The opportunity
I've been a little bit quiet of late, but I have an excellent excuse. The Proms are in full swing again and this year - being his 200th birthday - it's a Wagner extravaganza, featuring no less than SEVEN of his operas sung in full. Five of them were all performed in week 2 of the festival, which meant that if you bought a weekly Promming Pass - a new innovation for 2013 - you could go to them all for a total of £32.50. (Just let the brilliance of the Proms sink in for a moment - remember how much it often costs to buy a single gig ticket these days - then compare and contrast.) And the real headline news was that four of these evenings would be a complete performance of the Ring Cycle by the Berlin Staatskapelle, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and sung by an extraordinary gathering of stellar soloists. So much has been written about Wagner, the Ring operas, and even these performances (which the papers, of course, reviewed as they went along). In particular, Radio 3's Sara Mohr-Pietsch - new to the Ring at the start of the week - kept a brilliantly written online diary of the experience for the Guardian and I really recommend you read it. Her reactions are clearly near-instant but still full of wit and insight. The first post is here and then you can just follow the links on the right of the article for her day-by-day account. For now, though: bit of context: the operas are, in sequence, 'Das Rheingold' ('The Rhine Gold'), 'Die Walkure' ('The Valkyrie'), 'Siegfried' (er, 'Siegfried') and 'Gotterdammerung' ('Twilight of the Gods'). Set in a fantasy universe - with links to Norse mythology - overall they chart the story of how a cursed ring comes into the possession of a sequence of giants, elves, divine and human beings until events escalate to the destruction of the gods themselves. Wagner originally planned to write about the death of the hero Siegfried (just the latest in a long line of murderous tragedies) and the resulting self-sacrifice of his lover Brunnhilde, who rides into the funeral pyre while wearing the ring. In this way, she ends the curse and ignites the fire that consumes the gods inside their castle, Valhalla. In the process, however, the composer (who wrote all his own words as well - very unusual) kept working in the earlier elements of the story until he had four operas' worth of material. Also - Wagner didn't really write short stuff. He arranged them into a 'prologue' evening - that's 'Das Rheingold', always performed without an interval, despite being a mere 2.5 hours long - and three 'days', with the other operas clocking in at three to four hours apiece. Promming, even on a season ticket, means standing - which meant that Mrs Specs decided the whole enterprise was 'insane' and went off to Scotland for the week as if to underline this assessment. So, ready your applause for regular returning pal and classical guru David, who went through this transforming experience with me until we descended from the gallery, changed men, blood brothers, some 16 hours of opera later. Appropriately enough for a drama involving rings and fire, the circular Royal Albert Hall was more or less our home for what must've been one of the hottest weeks of the year. The Hall is beautiful but always that bit too warm. It's probably the UK's largest and most elegant steamer, gently cooking us until done (in). Nonetheless, who are we to complain, watching an orchestra in full dress perform such sublime music for hours on end - which did its job, making us forget about the heat - and our feet - for every second they were playing. I can't really talk about the Ring 'in full' - there is so much to think, say and feel - so I'll focus on some things that seem to me, at the end of the week, to be really important.
The problem
It seems a shame to deal with the 'negative' stuff first, but equally it feels somehow irresponsible to leave it out. Some people have read about the Ring Cycle - or about Wagner in general - and won't go near him. Sometimes this is simply due to the idea of listening to four-hour operas (fair point) but the major hurdle with Wagner is the 'Being A Complete Git' issue. It's not just speculation, sadly - his most notorious 'failing' is his anti-Semitism, expressed in a tract against 'Jewishness in Music' - and he was Hitler's favourite composer. This has led to some fairly extreme claims (I've read a summary by the expert Michael Tanner in his 'Pocket Guide to Wagner', which gives fairly short shrift to commentators who have tried to calibrate Wagner's direct influence - if any - on the appalling events of the Second World War) - and whether you're inclined to go fully along with them or not, it's hard not to conclude that Wagner's personal reputation is beyond rescue.
Not his artistic one, though. To begin with, I do fear that you risk hypocrisy if you try and only experience art made by 'nice people'. (It reminds me of efforts by some of my peers in my churchgoing teens, who - fearful of Satanic influences in rock - tried to listen only to Christian bands. Fast track to purgatory!) I genuinely believe that if everyone emptied their bookshelves, CD racks or walls of art created by anyone with even vaguely sexist, racist, homophobic or violent tendencies, we'd be surprised at how little we were left with. Separating the art from the artist is not always a justification tactic, or a cop-out. As 'culture vultures', we teach ourselves to do this willingly, when it suits us. If you admire Caravaggio or Gesualdo, you get past the fact they killed people. The example I've often heard cited along these lines is 'The Merchant of Venice', still performed and loved worldwide. We 'accept' - or perhaps 'overlook' would be a better word - the anti-Semitism, surely because Shakespeare is so good (we haven't really done the same for Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta').
And that's an example where the racism made its way into the work. Daniel Barenboim himself has said that the Ring does not deal with anti-Semitism, and I would agree. Wagner does employ plenty of 'fantasy shorthand' (people fall in love within 20 seconds of meeting, and conveniently recount everything that's just happened to them just in case any listeners went to the loo during the last opera) but he does not rely on convenient character stereotypes or 'race hate' - that is, ascribing negative traits to entire ethnic groups to stand for real-life prejudices. Everyone has mixed motives and wants to use the unlimited potential of the Ring's magic for their own purposes: power, greed, vengeance, desire, or a mix of them all. (I'll come back to this complexity below.) So, to rush into the briefest of conclusions: please don't be put off by Wagner's own character. If the music intrigues you, press on.
(Second part of the Specs 'Proms Ring Cycle' blog post)
Barenboim
This man is now one of my own heroes. He has an extraordinarily dynamic conducting style - he moves around on the podium, stepping forward and almost launching himself off it one minute, then retreating back to lean on its rails the next. Clearly, dictating the pace is one aspect of what he's doing - but he's directing the action as well. So fluid are his movements that you can see him point with the baton at the back line of the orchestra, say, and then jab his elbow towards one of the singers to bring them in, too. His seemingly spontaneous hand signals and expressions (although I wonder if this is actually long established code between maestro and players) inspire the Staatskapelle to different levels of volume and power as well as speed.
Barenboim's empathy with both orchestra and singers allowed for some superb stagecraft - which got me thinking about the whole business of managing the performance. With full-blown opera productions, the audience primarily sees the singers acting on stage sets. However, this being the Proms, the performances were 'semi-staged' - or more accurately, a concert performance. So, the singers (who I believe are pretty much all current 'Wagner performers') acted their roles properly and convincingly, but sharing the stage with the orchestra. And as a result, they could interact. I think the stage director, Justin Way, must take the credit for this, with Barenboim a fully collaborative co-conspirator. In arguably the most difficult, serious instalment, 'Siegfried', we were treated to some light relief as the hero bantered with the French horn soloist playing his theme.
However, at other times, the singers' engagement with Barenboim in particular was incredibly powerful. Staying with 'Siegfried', the hero handed the conductor his jacket when about to take on a particularly strenuous task, and Barenboim hooked it over his podium rail, without a pause in his direction of the orchestra. Likewise, other characters seemed to draw strength from Barenboim's platform at times when they most needed energy or succour: Wotan leaning on the rail then sinking wearily to actually sit on the podium in 'Die Walkure' (one of the entire week's stand-out performances by Bryn Terfel), or even 'Gotterdammerung' villain Hagen (the brilliant Mikhail Petrenko, prowling the stage in malevolent reptile mode) steeling himself for the next phase of his terrible plan. This opportunity to unite singers and orchestra in front of the audience - only possible because of the artificial circumstances of playing an opera as if it's a concert - is there any better way of expressing the mutual support between the two?
(Third part of the Specs 'Proms Ring Cycle' blog post)
Dawn of a new opera
I like to think that whatever his rotten prejudices, it's fairly clear that Wagner wasn't trying to write operas to express anti-Semitic hatred or promote racial purity. I think you'd struggle to get any kind of 'design for life' out of Wagner at all. It just doesn't work. For example, Siegfried is designed to be an ideal of a hero - except that he's the product of incest, and more to the point, for a lot of the time, he's a pain in the arse. He's some distance from perfection. Wotan, ruler of the gods, is actually something of a bungler, prone to very human failings and only regaining dignity when he accepts (and seemingly welcomes) the end of the gods - and disappears from the cycle before the final opera opens. He's about the worst advert for elitism or the 'superman' you can possibly imagine. It appears that one of the reasons Hitler really loved Wagner is the epic grandeur - this possibility of a German Opera in the nationalist sense. But ideologically, it just seems that Hitler didn't really understand what was going on in the Ring at all. One of the key themes is the utter uselessness of absolute power and the corruption and ruin it brings. H must've overlooked that bit.
It seems more likely to me that Wagner's main motivation was to come up with a new musical artform: the work is the end in itself. Again, it's a matter of record that he was aiming for this level of achievement - he constructed the purpose-built opera house at Bayreuth, and he seems to have had problems with the term 'opera' itself, preferring 'music drama' for the parts of the Ring cycle. Also, he shunned 'normal' opera's use of showstopping arias, and instead established a system of 'leitmotifs' - melodic signatures for characters, moods, scenes or even objects - that recur and intertwine so that you are constantly being made aware of links and half-remembered incidents that propel you through the cycle and heighten your awareness of what's going on. Sara Mohr-Pietsch is really good on this, analysing how this enhances the action for a first-time listener. Of course, Wagner's talent was such that when he did include a potential 'hit single', it would be an absolute masterpiece: the famous 'Ride of the Valkyries', or the 'Funeral March' for Siegfried - as performed by Barenboim and co, one of the most stirring and affecting parts of the whole experience. I don't mind saying: I had a 'moment'.
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I really want to thank David for his generosity, knowledge and above all great company through the hours of queuing, drinking (water mainly, although on one particular occasion, D attempted unsuccessfully to transfer a large quantity of Pimms directly to his bloodstream - we will never speak of it again), and fetching of ice creams and programmes. At one point, I was joking about 'queue etiquette' and how important it was to be careful about not encroaching on people's space at the gallery rail etc, lest we be thrown over. 'These things happen,' David muttered, darkly. This pic shows our special celebration t-shirt, worn to 'Gotterdammerung'. (Incidentally, apologies for lack of umlauts throughout the post. Couldn't get them to appear properly *shakes fist at sky*.)