When i was in high school, one of my best friends decided he needed to know what all the fuss about Wagner was about, so he bought the complete Ring cycle and began listening to it. After several weeks of this, he told me one day “People talk about how complex this work is, but really, it’s just smarmy.” i continue to think that’s about as good a summation of Wagner’s output as any more detailed account i’ve encountered.

All my students know that i find Wagner the man and his music distasteful. Hate implies more energy than i actually put toward him…i’m more likely to roll my eyes and shake my head when someone starts to wax enthusiastic about Wagner. i nod politely when someone starts to describe their ecstatic experience of some Wagner opera…like listening to someone describe their LSD trip, i’m sure it must have been wonderful for them, but it’s nothing i can possibly share.

When i was first getting into so-called Classical music, i gravitated to the extremes: i loved Medieval music and contemporary music. Gradually, i learned to like Renaissance and Baroque music (as i’ve said elsewhere, Bach took me awhile to warm up to). i also fell in love with Mahler, as a kind of pre-contemporary composer. But for a long time, the 18th and 19th century left me cold. Wagner, who spans much of the 19th century, was right in the middle of the music i didn’t care for at all.

On the other hand, i was interested in the concept of the arts being merged with each other. Scriabin’s use of the “color organ” for example, or works like Schoenberg’s Erwartung or Die Glückliche Hand.  The more i read, the more it became clear that Wagner had been an important influence on many composers and artists i admired, and i wondered if i needed to shake off my initial aversion and give him a second chance. So i got a book of his essays, a group of pieces he wrote during his exile in Switzerland and sometimes called the Zurich Essays as a result.  These included an essay called “Music of the Future,” which i found rather intriguing, if rather monomaniacal. i read about his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which was indeed the idea i was most interested in, and it was worthwhile to track this notion to its source.

However, also among these essays was something called “The Jewish Problem in Music,” where Wagner laid out the notion that the Jews, as rootless “metropolitans” with no real culture of their own (just lots of money and power) had systematically “weakened” and “ennervated” the strength of German music. Huh? The work was so blatantly an Anti-semitic screed, badly argued and with examples that were clearly being skewed to an oblique angle to make the points involved, that the entire thing struck me as laughable. Particularly up for abuse were the composer Meyerbeer (who had been, at one time, Wagner’s “mentor” and entry into the world of grand opera - talk about biting the hand that feeds you) and Felix Mendelssohn, a composer i was actually rather fond of, and whose music struck me as being better-crafted and much less heavy-handed than Wagner’s. The more i read, the more i discovered that this ugly little essay had been hugely influential in the 19th century. it had certainly been read by a young Adolf Hitler, who worshipped Wagner. Moreover, it seemed that Wagner’s operas, in light of this essay, could be read as Anti-semitic, in terms of characters and plots (especially parts of the Ring and Parsifal). So Wagner the self-centered egotist turned into Wagner the flaming jerk in my perception of him. i can’t say that perception has changed much over time.

Oh, i’ve given him a number of chances. i’ve sat through several iterations of the Ring, trying to find the “genius” in it, and all i manage to find is the smarm and the out-of-control egotism. i’ll grant him some pretty good tunes in Die Meistersinger, but not 5 hours worth of them. (“Brevity is the soul of wit,” and Wagner’s comic opera is 5 hours long?) Parsifal may contain some very beautiful music, but the plot is hideously misogynistic and Anti-semitic, and again, there’s 5 hours of it. At the moment, about the only Wagner that doesn’t send me racing to turn off the radio is the so-called Forest Murmurs from Siegfried, and the Siegfried idyll. Those are both kind of lovely, and relatively brief. i’m good with those. The rest of it can be shovelled into the dustbin of history as quickly as possible. The music of the future is really the music of the unpleasant past, and ought to be erased from our collective ears as soon as possible.

Wagner´s Ring part3 (by yvonnedesire)

Wagner´s Ring part2 (by yvonnedesire)

it’s the bicentennial of Richard Wagner’s birth. this seems the best response to that occasion…

Wagner´s Ring part1 (by yvonnedesire)

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented an all-Britten program in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what Anthony Tommasini had to say in the New York Times about the same program when it happened a couple of days later in New York.

Yesterday was Erik Satie’s birthday, and today i started thinking about his relationship to Claude Debussy. They’re roughly contemporary: Debussy was born in 1862, and Satie in 1866. They’re both Earth signs: Debussy was a Virgo, Satie a Taurus. And they composed roughly an equivalent amount of piano music (in terms of the number of CDs it takes to record it anyway).  They were friends, after a fashion, though it’s clear that Debussy found Satie a bit frivolous, and Satie found Debussy a bit pretentious. As evidence of this i cite two well-known anecdotes: After considering some of Satie’s music, Debussy told him the work was lacking in form. Satie responded with a work called Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear. Later, when Debussy’s symphonic work La Mer was presented in Paris, Satie was there. in reponse to the first movement, which is called “From Dawn ‘til Noon on the Sea,” Satie said he especially liked the part at quarter to eleven. in many ways, i think that the nonsensical performance instructions in Satie’s music (“This is delicious: light as an egg!” or “Don’t go too far!”) are all meant as a commentary on Debussy’s tendency to give rather poetic (rather than practical) comments in his scores. (in the Prelude “Footprints in the snow,” Debussy notes “Like a sad and frozen landscape” rather than “slowly” or “sadly” or “coldly” or any other more tangible instruction.)

Please don’t ask me which one is the “greater” composer. i hear echoes of them both throughout the 20th century. There are works by Bartok, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and George Crumb that are unimaginable without Debussy’s influence. But Satie also powerfully influenced composers like Poulenc and Milhaud, and i hear echoes of his work in Shostakovich, as well as in the work of conceptualists like Cage and Minimalists like Peter Garland. Forgive me for being unable to choose between them, for i love Debussy’s sensuous poetry as much as i love Satie’s tenderness and sense of humor.  Dick Higgins believed it was good to begin each day by playing some Satie at the piano, the way many people claim one should begin the day with Bach. i’ll take Satie over Bach any day, and you can take your “Greatness” discussion and shove it.

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
    To gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Besides ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

Lion (2013) photo from Fiesole, italy (2011), on indian paper

Skeezer (2013) from the series Body Doubles.

plaster problem…april 2013