Patrick Bade
Introduction to Opera, Part 4: German Opera

Patrick Bade - Introduction to Opera, Part 4: German Opera

- So Patrick, whenever you’re ready, I’m going to just hand over to you.

• Right, thank you, Wendy.

• Thank you very much. Thanks.

• Well, I hope the sirens didn’t interfere too much with that very beautiful music. And today I’m really starting back to front the very end of the story, ‘cause that is an extract from the very last German opera to enter the standard repertoire. It’s an opera, which has a valedictory quality to it. It was the last opera of Richard Strauss, and he conceived it really as his testament to the world.

• Patrick, I’m sorry to interrupt, do you want to start the slideshow so it’s larger on the screen for everyone?

• Oh, sorry, yes, yes, yes. Let me do that.

• Great, thank you.

• Slide show from beginning, right? There you are.

• Perfect.

• So, yes, this was the final opera of Richard Strauss. And I think he intended it also as a statement of his values and the civilised values of Europe, which at the time were being trampled underfoot by the Nazis and by other dictators in Europe, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and so on. The idea for this opera came, was given to him by Stefan SWEI, but political events separated them, and in the end, Strauss largely wrote the text of this opera himself with the help of the conductor Clemens Krauss. So what you may think it was a futile gesture when you think that he started work on it in the autumn of 1938. So just as Kristallnacht was happening. He was working on it during the conquest of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union. And the premier took place on October the 28th, 1942, just as the decisive battles of Stalingrad and were getting going. Well, the images you see on the screen are of, I think, the two most beautiful theatre interiors in the world, and they’re both in Germany. the one on the left is the court theatre in Bayreuth, that dates from the 1740s by the Italian BIH-BEE-AN-UH family, and the one on the right is by , and it dates from the 1760s and it’s in Munich.

And it is something of a miracle that these two theatres survived because of course, theatres were candle lit, so they burnt down regularly. There are very, very few theatres that survive from the 18th century. And these two not only had to survived the danger of fires, they had to survive the bombings of the Second World War. In fact, the Cuvilliés Theatre had a very, very narrow escape. It was expressly against Hitler’s orders. This theatre was dismantled and taken away for protection three days before the building that housed it was completely destroyed by Allied bombs. So as I’ve told you before, opera was an Italian invention and it spread from Italy to other places. In fact, Germany can claim to have the earliest public opera houses outside of Venice. First opera house for the public, not just a court opera house was in Hamburg in 1678. And various other German cities, Braunschweig, Leipzig, and so on followed suit soon afterwards. And the three greatest opera composers of the 18th century, Handel, Gluck, and Mozart were all German, or shall we say Germanic. I mean, in England, we like to think that Handel’s, George Frideric Handel’s a Brit, but he was George Frideric Handel and born in Saxony. He was a Saxon. Gluck in the middle, was born in and he was a German speaker, but Bohemians might want to claim him, he had Bohemian ancestry. And Mozart on the right hand side, don’t believe the lie that Mozart was Austrian.

He wasn’t. His family came from Salzburg, and believe me, you cannot get more German than Salzburg. He called in his correspondence, he describes himself as German, never as Austrian. And he happened to be born in Salzburg, which happened long after his death and after the Napoleonic wars to go to Austria rather than to Bavaria. So there’s nothing really very Austrian about Mozart. I’m sure you know the old quip, the biggest lie, that the Austrians told the biggest lie of the 20th century, or pulled off the biggest lie, convincing the world that Hitler was German and Mozart was Austrian. Now these three composers, these three German or Germanic composers, wrote most of their operas in Italian. Handel wrote Italian operas for British audiences. Gluck wrote Italian operas for Viennese audiences, and he wrote French operas for Parisian audiences. Mozart wrote 20 operas, of which only five were in German, and only two really are significant. The Die Entführung aus dem Serail, The Abduction from Seraglio, which dates from, here is Mozart again, dates from 1781 and Die Zauberflote, which dates from the last year of his life, 1791. I think he would’ve been quite happy to continue writing operas in Italian. And the only reason he wrote Die Entführung aus dem Serail in German was as a result of Joseph II becoming Holy Roman Emperor in succession to his mother Maria Teresa, and he was very influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and he wanted to modernise the Hapsburg Empire.

And part of this modernization was that everybody should be persuaded to speak German, and not all the very, the many, many different languages, of course, of the ethnic minorities of the Hapsburg Empire. And so for a short time, he insisted that operas performed at the old Burgtheater, which you see in the middle here at the top, should be in German. And so the first of Mozart’s three commissions from Burgtheater was in 1781. The image you see on the left shows Mozart, you can see, he’s a very short man. He’s there in the middle directing a performance of Entfuhrung. Entfuhrung is also, it’s an Enlightenment opera. It certainly reflects the enlightened, inverted commas, ideas of Joseph II. But Mozart himself, I think was very, very much a product of the Enlightenment. At some point I’d like to do a talk for you about this, about Mozart’s involvement with the ideas of the Enlightenment. But so the Turks had been the biggest threat, of course, to the Hapsburg Empire from the 16th century to the early 18th century. But by the 18th century, they were very much in retreat. They weren’t the kind of deadly threat that they had been. And with the Enlightenment, it became possible to see non-Christians, Muslims, and Jews primarily, as being human beings, as being moral human beings. So Trudy’s talked to you, of course, about , Blessing’s play, which celebrates a Jewish hero. And it’s around about the same time, of course, the Mozart writes Entfuhrung. And in Entfuhrung, you see the final scene, bottom middle there.

It’s a Muslim character who turns out to the most moral character in the plot. The other images you’ve got here in the middle at the top is the Swiss artist, Jean-Étienne Liotard, who spent two years in Constantinople, and he went native and he spent much to the rest of his career travelling around Europe, dressed as a Turk. And this was really part of his attraction. And he took a big store of exotic Turkish clothes with him and aristocrats all over Europe thrilled to the idea of dressing up as Turks. So you’ve got the Countess of Coventry looking as though she’s in a Turkish HIR-ING, and you have the Earl of the looking like a Turkish Pasha. Now, Entfuhrung is a most delightful opera. It’d be one of my two or three favourite operas by Mozart. It’s got such a sort of youthful to it, and it’s just full of most gorgeous music from beginning to end. Now Mozart of course, wrote many, many great arias, but it seems to me that his greatest, his genius is best expressed in the ensembles of his late operas. I talked about the ensembles in Italian opera, in Verde, for instance, where the action stops, everybody stands there in the old days, they would just come to the front of the stage, and the different characters express simultaneously their reactions to a particular situation. Mozart does something much, much more than this. Not only might you have 3, 4, 6 people simultaneously expressing very different emotions, but these are ensembles are not static. They move, and the action changes. So they are extraordinarily complex with so many things going on.

They’re musically complex with the different characters and the different voices, and they’re also psychologically very complex. So this probably reaches its most mature form in Le nozze di Figaro, The Marriage of Figaro, where there are ensembles that go on for 20 minutes or half an hour. But I’m going to play you part of one from Entfuhrung, which I can’t play the whole thing 'cause it lasts 10 minutes. But it starts off with the two pairs of lovers, Belmonte and Konstanze. They’re the aristocrats. And Pedrillo and Blonde are their servants. And Konstanze and her maid have been captured by pirates and sold as slaves to this Muslim Pasha. And Belmonte turns up at the hiring with his servant Pedrillo. This is the moment where they’re reunited. So it starts off in the major key, full of joy, a brilliant joy. And then we switch into a minor key and the two men start to express worry and doubt. The women first don’t understand it and they’re very anxious and they question the men. And then the two men want to know if the two women have been faithful to them in their absence. So we hear all these hesitations and all these doubts in the music. And then when the women understand what they’re being asked, they’re absolutely outraged. They’re furious. So the music goes back into a very sort of angry, lively, angry mode. And then finally, the men apologise and everything is resolved.

So I will see how far I get with this. As I said, it’s a 10 minute extract so I won’t play at all. So we move on. Now, that opera was premiered as I said in 1781, just weeks before the Mozart married his beloved Constanze. Constanze Weber was her maiden name. And a couple of years ago, somebody turned up this photograph on the left-hand side, which seems to be Constanze, 'cause she survived Mozart by many decades. And this is a photograph from around 1840 of Constanze as an old woman. And I think you can see that it is the same face as the portrait of Constanze with this very long nose and slightly pointed chin. I find that photograph incredibly moving. And it’s also a reminder of the loss of Mozart’s early death, that, you know, he, we should have had photographs of Mozart, we should have had so much more music from Mozart. But I think on one level, the Abduction from the Seraglio is a song of love and passion and longing for this woman that he was about to marry. And of course, the heroine has the same name. She’s also called Konstanze. So I’m going to play you this aria, which is so full of longing. This is the hero, Belmonte, looking forward to being reunited with his love and almost ill with longing and excitement.

He says, And I’m going to play you my favourite version, my favourite kind of singer. This is Richard Tauber. And it’s such a wonderful combination. I mean, Mozart himself is so good at conveying the feelings, even the physical sensations. You’ll hear the has, the clock from, you know, you can hear the boom, boom, boom, boom of the heart as he sings the words. And when he says, you know, I tremble, I waver, you can hear this also in the music. And you hear the swelling breast there at the end, the breast swelling with emotion. Now, Joseph’s reforms were short-lived. The Austrians are basically very conservative. There was a big, big push back against all his reforms, and nearly all of them had to be reversed, including his order that opera would be performed in the vernacular German language. So Mozart’s two later commissions from the Hall Fork were Le nozze di Figaro both of course, in Italian. And he only wrote one more opera in German, and that was Die Zauberflote. And this was a commission that didn’t come from the court opera, it was a commercial enterprise. And it was a theatre director called Emanuel Schikaneder who commissioned it and put it on in a commercial theatre for the public. The role of Papageno was specifically written for him.

It made him immensely rich. Sadly, Mozart didn’t live to receive any of that money, but Schikaneder made so much money that he was able to build the Theatre an der Wien which still exists in Vienna. And this is the decoration of sculpture of Schikaneder as Papageno, the Birdman, on the front of the Theatre an der Wien. And so here is a programme for the first performances. Again, it’s an Enlightenment opera, which is certainly an opera that, that expresses many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, the brotherhood of man and so on, and it’s, in some ways a very naive plot, but it’s full of fantasy and it’s always been a tremendous inspiration to theatre designers. These are early 19th, and this is an early 19th century design by the great German architect, Schinkel. This is a famous reduction for GEIN-HORN. That was, I think, is it sixties or seventies, anyway, by David Hockney. I’m very sad I never saw that. It must have been absolutely gorgeous. I remember my friend, PUH-LOTZ-EE, PUH-LOTZ-EE was absolutely longing to design a production of The Magic Flute.

And sadly, it never happened. There were negotiations that they fell through. Rather great artists, SHAH-GOW and KAH-KAHSH-KUH have designed Magic Flutes. As I said, it’s an opera in the Enlightenment, but it actually has some of the most unenlightened sentiments of any opera. I mean, outrageous sexism, truly jaw dropping, outrageous racism. What can I say? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a production of Magic Flute where they hadn’t actually censored the words of the aria of Monostatos, who’s a black character who tries to rape the white heroine. He has his aria, which he says, , white is beautiful. I have to rape her. , I have to rape this white woman because I’m an ugly black man. These days, I mean, you could sort of get away with it in the days when, of course, there weren’t surtitles and a lot of the people weren’t going to even, Germans might not necessarily hear the words. But these days, it’s really I think, not possible to sing that aria with its original words. But I’m going to, the opera contains the highest notes that you will ever hear in theatre. The arias go up to top F, and also the lowest notes, the base aria of , you know, those will be the lowest notes you are ever likely to hear in an opera house. So it makes some huge vocal demands.

But as I said, the character of Papageno was written for Schikaneder who was an actor but not a professionally trained singer. So all his music has a sort of folk quality to it. It’s music and it’s in a light baritone range. So even I could sing it, I’m not going to offend your ears by trying to sing it, but here is singing Papageno’s first aria. Now we move on to the early 19th century. And as I’ve explained in many lectures, and I know Judi has too, of course, Mozart is really on the cusp of the modern world. The modern world, the late 18th century world is completely transformed by the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the industrial revolution, and romanticism with a capital R. And of course, Europe is transformed by the Napoleonic Wars. So here we are with the and we’re in the middle of romanticism in the period immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, the famous painting by Friedrich on the right hand side, showing a French soldier lost and the immensity of the German forest. So DAY-VIS wrote a number of operas, most successful was Der Freischutz. Difficult to translate that exactly, Free Shot, I suppose. It’s about a huntsman and it’s set in the forests. It has a wonderfully spooky kind of almost proto horror film aspects of it. I think the early audience were thrilled by the amazing special effects in this, in the scene as you can see of the casting of the magic balls.

And they were promised all sorts of fantastic, spectacular creepy effects in this scene. Well, in 1821, it was a huge success and it took the whole western world by storm. By 1824, there was six different theatres in London playing Der Freischutz. I did think of playing you some of the sort of proto horror music stuff, but instead I’m going to introduce you to the prototypical German heroin, Agathe. She is the prototype for so many later Wagnerian heroines, Strauss heroines, young German woman, blonde of course usually show with plaits, certainly with long hair. She is womanly and gentle and sweet, and she should have a voice to go with that. The image on the left, oh, that’s a performance I would love to have seen with Lot of Lehmann, my favourite German soprano of all time, and Richard Tauber. They must have been absolutely wonderful in this opera. But I want to play you the typical German soprano, what they call . means useful, dramatic, dramatic, dramatic, that’s obvious. So it’s, as she has to sound young and feminine and womanly but she also has to have a certain strength for vocal climaxes.

And this type of voice, it’s such a, I think this is a type of voice that most people love. In some of my previous lectures I’ve talked about types of voices, which are meat and poison. I mean the french lyric soprano that some people love and a lot of people dislike because it’s so acidic. There’s nothing acidic about a German lyric soprano. It’s a voice with no edges to it. It’s creamy. It floats. It’s an extremely lovely, comforting sound. And I’m going to play you Agathe’s, first of her two arias sung by a singer who seems to me to represent all these qualities of the German soprano very well. This is Elisabeth Grummer. Now we come to the most controversial composer in the history of music. This is Richard Wagner, and he was, he provoked extreme reactions and was extremely controversial from the very start and long before his posthumous association with Adolf Hitler and Nazism. I think it’s quite important to remember that, that Wagner died in 1881. So he died six years before, no, 1883. So he died six years before Hitler was born. Probably, right from the start, his music was regarded as subversive, as dangerous. I think that the first person to express it in words was the great French poet, Baudelaire, who described the narcotic effects of Wagner. I feel that very, very strongly.

And I still feel it even though I describe myself as a recovering Wagnerian. There was a time when I was totally obsessed and besotted with Wagner. And I don’t listen to very much Wagner these days, but okay, sometimes I switch on the radio and there’s a passage of Wagner and it’s like I’ve just been given a shot of something in the arm. It’s disturbing, the powerful effect. And Trudy loves, of course, Woody Allen’s quip that, he said, Every time I hear the music of Wagner, I want to invade Poland. And there’s a tiny element of truth in that. You don’t have to, it doesn’t need to stir you up something terrible or bad, but it does, it reaches the parts that other music cannot reach. And so this on the left is an image of the notorious battle of Lohengrin. That’s in 1887 when a French company attempted to perform Lohengrin in Paris, and there was serious rioting, you know, the army had to be called out to deal with the rioting in the streets. So in the 19th century, he was controversial for all sorts of reasons that we wouldn’t necessarily worry about today. I suppose it’s, in modern times, it’s more the anti-Semitism that bothers us, and as I said, the posthumous association with Hitler. He wrote this notorious essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik, Jewishness in Music, two versions. Came out first in 1850 and a more virulent version, 1869. On the right hand side, you can, the Baroque, of course, was co-opted by the Nazis. So that the baroque festival became a big important element in the Nazi regime.

And this is a photograph of the audience at Bayreuth ecstatically greeting Hitler who’s standing in the Festspielhaus. Now the first three mature operas of Wagner, Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin, these are romantic operas. They’re very beautiful. I absolutely adore Lohengrin. It’s magically beautiful. It’s not so radically different from any other early 19th century opera. You could just, you could say Lohengrin, it’s a bit like a middle period Verdi opera in slow motion, slowed down with very beautiful and refined orchestration. He was not around to see the premiere because he was involved with the 1848 revolution in Dresden, and there was a fatwa on him. I mean, he could easily have been executed. He was in hiding and in exile for many years after 1848. He was a very political character. You know, he starts off on the extreme left and lands up speaking to the extreme right, I suppose that that trajectory from left to right is not an uncommon one, but he certainly took it to greater extremes than anybody else.

So after Lohengrin, there’s a pause for six years where he doesn’t write any music at all. Instead in these six years, he’s first of all writing the text for his, the central masterpieces of his career, The Ring Cycle. And he’s also writing theoretical treatises about opera and about art. He’s really radically rethinking the nature of opera and the purpose of art. I find his texts almost unreadable, even in translation. But they were tremendously influential. I think you have to say that like him or hate him, Wagner was one of the key figures of early modernism. He’s along there with Gibson, Monet, more powerful, I would say, than either of those two because his influence reaches so far and wide. Now The Ring Cycle, it took him, he worked on it altogether for 27 years of his life. It’s enormous. It’s 16 hours of music. So yeah, you know, you don’t go and see it casually. You need to prepare yourself to see it. And it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to everybody. It’s a challenge. You need the greatest conductor, you need the greatest orchestra, you need the greatest singers. It’s a huge challenge to the producer to actually stage it. You know, so many incredible things that he demands.

And so it’s always been the most radical and innovatory theatre directors who’ve been attracted to it. Here is the same scene in Die Walkure, Rocky Outcrop as it was originally in the 1870s production in Bayreuth in the post Second World War production of Wagner. This was ave the Patrice Chereau production in 1976, which was really tremendously influential, completely changed the way people thought of staging operas. And I’m just going to run through, of course, you’ve got to find a convincing ways to represent giants and dwarves and dragons and women riding on horses through the sky and women swimming in the River Rhine. So Sigrid’s forge. How do you do that convincingly? And in the end, you think right now what is this, what is The Ring about? And I think it’s about whatever you want it to be about. In a way it’s like the Bible. You can read whatever you want into it. You can have a Marxist ring as it was for George Barnard Shaw. You can have a Freudian ring, you can have a Jungian ring, the book on the left, Robert Donington, Wagner’s ring and its symbols is a Jungian interpretation, very convincing, actually, quite a fascinating book. You can have a green ring, that works really well. You can, for some people, it is a blueprint for the Nazi regime. And I’ve been trying to persuade Margaret Breely, if she could, would do, it would be wonderful if she would do a talk for us. She is a very remarkable woman. There’s a side of me that doesn’t really want to believe what she’s saying, but every time I hear her, I find myself alarmingly convinced, and she really does argue that The Ring is a kind of blueprint for the Third Reich?

My gut feeling in the end, I mean, she’s not somebody I would ever want to debate with because she’s so sure of her facts. You know, she’s researched it all. As I said, she’s very, very convincing when you hear her speak. But my gut feeling is that the two central meanings of The Ring, the two things that it’s really about, you can read all sorts of other stuff into it, is that power corrupts and that love redeems. And it seems to me those two themes are incompatible with the idea that it is basically Nazi ideology. That doesn’t mean to say there isn’t some Nazi ideology in it, proto Nazi ideology, and I’m quite sure convinced that there is an anti-Semitic subtext. And that was, I think, understood by many people from the first, this on the left. You see the first Paris production of , and you can see that Albrecht is wearing a sort of caricature false Jewish nose. On the right is Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Wotan and Mime. Mime again, if you look at the sort of anti-Semitic imagery of, you know, say postcards or posters or magazine illustrations of the period, you see very similar caricatures of Jews. So on having written this vast text and come up with all these ideas of what, how opera should be, Wagner, not surprisingly, he was faced with the situation of sitting down and beginning it, and he had a creative block. And then on the 4th of September, 1853, he was staying in a hotel in Italy and he walked into the hotel and he fell into, he had a fit.

He fell into a catatonic state and he had the sensation of rushing water around him. He couldn’t speak or move. And in his head, he heard the chord of e flat major. And this is how The Ring starts. I often wonder what an earth did people think this was when they first heard this in the 1860s. You have five minutes of one chord and it starts with a kind of deep hum that that represents, I suppose, nothingness, primaeval chaos or whatever. And then this one chord builds up as, you know, different instruments are introduced and it increases in power and intensity. As I said, it lasts five minutes so I’m not going to play the whole thing. But, in any case, I mean, I hope you, those of you who’ve got good speakers, you’ll be at a great advantage here. You do want to hear this live or on extremely good sound equipment. I can’t hear whether it’s actually playing or not. Actually, I’m going to skip this. I’m going to let you hear that on your own sound equipment. So this is Bayreuth. He built his own festival house and opened in 1876. The photograph on the left, you may not recognise me. That is me in 1989 Bayreuth Festival. On the balcony, you can see musicians coming out and they will, they summon you to the next act by playing motifs, fragments of melody from the forthcoming act.

On the right, you see Toscanini, who conducted two seasons of Bayreuth in the early 1930s in the famous orchestra pit Bayreuth, which is sunk deep beneath the stage with a canopy over it that to some extent mutes the sound. So it’s very, very flattering to the singers. For that production in 1989, I was very disappointed when I got there and I found that several of the singers actually were English, from the English National Opera, from their production of The Ring Cycle. But I can tell you they, that was, there was John Tomlinson, Linda Finney, Graham Clark. Ooh, they sounded so wonderful in the acoustic of Bayreuth. They sounded completely different. So I just mentioned light motifs. Light motifs are fragments of melody and they’re used by Wagner to represent characters, things, feelings, ideas. And there are over 90 light motifs in The Ring Cycle. My feeling is that in the first part of The Ring Cycle, they’re sometimes used to laboriously to, obviously. I’m very aware of, and if you don’t want to be too aware of it, that’s the thing. They don’t work well, I think if they, if you are, if you hear the light motive and you think, ah, that means that.

And you know, in act one of Die Walkure, when the evil character of HAR-GAN appears on stage, there’s a pause and we hear dum-dum-duh-rum-bum-pum-bum. That’s his light motif. But as The Ring progresses, of course you’ve got more and more of these light motifs and they’re woven together in an incredible, incredibly rich, complex psycho-tapestry with all these different threads coming together. And I think it, you know, the system works better and better as you go through The Ring. And I’m going to play you a very famous passage from Act three of Siegfried, that’s the penultimate opera. This is the moment where Siegfried walks through the magic fire to find Brunhilde. And it’s famously, there are 12 different light motifs that are woven together in this short orchestral passage, and I’m going to play you six of them and then I’ll play you the passage. So first of all, we have light motif number 58, which is Siegfried’s Horn Call.

• [Man] 58.

• This is LOH-GOH, god of fire.

• [Man] 15.

• Then we have slumber.

• [Man] 52.

• Magic.

• [Man] 53.

• Wotan’s Farewell. The Magic Fire, flames.

• [Man] 55.

• Now we’re going to hear the whole lot woven together. So on, I have to move on. Now, probably the most significant date in the history of early music is 1865. I’ve already mentioned early lectures about MAN-EE. Of course, MAN-EE’s rejected from the summer of 1863’s AHF-EHN-TAY-KEHN as a starting point for modern art, and it’s the premiere of Tristan and Isolde two years later in 1865, which could be taken as a starting point for the history of modern music and particularly just the opening bars of the prelude to act one. You can see here. And in this you have Wagner’s introduction really of chromatic harmony where he moves from one unresolved chord to another instead of resolving the chord.

This was so shocking that people fainted when they heard this in the 1860s and '70s. So hang onto your smelling salts and here is the opening bars of Tristan and Isolde. I hope you are still fully compos mentis. Now, a few years ago I was invited by the Royal Opera House to give a talk in an, it was an evening of entertainment really for rich sponsors who’d sponsored a Ring Cycle. The main speaker was Michael Portillo. And I knew he was just going to carry on about how wonderful Wagner was. So I thought, well, I was the kind of warmup for Michael Portillo.

So I provocatively I did, I titled my Talk Five Reasons to Hate Wagner. And there are obvious reasons. It was all tongue in the cheek. I wasn’t meaning it very seriously. But one of the things I said was, and I didn’t realise that all the singers of the production were present in the audience. And Catherine Wynne Rogers, she got really, she came up to me and sh she threatened to punch me in the face, actually. But one of the things was I said was that Wagner ruined the art of singing. And I half mean it because I mean, he makes such impossible demands, impossible demands on, on the, you know, the really heavy roles like Brunhilde and Siegfried. So and so you of course you’d hear this the left hand side as Brunhilde. This is a caricature from the New Yorker where the director of the Opera House comes in front of the curtain and addresses the audience. He says, Is there anybody in the audience who can sing Siegfried? Well, Wagner has been, from the start, he’s been known as a notorious voice killer. And here the man on the right, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who was the first Tristan, he sang eight performances was so exhausted by them that he died. Tristan literally killed him. And on the left, the great Polish universally recognises the world’s greatest tenor in the 1890s. Everybody said, oh, you’re the world’s greatest tenor, you must sing Siegfried. And he foolishly agreed.

And that was pretty soon the end of his career. This probably there’s only ever been one singer who could really do Siegfried and Tristan and do it easily, and that’s the Danish tenor who you see here, a large gentleman. I like this photograph of him at a fancy dress ball with French soprano Lily Pons. But it’s also, as I said, great, make great demands on conductors. Now I want to play you, I’m running out of time, but I hope I’m allowed to overrun a little bit. This is from a live performance of Tristan from Lascala in the 1940s that had . But I’m playing you an orchestral passage, and this, and this is the great Italian conductor Victor de Sabata. And I’ve never heard this music sound quite as exciting as it does here.

I mean, this should really, this is the moment where Isolde is impatiently waiting for Tristan and he’s running up the hill towards her. And it builds up to a kind of frenzy of erotic excitement and it really should get your pulses going, and I think you need to check your pulse. And if it doesn’t, maybe you haven’t got a pulse. Now if that doesn’t make you want to invade Poland, nothing will. And now, as I said, in Wagner’s operas, unfortunately, one very often has to put up with a standard of shrieky wobbly, hideous singing that nobody would tolerate for a minute in a performance by Verdi or KOH-CHEE-NEE.

But I want to stress it is possible to sing Wagner beautifully to make a really, really beautiful sound. Now I see that I’ve really run out. I’m not going to, I’m afraid I’m going to cut Richard Strauss, even though he is my absolute favourite composer as I have talked about him earlier in the series, I think about a month or so ago, and I would love to have the chance maybe to do a whole lecture on the operas of Strauss in, in the coming weeks. So I’m going to finish with this incredibly beautiful recording of part of the love duet, Tristan and Isolde, with FREE-DEHR-LYE-DER and . So you can hear that this music can be beautifully sung. I think I better move on and see if there are any questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Where are we? Yes, please identify the music.

It would’ve been on your list, which you get every week with the PowerPoint and it is the Moonlight Interlude from Strauss’ Capriccio.

Q: Can I repeat the names of the two opera halls you show at the beginning?

A: Yes, these, Bayreuth, the court opera, and the Cuvilliés Theatre, or the Old Residence Theatre, which is in Munich.

So wasn’t Don Carlos written in French, although mainly, yes, Don Carlos was a French commission in the first performance. And it’s today, there are two versions and you can either hear it in French or Italian.

Q: Who coined the word Enlightenment and when?

A: You know, I really don’t know who coined the word. I think it does go right back to the 18th century, but I dunno who was the first person to use it.

Did I say that Hitler, no I didn’t. I said that Mozart, no, Hitler was of course born in Braunau near Linz in Austria. No, I was making the point that there is, it’s a joke that that probably everybody knows that the Austrians claim that Hitler was German and Mozart was Austrian. My German accent should be good ‘cause I lived there for a long time.

Repeat, CC does not catch names. Sorry, I dunno what you’re asking there.

Q: Who are the soloists and the conductor and the,

A: it’s all on the list. It was, so Thomas Beacham, the wonderful Canadian Jenna . Lucky Dennis, Hockney,

Q: oh, from San Francisco. Yeah. On the highest note, does IH-BREE-TAN-EE have a high? Does it?

A: Well I think it originally did, but nobody sung it in the 20th century except, what’s it, Stefan Zucker maybe, who’s a slightly joke tenor in America.

Q: How many autographed photos?

A: I have long since lost count. I have thousands of them.

Q: What kind of German soprano was Leonore from Fidelio.

A: Well you should, it should really be a proper dramatic soprano. But can get away with it. I think it depends on, on the conductor and the production. But you know, her big aria, the opening is very, very, I think it would stretch a soprano to do that.

Yes, I know this quote from Hitler, Whoever wants to understand international socialism must know Wagner. I don’t know quite to make of that. Can you blame Wagner for that? I mean for, I’m not sure that, I think that is necessarily a condemnation of Wagner.

Yes, the GB shores, the perfect Wagner, right, I think, isn’t it? That’s a good book to read.

Q: Did you see the incomparable Canadian Robert LaPaz staging of The Ring Cycle at the Met?

A: I saw it on on TV, I didn’t see it at the Met and it was very, very impressive.

Yes, love, the two basic meanings of The Ring is that that power corrupts. Everybody’s searching for power of course and it corrupts them all in the course of the opera and destroys them in the end. But it a great theme of art all the way through, all of his operas.

You know, going back to Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin, and is that love redeems, the redeeming power of love. Right, redeems, redeems. Thanks. Thank you.

This is Arlene saying I love the music of art. Tried to see at least one full Ring Cycle, somewhere in the world over for over 20 years. The artists may have caricatured Nema or Albrecht, but in the text there is no antisemitism.

I’m not, that’s very debatable. Very, very debatable. I don’t, I can’t give you an answer really, for sure. Margaret would say that there, would definitely say that there is. I think you, you know, it would be great if I could persuade Margaret to do her talk. She’s extremely impressive and thought-provoking. All you’re saying, I tended a debate with Margaret as a speaker and she won the debate by saying there is, I don’t think she said that. I really don’t think she said that. I think you must have misheard there. I’ve heard Margaret many times and had many, many conversations with her. She may have, what she may have said was there’s no antisemitism in the music, she wouldn’t have said there’s no antisemitism in the text.

There are somebody saying that of course the late quartets of Beethoven are absolutely amazing and kind of timeless.

So there are precedents for those unresolved harms. Even Bach actually.

There’s Hannah saying, Wagner is for me so sublime, sends me to another world.

Yes, yes. I feel a bit uneasy about that but I agree with you.

Tristan singing Last Night promptly lost his voice and the MAY-LOH had to sing his part. Oh dear, dear, my goodness.

Right. My last pair of photographs, it’s Richard Strauss, I’m afraid, and as I said, I’d love to be able to do a whole talk on Strauss 'cause he’s a composer so close to my heart.

Q: Who’s the young German tenor who is Jewish? Is Reiner Goldberg, was he Jewish?

A: I’ve not seem Wagner at the Met. I’m not sure who you mean actually.

Q: What do I think of Johannes Kaufman as the Wagner singer?

A: I mean I admire him. He’s a certainly a great singer.

Somebody’s just a friend from Munich has just sent me his, he’s Tristan at two. I think he shouldn’t sing Wagner. I think he, well cause he’s had quite a long career already. But I think it, it was better in the lyrical bits than the more dramatic bits.

Right. Thank you Norman. Very nice comment.

Repeat the E cord, the major cord. Yeah. Get a really good modern recording of that and some good sound equipment.

It also shows that you can’t have love if you are after power one excludes the other. Yeah, I agree with that. That is really what Wagner is saying.

Nietzsche. I mean Nietzsche started off completely besotted by Wagner and then he wrote this, The Foul Wagner, which really kind of deconstructed him. He loathed Parsifal. He absolutely thought it was extremely unhealthy and sick and perverse and I suppose the ultimate insult was that he sort of praised BEE-ZAY’s Carmen as much more healthy than Wagner’s .

So that seems to be it. Thank you all very, very much indeed. And I think I’m talking to you again on Sunday.

• Thank you so much Patrick. That was wonderful and everyone have a good evening.

• Thanks Lauren.

• Bye.

• Bye.