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Wagner (Wagner, Siegfried - Composer): Operas
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Wagner (Wagner, Siegfried - Composer) also shows up in the Retriever categories:
Wagner (Northeast Conference) , and more.
Wagner (Northeast Conference) , and more.
If Wagner is using symbolism to convey messages - as he does here - he is very much cheating the onlooker. The onlooker simply does not know what message he is being fed. The opera extols the idea that one should "honour your German Masters". Now Wagner actually refers to a couple of these German Masters in his "Grimm-bewarht" pun - The Grimm brothers. The Grimms deliberately collected their Folk-Tales as a means of tapping into the ancient Folk-wisdom of Germany. Their collection of tales was intended as a store house of German folk-wisdom. Wagner would have known this - as indeed practically any cultured German would.
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In expanding his repudiation of Ms Wagner's “heavy ideological baggage and debatable glosses,” Canning says: “…the German press barely questions the debatable premises on which the director and her dramaturg base their contentious interpretations. Sollich writes, in a note distributed to the press, of Sachs's “aggressive conservatism” in Act III and, in the official programme book, of the “sinister content” of his final peroration on German art. But what is aggressive and sinister about a defence of German art from foreign influence? His speech is essentially aimed at Italian opera and is a warning against princes who don't speak the same language as their people. To suggest anything else is as much of a distortion of Wagner's text as the Third Reich's misappropriation of Wagner's works for propaganda purposes.”
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Matthias Spohr, who has investigated Wagner's relationship to popular theater forms, has shown that Wagner was particularly influenced by the melodrama as developed in England and especially France. According to Spohr, the melodrama has a high degree of medially fixed expression especially as concerns gesture.6 Similar statements can be made about French grand opera of the time (approximately 1800-1830). The opera scores of Gaspare Spontini, richly annotated with stage and expressive directions for singers, reveal a close relationship of gestures (in the broadest sense of the word) to music, similar to that found in the melodramas.
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By 1866, Wagner's enemies were very different from those of 1834. If, as the quote suggests, he included them in the opera, then the simple summary will not do. His opera of Renaissance Nuremberg would have to have concealed allusions to modern Germany.
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As both Katharina & Nike Wagner have made it clear that they believe there must be a Renewal in the Festival—although they may not both have the same kind of change in mind—Bayreuth needs to be developed as an International Opera-Festival City. This is something Gerard Mortier tried to set in motion in Salzburg, which is ... ideally suited to such a Cultural-Development…
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Wagner was led to his theory of unending melody by his limited capacity for the invention of finite, that is of real, melodies. His weakness in melodic creation has struck all impartial musicians. In youth his power in this direction was more abundant, and he succeeded in creating some superb melodies (in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Fliegender Holländer). With increasing age this power became more and more impoverished, and in proportion as the torrent of melodic invention dried up in him, he accentuated his theory of unending melody with ever more obstinacy and asperity. Always there reappears the well-known device of concocting a theory a posteriori as a plausible ground for, and palliation of, what is done through unconscious organic necessity. Wagner was incapable of distinguishing the individual personages of his operas by a purely musical characterization, and therefore he invented the leit-motif.
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