Why do people like wagner

And in fact the conductors who have had difficulties acoustically in the pit at Bayreuth have been conductors who have a very angular way of conducting. Wagner had a preoccupation with everything that was round, and I think this is part of his whole personality: he hated anything that was angular or clearly defined. The main difference between conducting in the pit at Bayreuth and at the State Opera pit in Berlin is that, at the State Opera, you have to start all the crescendos a little later than you would in an open pit, because otherwise you get too loud too soon; and you must come down with the diminuendos obviously a little quicker, and you cannot sustain loud chords in the brass as long as you can in Bayreuth.

Because, on the other hand, you get an orchestral presence; you get an active participation from the orchestra in an open pit, which you cannot get in Bayreuth.

In a work like Parsifal , it makes no difference. On the contrary: I think that anybody who conducts Parsifal and has not conducted it in Bayreuth has not conducted Parsifal. It was written for that acoustic, for that place, and it needs to be done there.

But even in The Ring, I think that you have to be very open and see that there are advantages and disadvantages in both. ES: Now to move from Bayreuth the place to Bayreuth, the idea, or the ideology. There is, as you said earlier, all the prose writing. And there is also the extremely problematic material of the dramas themselves. Obviously, sexuality is quite pronounced — and unprecedented before Wagner — in those works. Similarly, violence of one sort of another.

You are dealing with a composer who is unique in that way, and this is obviously one of the aspects of Wagner that is problematic. The other, of course, is the association of Wagner and Bayreuth with the Nazi period and the use made of Wagner during the Nazi period.

The thing that you can obviously inform us about and illuminate is: What is it like as a conductor to face all of these issues in the productions that you deal with? To what extent is there a kind of interplay or even an antagonism? ES : Within himself, absolutely. But the question is, given your background, what is it like to confront this — whether as somebody preparing or conducting a production or, as we are now, thinking about it? A few things have to be made clear.

First of all, there is Wagner the composer. Then there is Wagner the writer on artistic matters. And then there is Wagner the political writer — in this case, primarily the anti-Semitic political writer. These are four different aspects to his work. But before discussing them, I think it is worth examining the history of production in Bayreuth.

Bayreuth began, under Wagner, as a great experimental theater. The whole world attended the world premiere of The Ring in Wagner also had, for his time, absolutely the most revolutionary and progressive ideas. He was a man of such forceful talent that he also invented the notion of the covered pit, such as it was constructed in Bayreuth. The pit at Bayreuth has been accepted by all modern acousticians as absolutely perfect; not only that, but it is impossible to imitate — which shows you that his talents and his genius went far beyond composing music.

In , he died. As is often the case with great artists, they inspire either unrestrained adulation or uncontrolled hatred, and Wagner is a prime example of this. His widow, Cosima, and everybody who worked with him then, worked in an atmosphere of uncritical adulation and fought to preserve every little snippet of an idea that the master might have had. Which is the most un-Wagnerian thing you can do, because he was exactly the opposite of himself. He was a revolutionary; he rethought and redid and undid everything in order to create it anew.

Therefore, this whole fight to retain the theater at Bayreuth as it had been under Wagner, to my mind, made Bayreuth devoid of one of the most important characteristics of Wagner the artist.

Productions there stayed almost exactly the same, in fact, until the Second World War. Bayreuth was the most conservative, unthoughtful theater in the whole world. Busch then left Germany in protest with the rest of his family, conducted once, and never came again, because he found the whole atmosphere intolerable. Even Hans Meyer, the great Wagner theorist who was there as a young man, recalls it as being absolutely intolerable.

So that conservatism stuck in the interpretation of the works. In other words, it was not in the nature of the works but in their interpretation at Bayreuth. I think it is important to acknowledge that Bayreuth, from until the Second World War, was the most conservative, narrow-minded theater in the whole world.

And this is, of course, at the root of stage production and opera production. What really is expected? We have enough difficulty agreeing on what is literal musically when we have a written score in front of us, but what is literal in terms of staging? Wieland tried to make Bayreuth the most progressive place, in those terms, and he did. I came to Wagner relatively late — for me in any case. I started, as you know, very, very young, and I was playing professionally already at the age of seven, but the musical education that I got and the ambiente that I lived in revolved much more around piano, instrumental, symphonic, and chamber music.

I went to hear song recitals; I went to hear string quartets; and I went to hear symphony orchestras; I rarely went to the opera. When I was nine, my family and I moved to Israel. DB : I think Tristan. So I came to Wagner first of all from a purely musical and orchestral point of view. And I became fascinated with the way every element can really be examined individually, and with the whole idea of orchestration and of the weight and continuity of sound.

And I became very interested in Wagner through his writings about music, and conducting, etc. So this was the main thing that interested me first, and I did not occupy myself with the world of ideas at that stage. I must say, in those days I had no idea I would end up conducting operas. I was not even conducting the English Chamber Orchestra, let alone Bayreuth, so nothing was further from my mind.

And I approached Wagner from the works that were closer to me, and that had an influence on Wagner as a musician: Beethoven first of all, then of course Berlioz and Liszt. And in a way, Bruckner, although he was not an influence on Wagner, but I was from early on attached to the music of Bruckner. And that goes as far as Debussy — post-Wagner, too. In other words, the coloristic element of Wagner is also very important. In any case, this is what really fascinated me in his work and in his writings about music.

Zubin Mehta, musical director of the Israeli Philharmonic, has tried on four occasions to programme Wagner but has always been dissuaded by the force of public anger. The musical director of New Israeli Opera, Asher Fisch, has made no secret of the fact that he'd like to hear Wagner performed. We have regular relations between our governments and armies, but we seek to ban Wagner. Why do we do so? Because there is no money tied up in culturally elite activities like music. No one suffers financially if we refuse to play Wagner or Beethoven.

In Israel we only reject Germany where it does not matter. Knapp is suspicious of these arguments. But how can a chord or sequence of chords be anti-semitic? By examining such bodily images as the elevated, nasal voice, the 'foetor judaicus' Jewish stench , the hobbling gait, the ashen skin colour, and deviant sexuality associated with Jews in the 19th century, it's become clear to me that the images of Alberich, Mime, and Hagen [in the Ring cycle], Beckmesser [in Die Meistersinger], and Klingsor [in Parsifal], were drawn from stock anti-semitic cliches of Wagner's time.

Surprisingly, though, Weiner refuses to write off what Wagner does with them. There are of course are those who refuse to accept that Wagner was anti-semitic at all - but such an argument carries no serious weight today. In the view of John Deathridge, professor of music at King's College, London, both Wagner's defenders and detractors are missing the point.

My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds. Today, as Barenboim knows all too well, any attempt by a composer to perform Wagner in Israel invites outrage. In , his considered decision to offer a piece of Wagner as an encore led to widespread condemnation — particularly regrettable, he says, because the audience had been asked beforehand, during a measured minute discussion, if they would like to hear it.

Those who did not were invited freely to leave; they were less than five per cent of the audience. The Wagner issue is particularly nettlesome for many listeners because invariably the music itself engenders precisely the opposite feelings.

For overwhelming emotion, love, passion and humanity there is little comparable to Wagner. It is precisely the sensation caused by an only partial resolution, though, that allows Wagner to create more and more ambiguity and more and more tension as this process continues; each unresolved chord is a new beginning. As the birthday parties commence this month, expect the ambiguities and the tensions to rumble on.

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