MUSIC
The Mastersingers
THE production of The Mastersingers at Covent Garden prompted feelings equally of gratitude and of regret—regret that the perform- ance should have been so inadequate, gratitude for the opportunity of hearing once more the wonderful score. Hans Hotter sang admir- ably as Sachs, and had the opera not been in English would doubtless have sung even better. It was impossible in any case to hear a word anyone sang, although occasionally an infelicitous phrase would slip embarrassingly through. The chorus, too, was good ; but the other performances were unremarkable. The orchestra at present is scandalously bad.
The cavilling done, gratitude wins over regret. This is tremendous music always, the keystone of &I-man nineteenth-century• art. It is possible to detest Wagner as a phenomenon, just as it is possible to detest Brahms, but only amateur chatterboxes carry the hatred in either case into blank refusal to recognise the transcendent virtues of both men. It is useless to sigh for Verdi. It is a different world—doubtless a happier one—beyond the Alps, over there in Lombardy. The tug can pull a man in two—Busoni, for example. The gigantically inflated forms of Wagner can be detested, but they are marvellous.
Comparatively concise, sane and wholesome as The Mastersingers is, it is still too long. The organisation is faultless ; the thing had to be that size. But it is the wrong size. It is mysteriously the wrong size in the way that so much nineteenth-century art is mysteriously wrong. There is the consummate technique, the originality, the genius—yet the whole thing seems suspended above the ground. One can wholeheartedly admire one of the greatest works in the history of music, but it would be wrong not to communicate this feeling of uneasiness, which I think cannot be hallucinatory since it is so widely shared. In purely musical terms the feeling might be described as a constant premonition of the cadence, because of the harmonic and non-melodic character of the music, which may be said to create a feeling of Angst. It is the music of death.
JOHN DAVENPORT.
Previous page
