Anniversaries are strange
creatures; more often than not, they now seem to make us moan. (Did anyone not
become sick and tired of the dual Mahler anniversary years 2010-11? Most
notably, anyone who actually had a real interest in Mahl...
Anniversaries are strange
creatures; more often than not, they now seem to make us moan. (Did anyone not
become sick and tired of the dual Mahler anniversary years 2010-11? Most
notably, anyone who actually had a real interest in Mahler?) Until relatively
recently, my unconsidered response to this year’s Wagner bicentenary was –
well, not much of a response at all. Indifference, not total, but relative,
reigned. Yes, it has had me thinking about certain things, often more about
1813 than 2013, and it certainly has had me working on certain things, from a
visit to the splendid Wagner
World Wide conference in South Carolina onwards. Yet to a certain extent every year is a Wagner
year, and not just for me. London does not do especially well for Wagner
performances, though at the same time they are far from non-existent. (The
responses or lack thereof, by the two main opera companies here have, however,
been baffling: a single production, yet to come, from the Royal Opera, and
nothing whatsoever from ENO.) More to the point, however, not only the arts but
so many of the ways in which we might and perhaps should consider our lives
remain very much in Wagner’s shadow.
Yes, there have been
anti-Wagnerians – Stravinsky is perhaps the most obvious example, though one
should always take his alleged æsthetics with a large grain of salt – but their
often militant anti-Wagnerism pays at least as much testimony to Wagner’s
influence as more evident discipleship. The seriousness of Wagner’s vision for
music, for the theatre, for art, for humanity remains as inspiring as ever –
and as artistically productive. Stockhausen’s Licht, still to be staged as a cycle, is only the most gargantuan
of modernist engagements, which of course began long before Wagner’s death,
Liszt as so often standing as a pioneer (as well, of course, as a powerful
influence upon Wagner). When opera,
following the Second World War, seemed to have reached something of an impasse,
much of the avant-garde for no particular reason having decided it was no
longer ‘viable’, it was Wagner’s example that pointed the way forward. Boulez,
initially suspicious of Wagner’s mythologising, came through his work with Wieland Wagner to be
one of the composer’s foremost modern advocates and freely admitted that his
own compositions from the 1970s onwards would have been quite different were it
not for his immersion in conducting Wagner’s dramas. (A great sadness is that
he never conducted Die Meistersinger,
one of the three operas he most wished to conduct but never had the opportunity
to do so, the others being Don Giovanni
and Boris Godunov. And Tristan never really had the attention
it deserved from him, being confined to a collaboration with Wieland in Japan.)
Nono, a composer who from a
relatively early year did write for the stage – and all of his works are in one
sense or another highly dramatic – was asked, in a 1961 interview, ‘Who
were the musicians that most influenced you during your earliest years?’ He
named but one, Wagner. Operas such as Intolleranza
1960 and Al gran sole carico d’amore
may certainly, in their political concerns and in their determination to
explore the boundaries of theatre and of musical drama, the composer’s
relationship with the audience included, may and should be considered very much,
though certainly not exclusively, in a Wagnerian tradition. Just as with Wagner,
Nono always believed in the necessity of a ‘provocation’ for an artwork, ‘The
genesis of any of my works,’ he wrote, ‘is always to be found in a human
“provocation”: an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my
instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness.’ Moreover,
that witness was best served in a fashion both verging upon the traditional,
its roots in the Schiller-Marx-Wagner idea of art as the paradigm of labour,
but also technological, an interest in new technical possibil
