Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What is it about Richard Wagner that so ignites the passions? Since the mid- 19th century, the man, his mind and his music have been among Western culture's brightest flames, firing the imagination and illuminating the inner reaches of the human spirit. Yet his intellect had a destructive side as well: a deep-rooted, Germanic hostility to the Mediterranean wellsprings of European culture and in particular to the Jews. "Wagner is one of the most complex phenomena in the history of art and intellect, and one of the most fascinating," wrote Thomas Mann in 1940, "because he offers...
...latest confrontation with that challenge came late last month in Israel when conductor Daniel Barenboim proposed to defy an unwritten ban on Wagner's works by performing excerpts from two operas at a special, nonsubscription concert with the Israel Philharmonic. The idea met with such fervid opposition that it has had to be at least temporarily abandoned. The reason had little to do with the music and a lot to do with the composer and the anti-Semitic intellectual company he kept, both while he was alive and after his death: Father Jahn, Count Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg...
...Metropolitan Opera, goes the old line, is New York City's second Met museum. It's an acrid joke, deriding the opera house's conservative repertory, its emphasis on Verdi, Puccini and Wagner standards. Where, the critics ask, is innovation? What about experiment? But the hard truth is that new works don't sell, and the Met, with one of the most ambitious schedules in the world, must try to fill 4,000 seats at 210 performances a season. And for the most part, its forays into premieres have been failures. Met veterans still wince at the memory...
MEETING VENUS. A Hungarian guest conductor (Niels Arestrup) meets a Swedish diva (Glenn Close) while rehearsing Wagner's Tannhauser with a motley and disputatious band of emigre musicians in Paris. Result: a funny, satirical, romantic and -- above all -- intelligent film about backstage intrigues and onstage triumphs...
SCHOENBERG: GURRELIEDER (London). 2 vols. This quasi-oratorio is in many ways a summation and culmination of Romanticism: a magnificent music-drama about doomed love and transcendence, it echoes Wagner's Tristan and foreshadows Mahler's Eighth. Riccardo Chailly guides the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, a large chorus and superb soloists led by Susan Dunn and Siegfried Jerusalem in this infinitely expressive, dramatically gripping performance...