attempt to preclude further e-missives on the matter.

First, let's be clear about this. Although it's well known that Wagner committed several narrative and textual boo-boos in the text of the tetralogy, they're all ultimately trivial, and objecting to them, the sheerest sort of pedantry. The present apparent boo-boo, however, is not among them, for it's no boo-boo at all.

Consider:

Had Wagner made Erda's warning to Wotan unambiguously clear and specific — viz., have Erda warn Wotan that unless he surrendered Alberich's gold ring to the Rhine so that it could be returned to its original form and proper place, etc. — there would have been no Der Ring des Nibelungen as after some now necessary bargaining with the giants to accept Alberich's hoard of gold minus the ring (which ring is now at the bottom of the Rhine, for Wotan has no choice but to obey Erda's warning) in total payment for building Walhall, and to secure the release of the captured Freia, the drama would have ended with Das Rheingold. In other words, a done deal, for the ring's returned to the Rhine, Alberich's defeated, and the gods forever safe and secure against the irredeemably shameful end warned against by Erda.

From this it's clear Wagner made no mistake here. He by design made Erda's warning to Wotan mysterious and ambiguous (the part about fleeing the ring's curse is particularly choice as it for all the world sounds like Erda is telling Wotan to flee the curse put on the ring by Alberich, but she of course means nothing of the sort) which allowed Wotan to obey the warning literally without really understanding its import by surrendering the ring not to the Rhine — which is what's necessary to rid Wotan, the gods, and the world of its curse (viz., its very existence) — but to the giants Fasolt and Fafner in return for the satisfaction of their claim against him in the matter of the building of Walhall, and to secure the release of the captured Freia, thereby ridding himself of the ring in literal obedience to Erda's warning. It's only later that Wotan will understand the real import of Erda's warning, and that directly from Erda herself, as we'll learn during Wotan's great Act II monologue in Die Walküre.

There's a lesson of sorts to be learned here. Where works of art are concerned, it's a more than reckless enterprise to attempt to second-guess or outthink a transcendent creator such as Wagner, for if one does, one will almost always find oneself ending up having to wipe the egg off one's face.

A Petty Singling Out?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 3:24 AM Eastern on 16 Aug. See below.]

Is it petty or pedantic to call attention to a single, grossly ill-conceived staging of an episode lasting but some six minutes or so in an opera that goes on for some two-and-a-half hours?

Perhaps.

But what if that opera is the indispensable prelude to a trilogy of operas to follow that collectively span some thirteen hours of performance time, and that single, six-minutes-long episode is responsible for setting up the dramatic urframe, so to speak, for and for posing the central problem or argument of that following trilogy?

We're here talking about Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, of course, and specifically the Erda episode of its prelude, Das Rheingold, as mounted this past Sunday in the famous Stephen Wadsworth production for the Seattle Opera.

We held off commenting on this matter before as it was our hope that the six-minutes-long episode above referred to — part of which episode we witnessed in the video "trailer" (or "preview", as the SO calls it) for Das Rheingold put up by the SO on a page on its website along with trailers for the other three music-dramas of the Ring which page we've linked to previously — was merely a dress rehearsal aberration that would be altered substantially for the actual performance. Turns out, we're now reliably informed, it wasn't, and was staged in actual performance just as seen in the video trailer.

But let us be more specific.

In his uncompleted, occasionally flawed but brilliant traversal of the Ring (I Saw The World End, for commentary on which see this S&F post), musicologist Deryck Cooke writes of this six-minute episode:

Erda's sudden appearance is the most unexpected of all the unexpected events in the Ring: it comes as a tremendous, breathtaking surprise, and has the effect of a visionary revelation.

Indeed it is and does. Further, it's in a very real sense the launching pad for all that will follow over the next three music-dramas of the Ring, providing them their dramatic urframe, and posing their central problem or argument as we've above noted. Director Stephen Wadsworth's staging of this crucial episode is so grossly and jarringly ill-conceived that it makes one wonder what the man could have been thinking, or, worse, was he thinking at all. Not only is the staging completely at odds with Wagner's text and most especially with Wagner's music, but it makes Erda's sudden, mystic "visionary revelation" with its dire warning come across as little more than a quietly touching, even domestic, caution by a concerned parent to an erring child.

On the evidence of the score (music, text, and stage directions), this is not at all what Wagner had in mind. According to the score, as Erda rises slowly from the earth in a mystic halo of blue light as all around turns dark and foreboding, we're given to understand from the music that this is an extraordinary personage, and her appearance an extraordinary event even in this mythic world filled with extraordinary personages and events. And from the text, we're given to understand that the gods, Wotan included, have no idea who or what she is, but all are awestruck by her sudden and unexpected appearance. Quietly but sternly, Erda, pointing a finger ominously at Wotan, issues her dire warning to him to give up the ring he's just stolen from Alberich, for if he does not, she says, he (and by implication, all the gods) will be doomed irredeemably to dark (i.e., shameful) destruction. Wotan, his fear getting the better of his awe, commands her to stay and tell him more, but Erda tells him she's told him enough, and then slowly disappears back into the earth as Wotan, frightened by her warning, and desperate to learn more, makes an attempt to physically prevent her leaving, but is held back by the other gods who warn him not to so much as touch her, for though ignorant of who or what she is, they know enough to know she's not to even be approached, much less manhandled.

Arresting, makes-the-hair-on-the-back-of-one's-neck-stand-up stuff this episode, as Wagner intended it to be.

So how does Mr. Wadsworth stage this? As Erda begins her warning, he has Wotan drop to his knees and, like a child clinging to its mother, familiarly wrap his arms about Erda's waist, his head tilted against her shoulder, as Erda, like a comforting mother, her face all sympathy, gently strokes him variously on shoulder, breast, arm, and hand as she issues her warning, as if to say, Don't be afraid.

So much for makes-the-hair-on-the-back-of-one's-neck-stand-up arresting, and so much for Erda as a "tremendous, breathtaking ... visionary revelation" setting up the dramatic urframe for and posing the central problem of the three music-dramas to follow.

What could Mr. Wadsworth have been thinking?

Or was he thinking at all?

Only The Shadow and Mr. Wadsworth know for sure.

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Update (3:24 AM Eastern on 16 Aug): What's that we hear you saying? Wagner screwed up here and made nonsense of his own text? He did no such thing.

The Art Of Transition

I recognize now that the characteristic fabric of my music (always of course in the closest association with the poetic design), which my friends now regard as so new and so significant, owes its construction above all to the extreme sensitivity which guides me in the direction of mediating and providing an intimate bond between all the different moments of transition that separate the extremes of mood. I should now like to call my most delicate and profound art the art of transition, for the whole fabric of my art is made up of such transitions: all that is abrupt and sudden is now repugnant to me; it is often unavoidable and necessary, but even then it may not occur unless the mood has been clearly prepared in advance so that the suddenness of the transition appears to come as a matter of course. My greatest masterpiece in the art of the most delicate and gradual transition is without doubt the great scene in the second act of Tristan and Isolde [i.e., Scene 2]. The opening of this scene presents a life overflowing with all the most violent emotions — its ending the most solemn and heartfelt longing for death. These are the pillars: and now you see, child, how I have joined these pillars together, and how the one of them leads over into the other. This, after all, is the secret of my musical form, which, in its unity and clarity over an expanse that encompasses every detail, I may be bold enough to claim has never before been dreamt of. If only you knew how that guiding emotion has inspired me to invent musical devices that would never have occurred to me previously (devices in terms of rhythm, as well as harmonic and melodic development), you would realize that even in the most specialized branches of art no truth is ever invented that does not derive from such grand primary motives. That, then, is art!

—Richard Wagner in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck, 29 October 1859 (English translation by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington).

Seattle Opera Ring Video Trailers

For those of you (ourself included) who can't get to — and/or afford tickets for — the 2009 Seattle Opera Ring, be advised that the company's excellent website has up video "trailers" (called by the SO, "previews") for each of the company's 2009 productions of the Ring's four music-dramas all of which can be viewed here. Not the best way to get a real taste of the four productions or of the cycle, but a taste nevertheless.

Sidebar To Our Remarks On The Seattle Opera Ring

In conjunction with a series of video clips examining backstage views of the Seattle Opera's production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen titled, "The Road To Valhalla", there's in addition a series of video clips titled, "Confessions of a First-Time Operagoer" wherein is chronicled the experiences and impressions of a young, first-time operagoer on her introduction to the backstage preparations that go into the making of the production. The series is of only minor interest in itself (but still worth a look-see), but we wish to call your attention to the clip titled, "Speight Interview" (the clip has no separate link that we can discover, and so you'll have to go to the page and click on clip itself to view it), in which the young first-time operagoer "interviews" Seattle Opera General Director Speight Jenkins. All Jenkins's remarks are of interest, of course, as they were bound to be, but there's something about those remarks given their immediate context that's quite remarkable for and conspicuous by its absence.

Can you suss out what that might be?

Comments are open for a week for your convenience.

More On The Seattle Opera Ring

Here are some illuminating comments by Stephen Wadsworth, the director of the Seattle Opera's production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (for our comments on which, see this S&F post) which opens 9 August this year.

A Seattle Opera fixture since 1975, the Ring is now in its third incarnation here — a hugely popular production, directed by Stephen Wadsworth and designed by Thomas Lynch. [...] It's creative, imaginative and audience-stretching, but it also has the storybook beauty and the attention to Wagner's own stage directions that satisfy the traditionalism dear to many Wagnerites.

[...]

In a world of "concept" opera — staging the Ring as, say, a parable of the Industrial Revolution — Wadsworth is something of an anomaly for focusing instead on the human interactions that make the operatic tetralogy speak to all times.

"I'm not a person who leads with ideas about the piece, or a concept, particularly," Wadsworth explained recently during a discussion on how his production will look in 2009. [...] "I'm more interested in what's happening in the moment. And for that reason, the only significant change in the production is in the people who are playing the roles, and their differentness from the people who have played those roles in the past." [...] "Theater at its core is the interaction, in the moment, between the characters/actors. That's what makes the thing really fly or not."

RTWT here.

The Seattle Ring

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:43 PM Eastern on 6 Aug. See below.]

As the Bayreuther Festspiele has long since abandoned and betrayed its very raison d'être which was to present model performances of Wagner's operas and music-dramas, electing instead to present the mostly imbecile and grotesque Konzept stagings of various and sundry postmodern directors who care not one whit for Wagner's original vision and spirit as made manifest in his scores (text and music), and as the Met this past season mounted its last performances of director Otto Schenk's "traditionally staged" Ring (which, truth be told, needed retiring), the Seattle Opera's so-called "Green Ring" — first mounted in 2001 under the direction of the estimable Stephen Wadsworth with sets by Thomas Lynch — is perhaps the only (and perhaps last) staging by a major opera house of this epic work where one can see the work staged true to the essential vision and spirit of its creator.

This month, the Seattle Opera, under the enlightened directorship of general director Speight Jenkins, will mount its third production of this staging of the Ring (the prior productions were given in 2001 and 2005), again directed by Stephen Wadsworth, in a series of three cycles running from 9 August through 30 August. In conjunction with this Ring, the Seattle Opera has prepared a series of five videos giving a backstage look at the production which is most informative (although not as informative as it could have been) under the general title, "The Road To Valhalla", which series of videos can be viewed here. Also in conjunction with this Ring are a series of pre- and post-performance lectures and symposia as well as other events the schedule for all of which can be viewed here.

We Wagnerians, both present and prospective, have much for which to thank and be grateful to the Seattle Opera and its venerable general director, Speight Jenkins. Long may they prevail.

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Update (5:43 PM Eastern on 6 Aug): For more on this, see this S&F post.

Huh?

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 5:22 PM Eastern on 23 Jul. See below.]

The German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, interviewed Stephan Moesch, "an expert on Wagner and the editor-in-chief of Opernwelt (World of Opera), a prominent German trade journal", concerning the future direction of the Bayreuther Festspiele under the new co-directorship of half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier. A virtual cigar to anyone who can make sense of the following response from Herr Moesch:

I would like to see Wagner's compositional legacy play a greater role — that his works are not only staged differently, but that they also reflect the context in which Wagner lived and worked and are confronted with new ways of listening.

The Comments Section of this post is opened for a week for your convenience.

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Update (3:27 PM Eastern on 23 Jul): The so-far two comments on this post have mysteriously stopped displaying although both are still intact. The TypePad techies have been notified of the problem, and we're waiting for their response.

Stay tuned.

Update 2 (3:49 PM Eastern on 23 Jul): The two comments have spontaneously reappeared and are now displaying as per normal. No idea what the problem was.

Update 3 (5:22 PM Eastern on 23 Jul): TypePad tech informs us that the problem was that "TypePad released an update to TypePad earlier today which resulted in the comments not displaying on your posts. We rolled back the release, and the comments are now displaying without error."

End Of An Unbroken Era

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 1:03 PM Eastern on 24 Jul. See below.]

The threatened strike of stagehands at the fabled Bayreuther Festspiele, first made public a couple weeks ago, is the first publicly visible sign that the Festspiele — from its inception always a special event on a number of fronts — is on its way to becoming just another opera venue, its position as a jewel in the crown of German cultural and nationalistic pride notwithstanding, and marks as well the end of an unbroken era that stretches from Wagner himself straight through the stewardship of his two grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang. The Festspiele will coast for another few seasons or so on its storied history and on its German cultural and nationalistic significance (for Germans), eventually becoming...what?

Only The Shadow knows.

Sad — and certain to be a meaningful cultural loss to the world of the arts generally, and the world of opera in particular.

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Update (1:23 PM Eastern on 14 Jul): After the breakdown of negotiations, the strike is on reports Spiegel Online.

Update 2 (1:15 PM Eastern on 15 Jul): Deutsche Welle is now reporting that a new round of negotiations is scheduled for 22 July, and that union executive Hans Kraft has declared that, "It looks as though the strike has been averted. I am confident we'll be able to reach agreement."

Update 3 (1:03 PM Eastern on 24 Jul): Agreement has been reached, and the opening of the 2009 Bayreuther Festspiele on 25 July will go on as scheduled.

An Eye-Popping Regieoper Walküre Act III Opening

If you're determined to do Regieoper Wagner, you might as well throw all restraint to the winds and let it all, um, hang out. Here's a suggestion for a Regieoper Act III Walküre opening guaranteed to make arts headlines worldwide.

Oh, and fair warning: NSFW.