Classical Music, Poetry and stuff

[Erika1487]

Anne Sofie von Otter

[robertlouis]

What are your thoughts of Lisa Gasteen? I just came across her 2005 BBC PROMS preformance. Good stuff.
I am a big Wagner lol

I somehow thought you might be, Erika. Sorry, it's a cheap one, but I couldn't resist. Genuinely, no offence intended.

Wagner is the toughest test for the listener, unless you can completely divorce the music from the man, who was an anti-semite of the most vocal and virulent kind. It was that anti-semitism, coupled with the subject matter of his operas which harked back to a mythic and heroic German past and chimed perfectly with the Nazis' preferred basis of German culture, that elevated him to the pinnacle of composer worship under their regime.

The music has sublime moments, and it's also important to remember that he was very much an innovator, but I find it difficult to listen to without the reminders.

My favourite Wagner anecdote concerns the Prague Conservatoire during the war, during which the Nazis took their hatred of all things Jewish to the absurd extent of removing and destroying statues of Jewish artists, writers and composers. The staff were ordered to remove the statue of Mendelssohn from the array of figures which lined the roof, but refused to risk their lives, so the Gestapo undertook the task. The statues weren't labelled, so the commanding officer simply took down and destroyed the one with the biggest nose.

It was, of course, a statue of Wagner.

[trish]

Tristan and Isolde sweeps me up into its endless despairing crescendo of passion every time I listen to it. I love how Wagner's harmony floats adrift within a chromatic sea of sevenths and ninths and eleventh chords. After Wagner there was nothing left to do but break with the rules of harmony altogether.

If I allowed myself to be burdened by extra-musical meaning I could never listen to a Mozart mass or a passion by Bach, or the liturgical music of Messiaen. Music transcends the little narratives that were once the scaffolds of its composition.

[robertlouis]

Tristan and Isolde sweeps me up into its endless despairing crescendo of passion every time I listen to it. I love how Wagner's harmony floats adrift within a chromatic sea of sevenths and ninths and eleventh chords. After Wagner there was nothing left to do but break with the rules of harmony altogether.

If I allowed myself to be burdened by extra-musical meaning I could never listen to a Mozart mass or a passion by Bach, or the liturgical music of Messiaen. Music transcends the little narratives that were once the scaffolds of its composition.

I know, Trish. But I genuinely find it difficult to listen to Wagner without the negative associations, although some of it is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

In terms of the break with traditional romantic boundaries, yes, but there was a glorious interim period during which Mahler and Sibelius, so utterly different in their views of symphonic scale and purpose, took the last threads of the romantic and fused them with the beginnings of modernism to provide stunning contributions to the symphonic canon.

[Prospero]

I know what you mean. the majesterial tone of the music is hard to resist. In a sense something of the impulse which made the torchlit rallies in Nuremberg so magnetic (and with knowledge of all they represented utterly cvhilling) is there in that music. Resist it perhaps but it has an arousing quality which is also deeply disturbing. I think Wagner reaches past the conscious to stir certain archetypal impulses.

But I have a greater love for Mahler personally. The wonder of the second was never surpassed but the sadness of the final movement of the 9th really does embody a profound Weltschmerz

[Stavros]

Music seems to generate some odd responses in people -first, Lisa Gasteen is a good but not a great singer, I wouldn't make an extra effort to go and see her. Second, the final movement of Mahler's 9th is not weltschmerz, a juvenile emotion, but the deeply felt reflection on a life about to end, by a mature adult who was aware of his imminent death.

Third, I thought we had already done the Music and the Nazi's in another thread -Beethoven was (and still is) considered the pinnacle of German music, not Wagner -see Beethoven in German Politics 1870-1989 by David Dennis. Beethoven himself was at one time a supporter of the megalomaniac Napoleon, and by today's standards a German nationalist too -it is assumed he would not have welcomed Hitler, but on what basis? In Wagner, Race and Revolution, Paul Lawrence Rose compares the 'deep humanity' of the funeral march in Beethoven's 3rd, to Siegfried's death march in Gotterdammerung, saturated with violence and of course a premonition of the violence yet to come...no mention of the wars and violence Beethoven was thinking of when he wrote the 3rd (he only withdrew the dedication to Napoleon after writing it, not during its composition). This precise attempt to locate anti-semitism in the music, was taken to absurd lengths by Marc Weiner in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, where he correlates the sound of Sixtus Beckmesser in Meistersinger to the caricature of a 'whining Jew' even though Beckmesser was modelled on Eduard Hanslick, the notorious and acid-tongued music critic in Vienna who was not a Jew. Nevertheless by casting a figure of ridicule as a high baritone was the key, it was musical code, and it goes on throughout the works, ignoring all the pre-existing issues: why are heroines in opera usually sopranos, and why are heroes tenors? Why are villains basses and why are scheming harridans mezzo-sopranos or contraltos? And so on.

Chopin's anti-Jewish feeling was as strong as Wagner's whereas Wagner actually employed Jews as musicians and conductors and as someone convinced of his own global importance would probably have seen Hitler as rival -but taken any money that was offered, ultimately, it was money that mattered most to Wagner for most of his life.

Puccini was so disgusted with the inefficiency of the Italian republic that he welcomed Mussolini on the basis that his affinity with the German variety of fascism would introduce German style efficiency to Italy, but I don't know people are suddenly going to find La Boheme, Tosca or Turandot polluted by Puccini's retrogade politics and Mussolini's catastrophic fascist experiment and its treatment of Italian Jews. Carl Orff joined the Nazi party, was he a Nazi or did he do it because he wanted to promote himself? At least one conductor (Charles Groves) has said he couldn't conduct Carmina Burana because the episode with the roasted goose made him think of the 1930s and made him shudder with fear.

Same with Karajan, same with Schwarzkopf although she didn't join. Furtwangler is filmed conducting Beethoven's 9th while wearing a Nazi armband, there is a file on him in the National Archive which was generated when Furtwangler was about to do a concert tour of the UK in the late 1940s and some protested. A well-known tenor of the day wrote to the Foreign Office with the emphatic statement He is a Nazi through and through, yet we now know Furtwangler helped many Jewish musicians escape.

Richard Strauss was appointed director of the Reich Musikammer in 1933 by Goebbels, and used it to get a law on copyright published which guaranteed composers would get royalities for music performed. When the Nazi's insisted that Stefan Zweig's name be removed from the libretto of Die Schweigsame Frau at its premiere in Dresden in 1935, Strauss wrote a sarcastic letter that was by intercepted by Goebbels office, and he was sacked. He fled Garmisch at the end of the war and was subsequently arrested by the Americans, but never actually put before the de-Nazification court (I have tried to find records of this and failed). His daughter-in-law, Alice, who lived in the family house in Garmisch, and who is still alive, is Jewish -so in fact according to Nazi law, the Nazi's could have arrested him for harbouring a Jew. His Olympic Hymn (1936) is rubbish, but so is a lot of Strauss's music. Webern's son was in the SS, what about him? He was shot dead by someone who thought they were shooting his son.

Sometimes it seems clear, at other times it becomes ambiguous, or not proven, or false. One should be wary of retrospective judgements, and as far as Wagner and the earlier composers go, it is an interesting but a pointless historical exercise that does no justice to the composer or his music. We haven't even got started on the painters and the writers....

[robertlouis]

I agree with your analysis of Mahler's 9th, Stavros. The entire symphony is a musical reflection on the approach of imminent death, foreshadowed by the loss of his children in the 6th. With Mahler, I always get the impression of a teeming mind unwilling to leave anything out and striving in the opposite direction to ensure, as he said, that the whole world should be in the symphony. Given the virulent nature of both music criticism and anti-semitism in fin de siecle Vienna, and the extravagant nature of his music, it's not surprising that he was under hideous pressures from all sides during his career in the capital.

And as for Sibelius, he is often regarded as the dark master of Scandinavian bleakness, but that ignores his separateness as a Finn, his immense personal contribution and commitment to the cause of Finnish independence, and the warmth that underlies the symphonies, invariably in the third movement.

If I had to choose just one work to take to the mythical desert island, it would be the Sibelius 5th in the 1993 recording by the CBSO under Rattle. The tension created by the final hammer blows of that symphony in live performance is a tour de force unmatched in the canon.

[Stavros]

I don't know what to make of Vienna, it has been a focal point in the classical tradition and yet there is a consistent tug of war between traditionalists and radicals: Mozart and Beethoven and later Brahms left their petty-bourgeois enclaves to hit the high life but also the financial and artistic opportunities the city had: the arch-conservative Vienna of Metternich hid an underground of sexual experimentation (Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini). And yet after the death of Schubert, all Austria could produce was the relentless froth of the Strauss family, the emotionally wrought cathedrals of sound through Bruckner, and ultimately the death of tonal music in Schoenberg. Superb musicians, however, seem to grow on the trees. It seems that Mahler was admired as a musician, but provoked the traditionalists who hated his experiments with Beethoven, the tempi he chose (too fast) and his determination to both break the star system at the Opera to create an ensemble, and his use of avant-garde producers for stagings. It becomes part of that extaordinary cultural battleground with Freud, Mahler, Karl Kraus, the Secession, Schnitzler on one side and the starched imperialist-catholics on the other. Fischer-Diskau once said that is the 'Jewishness' of Mahler's music that upsets people, even though he blithely signed it all away to convert -I don't think it meant anything to him in religious terms, he was some sort of pantheist, he did it to get a plum job. Cosima Wagner, more anti-Jewish than her dead husband, hated him. Hitler rather enjoyed a performance of Tristan Mahler conducted, but he was a teenager at the time, and we don't take Hitler's views on music seriously...

I don't rate Sibelius as highly as you do, but it raises the question again, does it make any difference to the music who the man was and what his biography means -in terms of world history, Finnish history, music history?

[Prospero]

re weltschmerz - I stand corrected. I know that it was his reflective farewell to life so i guess i used the wrong word. i don't speak german.

[Prospero]

Stavros - your question about does it make any difference is a complex one. Is music value free in the sense that the political ideas of the creator are seperate wholly from the fabric of his or her work? Certainly can't be said to be true of great works of literature. Prably nor of visual arts. Certainly the uses to which art is put change it and also one has to judge the entire corpus of work by someone like Leni Riefenstahl by her work glorifying Nazi ideology