Wagner
BDS on Wagner
Forget the picket at Max Brenner’s, the Jewish chocolatiers! There’s a Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement against the playing of Wagner‘s works in Israel. We learn from an interesting piece in ‘The Australian’ of 13 May 2017, by Vic Alhadeff, the chief executive of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, that there is a longstanding unofficial ban, despite recent attempts to overcome it by such luminaries as Daniel Barenboim. Mr Alhadeff refers, as part of his case, to the repulsive pamphlet, “Jewry in Music” which is certainly strident and virulent, but might more properly be seen as a reflection of Wagner’s…
Continue Reading →How Much I Lied
(Image by Jo Kuehn)
THE LIEDER TRADITION Schubert’s Winter Journey – Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge (2015) Deborah Humble sings Wagner & Brahms (Adelaide, 11 February 2017) The German lieder tradition sets romantic poetry to music and performs it with raw emotion, usually to a very simple musical accompaniment such as piano or guitar. It is a broader part of a long line of love songs, from the French troubadours like Villon to the German lieder composers up to and in the nineteenth century, all the way to Tin Pan Alley and the torch songs floating out the windows of the Brill Building. And beyond – modern pop songs have often…
Continue Reading →Visconti’s Ludwig
(Dir. Luchino Visconti) (1972) Ludwig II of Bavaria led a life of the mind and was a genuine original in a time of puppet kings and jumped-up Germanic principalities. Therefore a period film of his tumultuous life, his reluctant ascension, his shaky romances, his celebrated patronage of Wagner, the night train and sleigh rides to nowhere, his decline into madness, his mysterious death…all sumptuously filmed in situ by the consummate Luchino Visconti, director of masterpieces such as La Terra Trema, Senso, The Leopard, Death in Venice…couldn’t miss, right? Wrong. It looks terrific, and Helmut Berger suggests something of the King’s inner torment,…
Continue Reading →Wagner by Michael Tanner
Science has proved that books on Wagner’s life and works would more than fill the Grand Canyon. It is therefore necessary to be discriminating (in a good way) as to what reading matter on the Maestro you choose to buy, beg, borrow or steal. Michael Tanner is a perceptive opera critic of good standing, an unapologetic Wagnerite, and his little book on the subject of Wagner’s work is a lucid and concise presentation of his views on Wagner’s raison d’être and the dimensions of his achievement. Despite tending to present difficult concepts in convoluted, laborious language (the hallmark of the professional philosopher,…
Continue Reading →Götterdämmerung
There's nothing like wrapping-up a series with a wedding (even if it's a double-wedding from Hell)
(Opera Australia, Melbourne, December 7, 2016) (Dir. Neil Armfield) With Götterdämmerung, Wagner closes his monumental circle, and not in a particularly happy way. Or does he? Why, after their interminable love play concluding Siegfried, does Brünnhilde send her lover off to do good deeds, a la Lucy and Ricky? Why are the Norns just catching-up with the imminent fall of Valhalla, which Wotan and Erda would have told them about already? Why, after drinking a Brangäne-inspired potion that moves him to marry Gutrune and kidnap Brünnhilde for Gunther’s convenience (an infamous act that he compounds by slapping her around and stealing…
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