Wagner
Tannhäuser
The naughty knight with Venus (Otto Knille, 1873)
(Richard Wagner) (1845) (Met, December 2015) An old-fashioned, rollicking and surprise-free production, beautifully sung and shockingly acted (Johan Botha can’t even manage to convincingly strum the symbolic lyre) with James Levine leading the orchestra (James Jorden in The Observer rudely suggesting that he “flapped his baton like a wounded bird”). Terrific early Wagner, with a stark and invariably crass look at a medieval gallant’s perennial struggle twixt sacred and profane love – the orgasmic overture leading on to the writhing, wriggling Venusberg – replete with smudged borders between high church and low conduct, and a fairly unsatisfying denouement. Leaves on a staff? …
Continue Reading →Go See the ASO in 2016!
Photo of ASO from "The Australian"
Great season ahead for ASO, in its 80th year, with newbie Nicholas Carter. He’s a Wagner fan (yay!) and opens the season (13/2/16) with Die Walküre, Act I. Dare we dream to ramp-up Adelaide again as a second Bayreuth? It’s a natural fit – small, picturesque, bankrupt as the Master, and full of chancers! But beautiful. Like the canon on offer this season – Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Dvorák, Handel, Berlioz, Strauss, Ravel, Prokofiev, Smetana, Elgar, Mahler, Debussy, Sibelius, Delius, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Yes…The Varnished Culture has ranked them, not chronologically, but on merit. But see and hear what you can…
Continue Reading →Twilight of the Gods
(Dir. Julian Doyle) (2013) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the successor to Schopenhauer and a great writer and weirdo, said he “would never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music.” “And Wagner did become Nietzsche’s awakener, who, by subsequently failing to live up to the youth’s ideals, dealt him wounds which, though they never healed, yet played a salutary role in his development into one of history’s most formidable philosophic writers and thinkers. Like King Ludwig, he at first placed Wagner upon so high a pedestal that the concussion of the idol’s fall shattered not only it but the shocked worshipper, too….
Continue Reading →Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel
"Let's see what he makes of this brief..."
(by John Louis Di Gaetani) (1978) When P brought this obscure little tome at the Paradise Bookshop, L asked, not unreasonably, “What has Wagner to do with the modern British novel?” Oh ye of little faith and so many brains! Well, let’s see…. In this book, Dr Di Gaetani mounts the case that the operatic works of Wagner, and in particular the poetry and prose in his librettos, had a vital galvanising effect on five major British novelists maturing (if not all necessarily in their prime) during the Edwardian Age: Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. P read this…
Continue Reading →The Adelaide Ring
(2004: Recording 2012) The Varnished Culture is leery of greatest hits records. Everyone’s CD cupboard bursts with them, especially those replenished after an insurance claim. Yet with The Ring, one can make an exception. Especially when this is the only record of the sublime Adelaide production seen in 2004, when little Adelaide’s gallant attempt to simulate Bayreuth was almost scuttled by a relatively new State Government (which is still the State Government) quibbling about funding. Thankfully, a Commonwealth Grant to the Melba Foundation cleared the way. The Adelaide Ring was the first ‘ground up’ production in Australia and many feared it would be…
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