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Wagner (Wagner, Siegfried - Composer)
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Wagner (Northeast Conference) , and more.
Wagner (Northeast Conference) , and more.
Canning continues: “…Katharina Wagner and Sollich's Mastersingers is all attention-seeking exaggeration and parodic distortion. They throw everything into the pot: a staged debate about modern art that has the would-be mastersinger Walther von Stolzing throwing paint around the masters' academy and drawing pudenda and breasts on Eva's frock; caricatures of the German masters, who sit disconsolately during the Act III prelude; the chorus emptying replicas of Warhol's Campbell's soup tin over the brawlers of the Midsummer Nightmare at the end of Act II. There are two stark-naked women and a man, and Walther's Prize Song climaxes in a game-show presentation of a huge cardboard cheque by television studio hostesses. The result is an unpalatable witch's brew: a mishmash of the styles of fashionable avant-garde German directors such as Peter Konwitschny and Christoph Schlingensief. If Katharina has inherited anything from her father, it is a knack for aping other directors' work.”
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Wagner was one of the most revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history. Starting under the influence of Weber and Meyerbeer, he gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a "complete work of art"), a fusion of music, poetry and painting. In his mature music dramas, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, he abolished the distinction between aria and recitative in favour of a seamless flow of "endless melody". He greatly increased the role and power of the orchestra, creating scores with a complex web of leitmotivs, recurring themes often associated with the characters and concepts of the drama; and he was prepared to violate accepted musical conventions, such as tonality, in his quest for greater expressivity. Wagner ... brought a new philosophical dimension to opera in his works, which were usually based on stories from Germanic or Arthurian legend. Finally, Wagner built his own opera house at Bayreuth, exclusively dedicated to performing his own works in the style he wanted.
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Actually, Katharina Wagner has her own Uncle Wieland’s ingenuity to thank for such an innovation during this scene. For the 400th Anniversary of William Shakespeare, he mounted a new Meistersinger production in a mock-up of Shakespeare’s Globe-Theatre—which looked rather like Medieval Nuremberg!
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Wagner has the good fortune of belonging to the class which Linné called Monœcia. He is both poet and musician, man and woman. But he can see no reason why poet and musician should not be two separate persons, whose co-operation would no doubt be facilitated by a certain superiority, in age or otherwise, on the part of the poet. Voltaire said, What is too absurd to be spoken is allowed to be sung. But Wagner would say, What is unworthy [65] of speech cannot be worth singing, and what is unfit for song ought not to be deemed worthy of poetic speech. In other words, he would say to the poet, Give up as unpoetical whatsoever cannot be fitly expressed in music; and he would say to the musician, Avoid all musical expressions which are not called for by the poet's intentions, as superfluous, meaningless, unintelligible, and offensive.
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Wagner ... liked secrets and codes in other media. Thus, when he came to design the crest for the title page of his autobiography, he went to some lengths to make sure it contained a vulture(!). This was because his stepfather, to whom he had been particularly attached, was called Geyer. The German for vulture is Geier. This thus shows two forms of code - the first a word play from Geyer to Geier, the second a transfer from the word Geier (= Vulture) to the picture of a vulture. Wagner was keen that the vulture should look like a vulture and not an eagle.
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Warner and Lazaridis have ingeniously avoided the clichés of staging the famously pompous Wagner "Wedding March." Instead, it begins forebodingly, with Ortrud and Telramund silhouetted against an immense revolving black cube. The cube disappears into the flies to reveal the central square. A Victorian chair and a chaise—earlier used by the villains—are the only wedding-chamber furnishings. No bed at all. A white square is surrounded by a moat of real water.
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Wagner (Wagner, Siegfried - Composer)