The second in a short series of posts marking
Richard Wagner’s two-hundredth birthday, which arrives tomorrow.
What better way to celebrate Wagner’s
bicentennial than with a Belgian-Norwegian mash-up of several of his most
famous hit...
The second in a short series of posts marking
Richard Wagner’s two-hundredth birthday, which arrives tomorrow.
What better way to celebrate Wagner’s
bicentennial than with a Belgian-Norwegian mash-up of several of his most
famous hits? Granted, there are more solemn ways of commemorating the birthday
of the man whom Auguste Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam once called “a genius
such as appears on the earth once every thousand years.” You delve into the the occult mysteries of “Parsifal,” as Richard Brody did on this site a couple
of months ago; or try to explicate a single moment in the mammoth “Ring,” as I did in a New Yorker
essay in 2011; or wrestle with the dark question of Wagner’s posthumous
relationship with the Third Reich. You could ponder Thomas Mann’s 1933 lecture “The
Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” or read Willa Cather’s piercing story “A Wagner
Matinée,” or become engulfed by Tony Palmer's eight-hour film “Wagner.”
Or, of course, you could plunge into the music itself, whether by way of a
historic recording (Wilhelm Furtwängler’s “Tristan und Isolde” and Joseph Keilberth’s 1955 “Ring” are
two of the greatest) or a DVD (there is no finer Wagner staging on film
than Patrice Chéreau’s “Ring” from Bayreuth). Not much Wagner is being played
live in America this week, but there’s a huge wave of events in Europe, including an
Afternoon Coffee Party in Leipzig, the composer’s birthplace, and a street
party in Bayreuth, the seat of Wagner’s festival of himself.
That’s all a bit heavy for a birthday, though;
let’s have something lighter. After all, Wagner did possess a rather antic, clownish
personality, and although he entirely lacked a sense of humor about his own
work he provoked satire and silliness almost from the first moment he stepped
onto the public stage. Even those who worshipped the Meister often found it necessary,
as a way of retaining mental balance, to puncture the aura of solemnity that
surrounded him. In that spirit, I’ve assembled a few
Wagner send-ups and pop adaptations going back a century and a half.
In the video above, the Ophelia Ragtime Orchestra,
based in Norway, plays a swinging arrangement of “Wagneria,” written in the
twenties by the Belgian jazz pianist Clément Doucet. The Pilgrim’s Chorus from “Tannhäuser”
is the main source, but you hear also hear the “Parsifal” bells (right at the
start), Siegfried’s sword, and the Song to the Evening Star. Here is the
original, recorded in 1927:
This was hardly the first bit of Wagner foolery.
Jacques Offenbach lampooned Wagnerian “music of the future” in the “Symphony of
the Future” section of his “Carnaval des revues,” of 1860:
For the Philadelphia centennial celebrations of
1876, which I mentioned in my “Walking Tour of Wagner’s New York,” the young
John Philip Sousa wrote a fantasy on national airs that ended with the “Star-Spangled
Banner” done in Wagnerian style. One can’t help thinking he did it with a smile
on his face:
from the United States Marine Band's recording The Heritage of John Philip Sousa, Vol. 2. For more on Sousa and Wagner, go here.
Many French composers of the late nineteenth
century were deeply under Wagner’s spell, making regular pilgrimages to
Bayreuth. While their appreciation was profound, they liked to perform the
defensive gesture of deflating the cultish atmosphere at Bayreuth, not least
because of resentment of the German Empire in the wake of the Franco-Prussian
War. In 1886, Emmanuel Chabrier produced a four-hand-piano piece entitled “Souvenirs de Munich,”
a quadrille on themes from “Tristan." This idiomatic orchestration is by David Matthews:
A couple of years later, Gabriel Fauré and André
Messager put together “Souvenirs de Bayreuth”—kudos to YouTube user musicanth for the accompanying image:
Debussy inserted a “Tristan” quotation into “Golliwog’s
Cakewalk,” here played in a creative arrangement for twelve saxophones (see esp. 1:18):
Here’s an
score: 1
about 4 hours ago
