Vintage Wagner
Robin Holloway
My focus for some recent revisits to the Wagnerian oeuvre has naturally been the Prom performance of Die Walküre (reviewed opposite by Michael Tanner); this thrilling event arouses the old ache, ‘again, for the first time’ as Nietzsche said, to embark upon the entire epic, in order, with time to recover and prepare between all its ten acts. Meanwhile, I’ve been trawling the archives of the other three canonic music-dramas to find pure old gold from yesteryear.
Whereas Tristan is timeless (though I suppose that internal evidence nighthunt, flowery bank for al fresco amours, linden tree whose gentle shade cannot ameliorate the hero’s delirious raving — might affix a seasonal pattern), Parsifal homes in on a Good Friday spring morning; and Mastersingers is specifically placed and dated — Nuremberg, mid 16th century, the first two acts during morning, twilight and night of Midsummer Eve, the third on Midsummer Day. The lindens of Hans Sachs’s celebrated monologue are palpable in foliage, rustle, scent. We’ve learnt, resentfully, to do without nature in the other two works; even in the Ring, posited through all four of the cycle, are animals, vegetation, minerals, not to mention the four elements. But an abstract/ conceptual Mastersingers ought to be forbidden by law!
Oldest of the golden oldies are sizeable stretches of Parsifal, provenance Berlin 1927 and Bayreuth 1928–9, under the venerable Karl Muck. They comprise about half of Act I, five minutes only from II (the flowermaidens); and III complete save one brief passage, sadly among the work’s sublimest, since it goes straight from the end of the Prelude to the hero’s first words, as he lifts his black visor, thus missing his mysterious arrival and the old man’s reproach turning to wonderment as recognition dawns.
The specialness of these recordings has always been acknowledged. Beneath sizzle and crackling the sound, as remastered by Opal, is clear, bright and full. It can indeed be searing, not inopportune, in the Act I Transformation, notable, too, for marchmomentum certainty underlying the climactic convulsions, drawing the listener ever upward through a rite of passage. True, the bells sound like bedsprings; the male chorus is right in your face from the start (no gradual procession from the depths to the front in 1928!), breathing wurst and beer even before communicating in bread and wine, after which succour they are heartier still — football vassals on the rampage. All true! Yet the overall effect, though always robust, is also unembarrassedly elevated and spiritual in the highest: no faery pallor, or Boulezy downplaying. The flowermaidens, too, however drunk on honeydew and milk-of-paradise, intimate muscle beneath their gauzy petals: Venus flytraps with iron springs to catch perfect fools.
But Act III is the point. The sense of line running through the whole — strong and stark in the Prelude, melting and hazy in the Good Friday meadows, vehement in lament and accusation, radiant in resolution and affirmation — is consummate in phrasing and pacing, without nudging, seamless without being bland or ‘Pasteurised’. Wagner’s mooted ‘endless melody’ steals by on the ravished ear. Two well-known remarks of Debussy come to mind: his calling the orchestration of Parsifal ‘illuminated from behind’ has never been more clearly vindicated; his abhorrence of Wagner’s scoring in general — that it’s all so intermingled ‘that you can no longer distinguish an oboe from a trombone’ — never more certainly disproved. What does disappear are the distinguishing features of the singers. All superb, then the focus on orchestral linearity causes them to merge into the picture, rather than emerge from it.
The archive Mastersingers was live in Bayreuth, July 1943. It’s piquant to try to envisage the audiences of exactly 62 years ago; reluctant Gauleiters dragged from baser pleasures up the Green Hill for a long swelter at higher things, culminating in a rousing paean to German Art (perhaps)? The ear of faith must work hard here, too. Fifteen-odd years after Muck, the sound is greatly inferior; and the singing, not much at best, is often plain awful. Unique, however, is Furtwängler’s interpretation. Mastersingers, normally the very embodiment of warm clarinet-andhorn-dominated euphony, is rendered edgy and cutting, stripped of comforts, denied glow. Mutiny threatens in the genial chaos of the Act I close; outright violence in the often smoothed-out street riot toward the end of Act II. But the whole piece is driven with powerful ferocity that, concurring all too well with the harsh voices and recording, casts a vivid new light on its essential nature; and constitutes a living antidote to the time, place, circumstances of the performances. The one passage which would surely mitigate this overall character — the seraphic Quintet in Act III and the adorable pages of cod-Lutheran counterpoint immediately before — are regrettably lost. If only some stanzas of the Prize Song, more than usually unctuous with this Suffolk Punch of a tenor, had gone missing instead!
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