Thursday, August 30, 2018

‘They say that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’






From O'Toole, Garson. “Wagner's Music Is Really Much Better Than It Sounds.” Quote Investigator, Quote Investigator, 25 Nov. 2016, quoteinvestigator.com/2016/11/25/wagner-better/.











In his 1897 travel book “More Tramps Abroad” the famous humorist Mark Twain credited Nye with the Wagner remark: 5

"It often happens that people frame phrases which have no meaning to a grammar, and yet convey a clear meaning to the world. William Nye’s remark about Wagner’s music is of that sort: ‘They say that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’"

More Tramps Abroad 1897












"Leave me, oh leave me in peace!"










Brunnhilde: "Do not come close to me, inflamed by nearness!" (obviously loses something in translation)













"Siegfried" by Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
'Ewig war ich...' Act III finale
Catherine Foster, soprano (as Brünnhilde)
and Johnny van Hall, tenor (as Siegfried)
Carl St. Clair, conductor
Staatskappelle Weimar (2008)
Arthaus Musik / www.arthaus-musik.com




Catherine Foster explains her interpretation of Brünnhilde:






Foster: It's almost like this just one theme she [ Brünnhilde ] wakes up he wants to get to know each other quicker [presumably, in the Biblical sense] than she wants to get to know him ans she's like, 'give me a chance, give me a chance, give me a chance! You know? I've only just woken up' This Brünnhilde is really about showing me having fun [not a word that comes to mind when discussing Wagner]. I get to know all my characters. You have to, for me, I have to find that within me that relates to the character that I sing. Wotan has taught Brünnhilde the power of love, but he lives for the love of power. If you look at Brünnhilde, she has all of it because she has revenge. In the second act, she wants revenge, she's got anger, she's got hate, at one point she has love, she has understanding, she has confusion. The confusion is definitely there with monologue in Valkyrie. So there are so many different facets of humanity and the feelings and everything that goes on but her fundamental driving force is love. 









film short


'Elegy to the assembly line' (1936)
(Modernism meets technological progress)
Filmed at the Chevrolet Plant (Flint, Michigan)
'Siegfried's Forging Music' (Richard Wagner)
"To New Horizons: Ephemeral Films 1931-45"
The Voyager Company





From “Hitler and Wagner.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 25 July 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/8659814/Hitler-and-Wagner.html.





• Hitler wrote in his first volume of his book Mein Kampf: "At the age of twelve, I saw ... the first opera of my life, Lohengrin. In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds."
• Aged 16, Hitler quit school and spent the next three years being idle. He is said to have spent a tidy proportion of his pocket money on going to the opera. He became passionate about Wagner.
• Wagner's anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic writings are thought to have had a quasi-religious effect on Hitler. His theories of racial purity were partly drawn from Wagner. According to Wagner: "The Volk has always been the essence of all the individuals who constituted a commonality. In the beginning, it was the family and the races; then the races united through linguistic equality as a nation."

Allegedly. Hitler committed suicide while listening to Wagner from Stone, Norman. “The Nazis' Last Stand.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/06/the-nazis-last-stand/302525/.

"on occasion Wagner or Bruckner was played. (When Hitler committed suicide, the Reich Chancellery staff, with huge relief, raided the wine cellar and put on jazz records; some staff members were dancing tipsily when the Soviets burst in.)"
Describing the end of Nazi Germany as Wagnerian seems to be a common metaphor / leitmotif from https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/demopoulos-gotterdammerung/





What role did music play in the death-throes of the Reich? What did the orchestras of the Reich perform in the latter stages of the war? Examining dialogues from the bunker in the expiring days of the Reich, one finds oneself in the rhetoric of Wagner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The leitmotif of this prolonged 'heroic' exit is a wild case of 'noblesse;”' and some thousands obliged indeed. This essay will illuminate the use of music as means to support the darker and more sinister ideogram of self-punishment and purification.


And from  Res, Laurence and Ian Kershaw. “Why the Nazis Didn’t Surrender.” WW2History.Com, ww2history.com/experts/Sir_Ian_Kershaw/Why_the_Nazis_didn_t_surrender. 



"So it took courage on all sorts of different levels, and the thing is - if that had succeeded - one thing which we do know is that if it had succeeded then there’d be an immediate attempt to negotiate a settlement and who knows how that would have panned out. But the chances are that they would have got some sort of settlement, the war would have been ended months earlier and the absolute colossal bloodshed of those last months of the war would have been avoided. So if Stauffenberg’s bomb had succeeded then millions of people would have been alive at the end of the war who actually weren’t alive when it came to the Goetterdaemmerung of May 1945."


But back to the continuing saga corporate PR use of classical music to increase profit margins:




even more Wagner





and the thrilling conclusion of a man, his love of cars, and a filmmaker's love of opera:





Posted by adagioforstrings at 5:31:00 PM
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