You're probably speechless. I mean, who could have dreamt up such a series of sounds? Lots of it didn't quite make sense to you. And the people around you appear to be speechless, too, so it can't be just you. So what do you do? It's ended. And you're speechless. The curtain has come down. In less than a moment, it will come back up again. What DO you do? Do you stay silent? Do you dare… clap that first clap? Well, you don't really even like doing that when it's an opera you absolutely love, so you definitely won't do that. You don't know what to do. Do you? No! So?
So, you boo like crazy, more out of discomfort than anything else, and because you're pretty sure no one around you liked it either. Then you reach into your pocket for that lump of rotting artichoke that you just happened to bring for your interval snack. Ah well. Too bad, Wagner, you think as you lob. Ooh, great, got him right in the small of the back, too. Good shot. Made the bugger fall flat on his arse. Fantastic.
Still, Wagner's day will come. In fact, in about, let's see, just two pages' time, give or take a concerto. Which gives me the perfect excuse to skip a couple of years and come up in 1845. Let me fill in the news gaps.
IT'S 1845: HERE IS THE NEWS
fi Sounds a little odd, really: 'Hello, my name is Stephen. Pm an Aquarius, realty, but I do have Maori rising.' ood evening, this is the last two years' news in brief, and I'm John Suchet reading it. The Anglo-Sikh war has now begun, which is a big nuisance to the civil servants back home in Blighty, who were already having a spot of trouble with the rather tedious and aforementioned Maori rising/ Interesting things are afoot in the US, too. Texas and Florida have come into the family of states, and - possibly more importantly - the rules of baseball have been codified by the quaindy named Knickerbocker Baseball Club. Presumably, somewhere in there are the rules that (a) no game shall take less than three weeks, (b) you must all eat junk food, and (c) you must learn to love die electric organ. As far as more handlebar-moustache sporting events are concerned, so to speak, die Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race has transferred allegiances: not from BBC to ITV but from Henley to Putney as a venue. It's possible that one or more members of the teams might have been taken with the new book of this year, The Condition of the Working Classes, which Friedrich Engels published in Leipzig. In fact, it had been only last year that Engels had met Karl Marx in Paris. History has it that they found they agreed on virtually everything except who would pay for the cappuccinos. Other recent books on the shelves included Vingt Ans Apres, the sequel to Les Trois Mousquetaires by Dumas, as well as a little something called Carmen by Prosper Merimee. The master of French neo-classicism, Ingres, has just exhibited his Portrait of the Countess Haussonville and JT Huve had finished La Madeleine in Paris.
That was the world in 1845. Now the weather, and light wars are expected around Lahore next year, with the odd blustery annexation out towards New Mexico. The rest of the world will be sunny with showery intervals.
THE NAME'S WAGNER… RICHARD WAGNER!
A
s one of my favourite people, Oscar Wilde, once said, T like his music better than anybody's.' Absolutely. I wholeheartedly concur. OK, if I'm to be honest and decent and true, then what he actually said, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, was, to be precise: 'I like his music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.' OK, well, yes. He was being facetious. But, regardless, Wagner really is one of my favourite geniuses. Before we refocus on him, though, what's happening with his fellow luwies, the composers of the day? Who's still around? Well, Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt are still the big noises. Mendelssohn is still alive, though, as are Verdi, Schumann, Gounod, Offenbach, Suppe… lots of them really. The Classical Music First 11 is fielding an odd, some would say illegal, 4/2/20-odd formation, and the big four, attacking up front, are Frederick, Hector, Franz and new boy Richard. Of that attacking front four, it is, to be fair, Wagner who is going to become top goalscorer, in terms of history, and eventually command the biggest following, or claim the biggest influence.
In a way, Wagner basically carried out a root and branch overhaul of music. Gone were the rules. Gone was the form book, the structure. Wagner, and indeed many of the romantics, but Wagner most of all - to be fair - said simply, 'Why should we?' and then did his own thing. As a child, he had loved Beethoven, and used to spend hours and hours copying out the scores and making arrangements of his music. He also loved the operas of Mozart - the first true German opera composer, he called him - and, if you add to this as healthy respect for the composer of the day, Meyerbeer, well, you can see how it all came about, in a sense. Throw in the fact that, as we know, he was only 5 feet 5 inches tall, and everything becomes crystal clear. The equation would read: pB x kB + 1?(?)
1 1-1 =WO
– h That's 'Passion for Beethoven x knowledge of Beethoven + love of Mozart opera, all over lack of height = Wagner operas'. Obviously. Now open your text books at page 182 and work quiedy through chapters 7 and 8, while I go off to the staff common room.
Wagner wanted to make a new form - not just music, not just opera, but a real living, breathing, organic new form. In Wagner's new form, the music and the plot would be inextricably linked - one couldn't move independentiy of the other, both were of equal importance. He called it 'music drama', a harking back to the dramma per musica of the Renaissance. They weren't just operas, though, to him - they were different. The music had to grow out of the drama - and the drama could advance only with the help of the music. So, no, you couldn't simply stop, every now and again, and 'stand and deliver' a pretty aria, for the sake of having an 'extractable' song which people could sing in recitals. His music would build and build, taking its cue from the story - and, as we know, he could write his own librettos too. Well, who else would know how to write librettos exactly how he wanted them? Who else would get it, as it were? But, if the music was going to be more or less continuous, how would he keep the audiences involved? He did want them to be able to at least keep up, but if the music was all just constantly new and unheard, page after page, how could they? How would they get what was going on, if there was no stopping, and everything flowed from what had come before? And more importantly, WHERE WOULD THEY COUGH?
LEIT MUSIC
he way he got round it was this. He kept writing what he called 'leitmotiv' - short, snappy(-ish) tunes that denoted either characters or moods or general themes. These would crop up, whenever he needed to get his point across, often over and over again, and sometimes long after they had been first heard. In fact, there is a great quote from the conductor, Sir Thomas Rentagob Beecham, which comes from the time he was taking an opera orchestra through its Wagnerian paces: 'We've been rehearsing [this opera] for two hours, now, and we're still playing the same bloody tune!' What a wag he was. But also, imagine you are not stopping a piece of music for two, maybe three hours even. After a while, you begin to lose any sense of what key you are in, because Wagner was always flitting around, shifting seamlessly between different keys. It must have been a whole new world for people, hugely unsettling. And that's not to mention the staying power you needed to simply sit through the opera - sorry, music drama - in the first place. In fact, while we're in the mood for great quotes, one of the other best quotes in all music concerns this aspect of Wagner operas. It's got to be one of my all-time favourite Wagner quotes after Woody Allen's 'I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.' It is: 'A Wagner opera is where it starts at 6 o'clock. After two hours you look at your watch and it says 6.20.' True, it's not for everyone, the five-hour-long works, with intervals which, honestly, last as long as some of his rivals' entire operas.