Patrick Bade
Richard Wagner: Genius and Monster

Patrick Bade - Richard Wagner: Genius or Monster

- So I’ll get started on the terrible Wagner. He is probably the most, no, certainly the most controversial musician in history, and probably the most controversial artist of any kind. And much of that has to do, of course, with his association in people’s minds with Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Hitler notoriously said, “Anybody who wants to understand the Third Reich needs to know Wagner first of all,” and a lot of people have taken that very literally. I will be discussing that in this lecture and in my following one about by Bayreuth. But I’d like to start off by dispelling two myths straightaway. First of all, Hitler never met Wagner. Wagner died in 1883, and Hitler was born in 1889. And the other myth that I would like to dispel is that Wagner’s music was played in concentration camps during the Second World War. This is absolutely not true. I don’t know where this idea comes from. I’ve lost count the number of times people have said to me, “Oh, I don’t listen to Wagner because his music was played in concentration camps.” There’s no way that the Nazis would have allowed Jewish musicians to play Wagner in concentration camps. And I’ve talked about this a number of times with the one person in the world today who really knows, and that is Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was in the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz. And she’s absolutely adamant that Wagner was never played by the women’s orchestra, or indeed any orchestra in Auschwitz during the Second World War. Wagner’s controversial reputation goes back much, long, long before that, as early as the 1840s and ‘50s. Charles Baudelaire, the great French romantic poet, who you see on the left-hand side, who was one of Wagner’s first supporters, was the first person to describe the narcotic effect of Wagner’s music.

It’s something that at various times I’ve felt very, very strongly myself, and I can still feel it, even though I don’t listen to Wagner as much as I used to. But I can accidentally hear Wagner on the radio, and it really is like some kind of narcotic shot in the arm. On the right-hand side, another great Wagnerian, George Bernard Shaw, who described Wagner’s music as “the brandy of the damned.” And someone else said, “Oh, listening to Wagner, it’s like being in love without the need for another person,” which I think is a slightly sinister idea, actually. And so all his ideas and his music were extremely disputed. In 1861, the premier of “Tannhauser” in Paris caused a riot. Wagner became even more controversial in France, not just for aesthetic reasons, but for political reasons in 1870, when he wrote a very gloating article in the press about the French defeat by the Prussians. So he became a real hate figure in France in the 1870s and '80s. And what you see here is the so-called Battle of Lohengrin in 1887, when an attempt was made to premiere his opera “Lohengrin”, and it actually caused serious street battles, with the Army having to be called out. And that was the case for a number of years when Wagner’s music was performed in Paris. Now, a few years ago, when the Royal Opera House in London staged the new production of “The Ring Cycle”, they put on an event to thank the sponsors who paid for it, and the main speaker was Michael Portillo. But they asked me to be the warm act, warmup act for that occasion. I knew Michael Portillo’s a huge Wagner enthusiast, and that he was going to talk about his love of Wagner.

So I thought they don’t want another person talking about their love of Wagner. So, slightly provocatively, I suppose, my talk, my warmup talk for Michael Portillo was titled “Five Reasons to Hate Wagner”. And the last reason I gave, which, I mean, the whole thing was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and Michael Portillo was actually very, he was a good sport, because I teased him. I said that I thought that the notorious speech of Han Sachs at the end of “Meistersinger” was really like a Tory Party Brexit speech, and he laughed, he thought that was funny. But my last reason, and it had a grain of truth in it, I think, for hating Wagner was that he ruined the art of singing. Wagner makes such impossible demands upon the human voice that I think Wagner is certainly responsible for the wreck of many careers and many voices over the years. And audiences will put up with a level of bad singing, wobble, shriek, in Wagner that they would never accept in Verdi or Puccini. So what Covent Garden hadn’t told me on this occasion was that all the singers in the cast of that “Ring” were invited in the audience. I only realised it, actually, when Simon O'Neill, excellent, excellent heldentenor, actually, I was mocking heldentenors and saying what a dreadful noise they mostly make, and he laughed so much, he almost fell off his chair. But at the end, the Wagnerian mezzo, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, who you see here, who’s a very formidable woman, I think she’s slightly taller than I am, and a big woman, and she was not amused.

And she came up to me at the end of my talk, and she put her face right into my face and she said, “I really want to punch you for what you just said about Wagner.” It was quite a scary moment. This was another Wagnerian encounter I had, oh, many years before. So this must have been, I think, in the 1980s. And I was on a lecture tour of Switzerland, on behalf of Christie’s, and I went to Tribschen, the house where Wagner composed “Tristan and Isolde”. And it was more or less empty, actually, but there were two elderly ladies who were talking in German. They were actually talking about Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister of England at the time, and they were dissing her. So, of course, I enthusiastically joined in that conversation, and I got talking with the lady you see here. And at one point in the talk, she turned sideways in front of the portrait of Wagner, the profile portrait of Wagner on the wall. And I thought, “Oh my God, it’s Wagner’s profile.” So I said to her, . And she smiled mysteriously. “Are you related to Wagner?” She didn’t say yes or no. And we actually talked for hours, and she told me various things about her life. And eventually I sussed out who she was. She was the black sheep of the Wagner family, well, from the Wagnerian point of view. This is Friedelind Wagner, incredibly brave and extraordinary woman, actually. At the age of 17, she broke with her family and she denounced Hitler. Her mother, Winifred Wagner, came to her in Italy to persuade her to go back to the family. And she threatened her that if she didn’t, that she would be assassinated. But she was not to be cowed, and she continued her denunciations of Hitler and the Nazis. And she, thanks to Toscanini, she was able to escape to the United States.

And she was actually quite important as somebody who had intimate knowledge of Hitler as a man. She was able to give quite valuable information to the Americans once they entered the war. A very remarkable woman. And a great friend, Ursula Jones, who might be listening to this lecture, she’ll probably tell me at the end, her father was a lawyer in Switzerland who actually had Friedelind arrested, must have been just after the war, for the purloining of someone’s jewels. So she was definitely in the family tradition, from that point of view. Now, of course, the big question these days is Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Now, there’s no doubt that he was anti-Semitic. It’s there in black and white, in his writings, his published writings and his private correspondence. Where the debate lies is to what extent that anti-Semitism permeates the operas themselves. And the three operas that come into question for this are “Die Meistersinger”, “The Ring”, and “Parsifal”. I’m actually not going to go into this in depth in this talk, but it’s a huge subject in itself. If you ever get a chance to hear Margaret Brearley, she’s very interesting, she has very cogent arguments about this. Whenever I hear her, I’m always convinced by her, rather against my will. And she’s always extremely informed and very interesting on this subject. So Wagner’s, his anti-Semitism, of course, is well-documented in his notorious essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik”, “Jewishness in Music”, which was published first in 1850, and then in an extended and even more virulent form in 1869. It’s one of the things that actually caused a rift between him and his great patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

It was thanks to Ludwig, of course, that Wagner was saved from penury. that Bayreuth was built and that “The Ring Cycle” was staged. It was all thanks to the financial support of Ludwig, who actually really fell in, fell in love with Wagner. Really, his correspondence with Wagner is something like a love correspondence, but it turns very sour on the subject of anti-Semitism. And, particularly when it came to the premiere of “Parsifal” in 1881, Wagner was completely dependent on Ludwig for his orchestra, well, and for funding the whole thing, of course. And Ludwig’s orchestra, his Munich orchestra, the chief conductor was Hermann Levi, who was Jewish. And initially Wagner said, “There’s no way I’m having my sacred music drama conducted by a Jew.” And Ludwig was very strict with him. He said, “No Hermann Levi, no orchestra. I won’t give you the orchestra without my Jewish conductor.” And Wagner wrote a torrid, a really abusive letter, saying that the Jews were behind everything bad in the world, and so on and so on and so on. And Ludwig wrote a really amazing reply, actually, for a king, for a royal of that period. He said, he preached the idea of the brotherhood of man in his letter. And in this letter he says, “There is , nothing more repulsive than prejudice against somebody on the grounds of their religion.” So, as I said, I’m not going to go very, in any depth into this, the question of anti-Semitism into the operas. It’s really another subject, and it’s actually not something that I would personally really want to talk to you about.

I’d rather somebody else did that. What I will say is that in the early performances of “The Ring Cycle” it’s very clear from the way that they were staged, and also from illustrations of “The Ring Cycle”, early illustrations like the Arthur Rackham on the right-hand side, that the characters of Alberich and Mime are seen as Jewish stereotypes, from, you know, the prosthetic nose on the character, that Alberich is wearing on the left-hand side, and the exaggerated nose and the kind of cringing body language of Mime on the right-hand side. These are anti-Semitic stereotypes of the period. Wagner himself, as I said, he clearly was anti-Semitic, whether he would have really gone along with the ideas of Nazis, and the sort of terrible crimes of the Nazi regime, is another matter. Friedelind was convinced that he wouldn’t, and that he would’ve been appalled by the Nazi regime. And there are plenty of examples of people who were anti-Semitic in the lead up to the Nazi regime who eventually did not go along with Nazi crimes and who denounced them. So we just don’t know. We can’t know what Wagner would’ve done under the circumstances. The link between Wagner and Hitler is really through his widow, Cosima, who you can see, the woman, she’s the woman in black here, on the picture on the right-hand side of Bayreuth, accompanied by her son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

And he was an absolutely virulent, poisonous racial theorist. And he is really, if you want to make a link between Wagner’s thinking and Hitler’s, this guy is the key figure. Now, this is an illustration, as you can see, of French and German Wagnerians, and how Wagner, in the decades after his death, in the 1880s and the '90s, became a cult figure. He was sort of worshipped , really, as some kind of god. And you pick this up in the press of the time, in journals and diaries and letters of the period. On the screen here we have the composer, Zemlinsky, and the beautiful Alma Mahler. He was one of her early, perhaps her first victim, you could say. And in her diary, she describes the occasion that they first met, which would’ve been in around 1900 or just before. And in her diary entry, she describes him as being dreadfully ugly, but the conversation opened when he asked her, “What do you think of Wagner?” “The greatest genius who ever lived,” I replied casually. That so delighted him that he became truly transformed in her eyes, almost handsome. He gave her composition lessons. And again, in her diary later on, she describes how during one of the lessons, “He started to play 'Tristan and Isolde’ on the piano for me. I leaned on the piano, my knees buckled, we sank into each other’s arms.” So, actually, Tristan became Alma’s weapon of choice when she wanted to seduce somebody. And several years later, after the death of Mahler, she was, this is I think around 1912, just before the First World War, she was at a dinner party with her parents.

And the promising young artist, handsome young artist, Oskar Kokoschka, was at the dinner table. She spotted him across the table and thought, “Mm, nice, I’ll have some of that.” And he described how, “After dinner, she took me by the arm and led me into another room, where she sat down at the piano and she played Tristan to me.” So he knew what she was after when she did that. So, in so many autobiographies and memoirs of the period, end of 19th, beginning of the 20th century, the discovery of Wagner’s music is described really as some kind of rite of passage. It’s almost like discovering sex, you could say. This is Alexander Benois, who describes this in his memoirs. Of course, Diaghilev was a huge, huge Wagnerian. In fact, the whole inspiration of the Ballets Russes as a , fusion of music, theatre, dance, visual arts, this also goes very much back to Wagner. Two young men from very different backgrounds who describe their first encounter with Wagner in very similar terms. So there is Bruno Walter, from a Viennese Jewish background. When he first heard “Tristan”, I mean, he was so blown away by it he couldn’t sleep. He was wandering the streets. And Joseph Goebbels, on the right-hand side, the greatest monster, really, of the Nazi regime, describing hearing Wagner as a boy in very, very much the same terms.

Wagner’s influence on the music of the beginning of the 20th century is all-pervasive. Here are the, perhaps the three greatest composers of the period, Richard Strauss on the left, Gustav Mahler in the middle, and Claude Debussy on the right-hand side. They’re all very different, but in each case their music would be unimaginable without Wagner. Wagner was the great enabler of all three. Each sprung, came out of Wagner, so to speak, although they all went in rather different directions. And it’s not just the musicians. What is so special about Wagner that makes him, in a way, the most influential figure altogether of early modernism is the way his ideas permeate early modern culture. This is… Having a terrible senior moment. Kandinsky, of course. Kandinsky on the left-hand side, in Bavaria, who describes how it was his encounter with Wagner that decided him to become an artist. He was already having a very successful career as a lawyer. He was 30 before he became an artist. He went to the opera and he heard “Lohengrin”, and he was so blown away by the incredible beauty of the prelude to Act One of “Lohengrin”. He said that suddenly it was revealed to him what art could be and what art could do. Wagnerian influence particularly strong, I would say, in France, although it permeates the entire western world. Here is Baudelaire again, on the left-hand side. Mallarme, profoundly influenced by Wagner. And the top, an intellectual, a French intellectual called Teodor de Wyzewa. He founded a magazine in the 1880s called the “Revue Wagnerienne” that was the leading Wagnerian, leading avant garde arts magazine.

And it wasn’t just about music, it was discussing poetry, discussing painting, all forms of art, but everything seen in the light of Wagner’s ideas. This is the French writer Rolland Romain. And in his memoirs at the end of his life, he says, “Looking back,” he said, “it was extraordinary how, in the 1880s,” when he was young, “the French intelligentsia judged everything in the light of Bayreuth and Wagner’s ideas.” And literature too. Here are perhaps the three most important and influential modernist writers at the beginning of the 20th century, TS Eliot, Proust, James Joyce on the right-hand side. All three, their revolutionary ideas in literature, the formal innovations, all very, very much directly inspired by the ideas of Wagner. Also, psychoanalysis. Of course, “The Ring Cycle” is of course a gift for anybody interested in psychoanalysis. Freud and Jung, on the right-hand side, both very, very… Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, of course, named after a Wagnerian hero. In fact, Jewish intelligentsia, the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia, they embraced Wagner probably more than anybody else’s, to the point where, in Germany, if you were called Sigmund or Siegfried, it was immediately assumed that you must be Jewish. Now, if Wagner had died in 1848, he would still be considered a great composer for his three early mature operas, “Fliegende Hollander”, “Tannhauser”, and “Lohengrin”. These are very beautiful, full of wonderful music. But in formal terms, actually not so different from middle period operas of Verdi, or earlier romantic operas by Weber. It’s after 1848 that Wagner really develops his more original ideas for opera, and for the arts in general.

But I’m going to, my first musical excerpt for you is the opening of “Der Fliegende Hollander”, which dates from 1843, because this is the first time where you hear this incredible power and sweep of Wagner’s music that just takes your breath away. Now, when I first met Trudy Gold, it must be, oh, it’s over 30 years now, 30 years ago at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, it was actually, from the very first moment, an incredible meeting of minds. We just got on like a house on fire from the very first. But I remember in one of our first conversations, she repeated to me the Woody Allen bon mot, “Every time I hear Wagner, I want to invade Poland.” And initially, I was irritated by it, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought, “Ooh, no, there’s actually really something in it,” that Wagner, the music just fires you up in an extraordinary way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something bad that it would make you do, and you don’t necessarily have to invade Poland, but you feel like it makes you want to act, it makes you want to do something, to go out onto the streets, to build a barricade or whatever. And I think this sense of power and firing you up comes across very well in the overture to “Tannhauser”. Here is the big tune coming up. Obviously, Theodor Herzl, who’s a great Wagnerian, felt that as well, because that music was chosen to open the first Zionist Conference as music that would fire people up to perform great deeds.

But of the three early operas, the one that I personally like the best and find most beautiful is “Lohengrin”. And I just told you about Kandinsky’s reaction, particularly to the Prelude to Act One, which is painting colour, it’s painting in music. It starts with very ethereal high strings, and gradually the wind instruments are introduced, and you have these shifting sound colours. That’s the only way I can describe it. And so I’m going to play you the climax of the Prelude to “Lohengrin”. And as you can see, there is a painting by Kandinsky on the screen, with similarly gorgeous colours. As a young man, Wagner was very left wing. Of course, it’s a familiar trajectory, really, isn’t it, for most people, starting off as left wing firebrands and drifting to the right as you get older. And his journey was a particularly extreme one, I would say, from extreme left to extreme right in his old age. He was a participant in the 1848 revolution in Dresden. He could easily have been killed. And he was then under sentence of death. And he could have been captured, he could have been thrown into prison, or even executed, in which case, as I said, we’d have a very different idea of Wagner. So, 1848, he goes into exile in Switzerland and in Italy. And for six years, from 1848 till the autumn of 1853, he writes no music at all. He’s completely devoted to the written word, developing his theories about the nature and the purpose of art, and particularly the role of opera, in two great, highly, highly influential essays that are key works of early modern thinking.

“The Artwork of the Future”, “Kunstwerk der Zukunft”, and “Art and Revolution”, as you can see on the right-hand side. Now, at the same time, he was beginning to work on the greatest project of his life, which was “The Ring Cycle”. Altogether, it took him a quarter of a century between starting to work on it and the performance, the final performances at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. So he started by writing the text. And of course, he’s very exceptional amongst the great composers in writing his own texts. But so, after six years of developing these ideas and writing the texts, excuse me, he had to sit down and start composing. And this man of monstrous ego and self-confidence, unsurprisingly had creative block. He was in Italy at the time. And then in September, 1853, he was staying in a hotel in Spezia. And he came back to the hotel. In the hotel lobby, he fell into a trance, and he had the sensation of rushing water pouring through his brain, and he could hear the chord of E flat major. And he realised that the music had come out of his unconscious, and that it was writing itself. So this is how “The Ring Cycle” begins. It is one of the most extraordinary things you can hear in the opera house. It’s really, to be sitting there in the dark, and then you hear this kind of low rumble, like a hum, mm. And then this, over more than five minutes, you just have this one chord of E flat major, with different instruments coming in at different levels and building up it.

I just think what must the first audience… It’s still a truly, truly amazing experience. I mean, at the end of that five minutes, every fibre of your being is vibrating with this chord of E flat major. So it, nobody had done anything like that ever before. It must have been a shocking revelation to the first audience. I can’t play you the whole thing. And of course it’s a very different sensation hearing it over a computer, but here is the opening of “Das Rheingold”. No, it isn’t. Something’s gone wrong there. I can’t play it to you. Anyway, it’s probably just as well I can’t play it to you, because, really, you need to hear it in reality. Now, “The Ring Cycle” is the ultimate challenge in the opera house. It’s the ultimate challenge for the singers. Makes impossible demands on singers, as I’ve told you. It’s the ultimate accolade for a conductor to be successful in “The Ring Cycle”. It’s hugely challenging for the orchestra. It’s challenging for the audience. You’ve really got to prepare yourself. It’s 16 hours of music over four nights. And it’s also the ultimate challenge for an opera director and the scene designers. Wagner asked for all sorts of very difficult things. You can see the Rhinemaidens here in the original production and in a 1930s production. You’ve got to have Siegfried’s forge, you’ve got to have magic fire, you’ve got to have Valkyrie galloping through the sky. It’s just such a challenge to any opera director and designer. Here are the Valkyrie in a more modern production.

Got to have giants, and dwarfs, and rainbow bridges. So here are two different Bayreuth productions showing Brunnhilde’s rock, an early one, which is quite realistic, and a post-Second World War one. Here is Brunnhilde on her rock. You know, I think that’s a Met production recently. This is the 1976 centenary production of “Gotterdammerung”. I was lucky enough in 1989 to go to Bayreuth and see an entire “Ring Cycle”. That is me on the left, in front of the Bayreuth Opera House. And on the right-hand side you can see “Toscanini” in the pit of the Opera House. Now, Wagner was an innovator in so many ways. One of his innovations was to put the orchestra down into this pit so that they’re completely, you don’t, at Bayreuth, you can’t see anything of the orchestra. It doesn’t interfere with your vision of what’s going on with the stage. And the other great advantage of that is he’s using a very big orchestra, and making a very big, big sound. So putting the orchestra down into this pit helps the sound to blend, and it also, it’s very helpful to the singers. As I said, he makes such demands on the singers. Singers must love singing at Bayreuth, because their voices can sail over the orchestra pit much more easily. I remember, in that particular “Ring Cycle”, I was very disappointed when I realised that several members of the cast were English and from the English National Opera production, with which I was very familiar. I thought, “Oh, I’ve come all the way to Bayreuth, and I might as well have stayed in London.” John Tomlinson was singing Wotan, Linda Finnie was singing Fricka, Graham Clark was singing Mime, but boy, did they ever sound better.

They sounded like different singers, hearing them in the acoustic of Bayreuth. So what happens when you go to Bayreuth, of course, it’s the most difficult music festival in the world to get tickets for, but there is a tradition that the audience are summoned for the act that’s about to begin by members of the orchestra coming onto the balcony of the opera house and playing leitmotifs. Now, leitmotifs, this is a great Wagnerian innovation, and that is, these are fragments of melody that are associated with a person, a thing, an idea, or an emotion. And there are altogether about 90, 90-something leitmotifs in “The Ring Cycle”. It’s a system that seems to me to work better as it goes along. Sometimes in “Rheingold” or in “Die Walkure”, it seems to me the system is too obvious. You know, in Act One of “Die Walkure”, when the evil Hunding enters the stage, we immediately get his leitmotif. Yes, that’s Hunding. We know he’s there. But as “The Ring” develops, there are more and more of these leitmotifs, and they’re woven together with increasing richness and sophistication. So I’m going to play you an orchestral interlude, at least I hope it’s going to come up correctly, from the last act of Siegfried. So we’ve already got a huge accumulation of leitmotifs by this point in “The Ring Cycle”, which is the penultimate evening, and this piece of, short piece of music is famous, because it actually weaves together, I think it’s 12 different leitmotifs. So I’m going to, first of all, I’m going to play you some of these melodic fragments, leitmotifs, and then I’m going to play you the piece of music where they’re all woven together. So we start off with leitmotif Number 58, “Siegfried’s Horn Call”. Here’s the final thing, with all the motifs.

• Now, as I said, Wagner makes impossible demands on singers, in terms of volume and stamina. The roles of Brunnhilde, Isolde, Sigmund, Siegfried, they’re just superhuman in their demands. And often, because you’ve got to have such a big sound, you need a big body to make the big sound. So that is another bit of a problem, I would say. And nowadays, opera directors, they want their singers to look slim and sexy. So I’ve seen a number of Wagnerian productions in Germany where the singers looked okay, but they, you know, their voices were absolutely incapable of coping with the demands made on them. The ultimate demanding role, really, the demanding roles are Tristan and Siegfried. And here are two singers whose careers were ended prematurely by the impossible demands made on them. On the left is Jean de Reszke, who was, by universal acclaim, the world’s greatest tenor in the 1880s and the 1890s. And he was thought to be drop-dead sexy. He was the kind of Brad Pitt of the late 19th century. And everybody said to him, “Oh, Monsieur de Reszke, you are the world’s greatest tenor, therefore you must sing Siegfried and Tristan.” And he did, unfortunately, and he wrecked his voice within a year or so. On the right-hand side, an even more tragic case. This is Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who apparently had a magnificent, heroic voice. He was the first Tristan, and Wagner had him in mind to be the first Siegfried. He sang a handful of performances of Tristan in 1865, and it killed him. He literally, he just died more or less of exhaustion, raving of Wagner’s genius. Oh, this is a cartoon from “The New Yorker” of the director of the Met coming out in front of the curtain and saying, “Do we have a Siegfried in the house, ha, ha, ha,” as though that was very likely. There has really only ever been one tenor who met all the vocal demands of Siegfried and Tristan.

This is the great Danish tenor, Lauritz Melchior. Superhuman. When he was young, he was considered to be quite handsome. As you can see, he needed a bit of a help from a corset later on in his career. He sang hundreds and hundreds of Siegfrieds and Tristans, and the voice was just superhuman. I hope this is going to work for you. This is him singing Sigmund, and it’s from a live broadcast from the Met on the 6th December, 1941. So as he was singing this performance, of course, the Japanese bombers were setting out for Pearl Harbour,. But he was a singer with just superhuman stamina, and the top notes in that one of “Walkure”, because he was so famous and he was the boss, the conductors just had to fold their arms and wait for him to run out of breath on these top notes. So I do hope this is going to work for you. I’m so sorry. I’m not going to play that for you. Anyway. So what is “The Ring” about? There will be some people today who will tell you that it is really a kind of blueprint for the Nazi ideology. There have been Marxist interpretations of “The Ring”, as George Bernard Shaw’s “The Perfect Wagnerite”, is really a Marxist, I love this cover, don’t you, with Donald Trump as Siegfried. That’s a very clever idea that I’m sure somebody will put into action one of these days. There have been Freudian interpretations of “The Ring”.

There have been green interpretations of “The Ring”. Robert Donington, “The Ring and its Symbols”, is a Jungian interpretation. It works pretty well, actually. There’s certain things in “The Ring” that go really well into Jungian ideas, particularly when Siegfried, for instance, awakens Brunnhilde on her rock and proceeds to make love to her under the impression that she’s his mother. Oh, I dunno whether that’s Freudian or Jungian. It’s so complicated, “The Ring”. What is it about? I mean, I, you could say, if you really want to be simplistic, you could say that the ultimate theme of “The Ring” is that power corrupts and love redeems, which seems to me not to go with an interpretation of “The Ring” as being proto-Nazi. Some of you will be familiar with Anna Russell’s explanation of “The Ring”, which lasts 16 minutes, so you’ve got one minute per hour of “The Ring Cycle”, and it is hilariously funny. I’m not sure whether to recommend it to you or not. The trouble with Anna Russell is once you’ve heard it, there are certain things in “The Ring Cycle” you can never hear again without wanting to giggle. But there is, I’ve got a two-minute explanation of “The Ring Cycle” given over the radio waves by Leopold Stokowski. So let’s going to see if this works for you. Nope.

• [Leopold] Now we are–

• “Tristan and Isolde”. Wagner broke off from “The Ring Cycle” in the 1860s to write “Tristan” and “Die Meistersinger”. And “Tristan” had its premiere in 1865. And it’s rather, it’s taken to be, I suppose, a kind of standing, a starting point for modern music, rather as Manet. I mean, many French intellectuals saw a parallel between Manet, who’s considered to be the father of modern art. When I studied art at the Courtauld Institute, I studied early modern art, and my course began in 1863, because that was the year that Manet’s painting, “Le dejeuner sur l'herbe” was first exhibited. It was rejected from the official Salon and shown at the Salon des Refuses. And so, I mean, of course it’s very arbitrary to say modern art begins in 1863, but many university courses, that’s how it is. And for, I suppose, an equivalent course in the history of music, 1865, that’s two years later, the premier of “Tristan” is seen in the same kind of light, and particularly the opening bars of the opera, which were just unbelievably shocking when people first heard them. It begins with this yearning melody, and you go from one unresolved chord to another unresolved chord. And, in fact, you don’t get the resolution of that chord until the very final notes of the opera, about four-and-a-half hours later. So the audience is constantly, in a way, teased, tortured, in a way, by moving from these chromatic harmonies, moving from one unresolved chord to another. People fainted when they heard this in the 19th century. Let me see if I can get this to work for you. Obviously, the sound has completely gone.

I don’t know what’s wrong with my computer. Very sorry about that. This is Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld and his wife, Malvina, who, they were the first Tristan and Isolde. As I said, he died days after the premiere. She went mad. The assistant conductor committed suicide during the rehearsals. So “Tristan” has a reputation for being a very, very dangerous opera indeed. And let’s see if this one works. Oh, let me see. How strange that some work and some don’t. Anyway, here are two French composers who both, or, actually, no, Belgian on the right-hand side, who both went to Bayreuth to hear “Tristan”, Chabrier and Lekeu. Lekeu, a young man, he actually died soon afterwards. Obviously rather fragile. And he heard those chords, those opening chords of “Tristan”, and he went into a dead faint and had to be carried feet first out of the theatre, and never, and missed the rest of the performance. And Chabrier, who was already a middle-aged man, he heard that ♪ Da da da da ♪ and he started sobbing uncontrollably. And somebody sitting next to him said, “Monsieur, are you okay?” And he said, “You don’t understand. I’ve been waiting 10 years of my life to hear those notes played in the theatre.” But it didn’t stop him being quite naughty, actually. Despite being part of the great Wagner cult, he wrote a very jolly piece, rather in the manner of Offenbach, using themes from “Tristan and Isolde” for two pianos. And here it is. Debussy, greatest French composer of the period, had also, I would say, an ambivalent relationship with the music of Wagner.

He always referred to Wagner in his correspondence as “Old Klingsor”. And he said that when he was writing “Pelleas et Melisande” that he had to tear up whole pages of what he’d written, because he found bits of “Parsifal” were creeping into his score. And he wrote a sublimely blasphemous parody of the great “Tristan” chord, the opening, with the rather non-PC title, “The Golliwog’s Cakewalk”, where he literally turns the opening bars of “Tristan” into a cakewalk. And even more outrageous. ‘Cause Wagner had this, as I said, huge reputation at the turn of the century. But after the First World War, there was quite, there was a big anti-Wagner reaction, particularly in France, and amongst the composers known as Les Six. They rejected the pretentiousness, the pathos of Wagner, and they wanted something much more frivolous and lighthearted, and much more modern. And here, this is the composer, Clement Doucet. This time he’s turning the melodies, using the melodies of “Tristan and Isolde”, and turning him into a foxtrot. If I’ve got any total diehard Wagnerians amongst my listeners, you may need to take a pill after you listen to this, because it might give you a heart attack.

And it was used, again, very blasphemously, in one of the most notorious films of the 20th century, “Un Chien Andalu”, which was a silent movie. But in the first performance is Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, who created this film. Throughout the film, there was Bunuel, with the first audience in the cinema, Bunuel was sitting in the wings with a gramophone, and he was playing the “Liebestod” of “Tristan and Isolde”, which of course builds up to this incredible orgasmic climax. And every time it nearly got to the climax, he’d lift off the needle and he’d go back to the start. So the audience must have been going crazy at the end. And Bunuel later, it’s something I’d recommend to you, you can see on YouTube, is the final scene of Bunuel’s version of “Wuthering Heights”, where he again uses the “Liebestod” from “Tristan and Isolde” to extraordinary effect. And so I think I’m going to finish here, because I’ve run out of time. And I’m going to see what questions and comments you have.

Q&A and Comments:

Friedelind. Yes, she’s worthy of a biography. She was a very interesting woman. I had the best day with her. Sadly, I never met her again.

Q: So, “Did Ludwig provide the orchestra with Levi conducting?”

A: Yes, he did. He did. Well, I mean he, as I said, he wouldn’t give the orchestra unless Wagner used Levi. And in fact, Wagner sort of adopt, he came to like Levi, and respected him, and almost took a sort of fatherly interest in him.

Margaret Brearley, I’ve been trying to persuade her. She’s a very good friend, and somebody I admire hugely. And I’ve been trying to persuade her to do a talk for lockdown. Maybe she will one of these days.

Yes, it is true. Cosima was the daughter of Franz Liszt. And of course, and it’s even more ironic in that her mother, I think, was half-Jewish. So I think Cosima herself was quarter-Jewish.

Q: “What was the relationship, if any, of the mutual influence between Wagner and his exact contemp…?”

A: Oh, that’s a whole talk in itself that I’d love to do sometime. Verdi first heard Wagner in 1870 in Bologna. He heard a performance of “Lohengrin”, and he said, oh, his comment was, “Beautiful orchestral effects. Some lovely music, but very, very slow.” And I would go with that. I think Verdi was spot on. It’s an opera that seems to go in slow motion. Later, I mean, there’s some dispute how much Verde himself was influenced by Wagner. Possibly you can hear it in his last two operas, “Otello” and “Falstaff”. He greatly admired “Tristan”, and he, when Wagner died, he was very shocked, and described him as “the greatest composer.”

I showed a print of “Flying Dutchman” and spoke of “Tannhauser”, as you… I think, though, the print I showed is where I played at the… “The Dutchman”, I definitely played the overture to “Dutchman”. And I played both, of course, but with two different images. I think that was correct, what I played with the image. UK listeners, BBC iPlayer, last night’s “Tannhauser”.

Lise Davidsen, who’s being hailed as the new flagstaff, she is certainly an extraordinary vocal phenomenon. Well, Barry, it’s up to you, I think. You’re saying, “Can I hate Wagner as a Jew-hater, but enjoy his music?” I think you, you’re allowed to do what you feel comfortable with. I’d certainly, not going to… What I find quite funny was when I used to go to Covent Garden for Wagner performances, I would find many of my audience from the London Jewish Cultural Centre there, looking slightly embarrassed, slightly sheepish to be caught out. The strange thing is that Wagner has, there is a really, I know Trudy was talking about the unrequited love affair of Jews and German culture. And the relationship between Jews and Wagner is a very extreme case of that. When I was at the London Jewish Cultural Centre in 2013 for the centenary of Wagner, I was asked by the centre to do a series of 12 lectures, in fact, I got Margaret to do some of them, on Wagner. And I said, “Look, it’s also the bicentenary of Verdi. Aren’t you going to have something on Verdi?” And, actually, I said to them, “I refuse to do any lectures on Wagner unless you let me do some lectures on Verdi as well,” which they did.

Q: “How did Wagner’s Jew hatred manifest itself?”

A: Most clearly in his essay “Jewishness and Music.” That is in black and white, there’s no disputing it. And also, as I said, in his correspondence.

This is Joan, “I hate Wagner. I received 'The Ring Cycle’ for a wedding present, and I threw it out.” Yeah, that’s a very bizarre wedding present to give somebody, I would say.

Q: “Is there an excerpt, but with four or five bars, of the various,”

A: I’ve lost that again now. Wait. Sorry. It’s jumped. Something very funny with my computer tonight. Yes, there are, there is. I know of two, Herbert. I was going to play… One came out with the first HMV attempt to record “The Ring Cycle” in the late twenties, and my excerpts, which wouldn’t work for you, came from that. But also, when Decca brought out their “Ring”, they also brought out an LP, and you can, I think, get it on a CD, with all the themes of “The Ring” and explanations of them. “BBC Sounds is available outside the UK.” Thank you.

“Autocratic music takes control, doesn’t allow individual reflection.” I’m not quite sure what your, point you’re making there. Do you know, I’m, people say that. Did you actually see Lauritz Melchior? My feeling is that he is, of course, I only, I have a great many recordings of live performances, and what is very clear to me is that he could really act with the voice. It’s not just wonderful singing, he’s really in the part. But, of course, he didn’t necessarily look the part in the later part of his career.

This is Monique. “One never hears them, but there have to be at least a few arguments positing that Wagner’s reputation is overdone.” Yes, there are. And, of course, most famously is the Nietzsche essay, “Der Fall Wagner”, who really, Nietzsche attempted to puncture the great reputation of Wagner. So, and that’s a very readable thing. You can find that quite easily, I think.

No, well, I think, yes, I think that the only connection between “The Ring” and… Tolkien was, of course, a very keen Wagnerian, so I think he was influenced by Wagner.

“The Melchiors are most prominent Jewish family in Copenhagen.” You know, it’s very interesting, the discussion of whether Melchior was Jewish or not. I think he was. I mean, he continued to sing in Germany after the Nazis took power, for a while. But I think he, there was a dictionary of Jewish artists in Nazi Germany, in which he was included.

This is Sandy, who saw Anna Russell live. Yes, I know that’s, it is the problem with Anna Russell. She is so… Meyerbeer, yes, and that’s a whole talk in itself, well, ‘cause I did a talk on Meyerbeer recently. And Wagner’s debt to Meyerbeer, his incredible ingratitude to Meyerbeer, and the way he attacks Meyerbeer in the second edition of “Das Judenthum in der Musik”, there’s a lot to say about that.

Q: “The Israeli Philharmonic, do they play Wagner now?”

A: Somebody else can tell me that. I know that they couldn’t until very recently.

“Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson, has devoted his life to combating anti-Semitism.” Yes, he’s an interesting character. Trudy knows him quite well.

That’s not true, I’m sorry, Sandy. John Vickers sang Wagner all his life. I heard him sing Tristan on many occasions. In fact, he sang, that’s what he mainly sang, Wagner. The only role he refused to sing was Tannhauser. And that had nothing to do with Nazism or anti-Semitism. John Vickers was very, very Christian, and he didn’t agree with, he didn’t like the character of Tannhauser, for religious reasons.

This is Frank, “My professor once said, how, how could a whatever, like Wagner,” I can imagine what the word would be, “is an illustration of theocracy?” Hm, I’ll think about that. I’m not quite sure I understand it.

“Wagner’s piano accompanist.” Wagner had many connections with Jews. And I mentioned in particular, of course, Hermann Levi. I still, there were attempts, weren’t there. I mean, Zubin Mehta, and I think Barenboim made attempts to play Wagner with the Israeli Philharmonic, but it was extremely controversial. And I wouldn’t, I don’t think it’s, I think, to this day, it’s not actually part of their repertoire.

Well, thank you very much. And sorry about, I feel very disappointed not to have been able to play to you many of the excerpts I wanted to. And thank you for your patience. And I’m going to continue with Wagner, but looking particularly at the history of Bayreuth, on Wednesday.

Thank you. Bye-bye.