Wagner
South Australia Venerates the Maestro
12 September 2016: Thirty Years of the Richard Wagner Society of SA Inc. 1986: what a year! South Australia’s 150th birthday. John Bannon was Premier – remember him? Ronnie Reagan was U.S. President; Bob Hawke was Prime Minister. Glenelg won a stirring Grand Final against the odds. And SA State Opera, eclectic as ever, staged Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, at Her Majesty’s Theatre, then the Opera Theatre, which inspired three men of letters, Professor Andrew McCredie, Malcolm Fox and Ralph Middenway (with spiritual father Brian Coghlin absent but there in spirit), to convene a hasty public meeting on 20 June 1986, in…
Continue Reading →Das Ende
"Wakey, wakey Brunhild!" (Otto Donner von Richter) (c. 1892)
17 August, 1876 In Bayreuth, Wagner’s great dream of a music festival playing nothing but Wagner (specifically, the Ring Cycle), concluded today 140 years ago. How many in the crowd cried “Danke Gott!” Or maybe, being mostly Bavarian and made of sterner stuff than most, many said “Grüß got!” For it had been a good day, a great week in fact. The Twilight of the Gods ended some 16 hours of music drama that left the audience drained and etiolated, but in a good way, like a pious married couple on the morning after the wedding. For his part Wagner…
Continue Reading →Richard Wagner & Visual Art
"Knight of the Flowers" (aka Parsifal) by Georges Rochegrosse
A talk to the Richard Wagner Society of SA by Trevor Clarke, 17 July 2016 This was a marvel of learning, a sumptuous panorama of somewhat saccharine mythical paintings, presented superbly by our fraternal guest, Trevor Clarke, member of the Richard Wagner Society of Victoria (or Danielgrad, as it is apparently now known – we wish that great State had kept its original moniker, Batmania). Trevor’s two hour talk was a fascinating and wide-ranging review, dazzling, and in some ways, dizzying, in its vast construct of connections and influence. Wagner obviously drew on the visual arts in a myriad ways –…
Continue Reading →Paris – The Moveable Feast
How to take the gloss off the Eiffel Tower
June 23, 1940: Herr Hitler strolls around his shiny new toy, Paris, taking in the architectural marvels under the tutelage and guidance of those well-known art lovers, Albert Speer and Arno Breker; the former a drawer of nightmare-constructions that never took shape, thank goodness – the latter a grafter of dubious, neoclassical trash that would make Phidias and Alexandros laugh (we except Breker’s bronze bust of Wagner at Bayreuth). The Nazis represented the worst threat in memory to art. They were thieves, of course. And what they did not understand, or disliked, they simply destroyed. They spun idiotic theories and practised…
Continue Reading →Wagner and Modernism
Wagner by Albrecht Leistner, 1911 (photo by Koernerj2000)
Modernism has many adherents and many parents. It began, more or less, in the late 19th century (particularly in France) and flourished in the 20th century (early on, particularly in Italy – Ezra Pound’s admonition to ‘make it new’ probably reflected his italianate longings). Although some point to Kant as the great begetter of modernism, there are folks who were closer to home that can stake a better claim. In France: Édouard Manet, Gustave Flaubert and especially Charles Baudelaire, and rather more globally, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche regarded Baudelaire in this context as Wagner’s ‘intelligent adherent.’ But surely Wagner takes the prize, both in…
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