Das Liebesverbot is great fun. As to writing his own librettos, Ernest Newman was right when he said that Wagner did it in self-defense. Weber (except Freischütz)Marschner, Schubert were saddled with far worse libretti. In almost all of Wagner's works, it's the principal female character who saves the day and pulls the irons out of the fire. So isn't it only fair that in two of them (Lohengrin and Parsifal) they don't? Adds variety, at least.
I’ve heard the overture to Das Liebesverbot, and to me at least, it sounds like P.D.Q. Donizetti. Let’s face it - Wagner did not have a light touch. I’ve often wished he’d kept Loge around in the Ring operas after Rheingold. He added some comic relief. ☺️
I love Lohengrin. I saw it last year at the Met and I fell in love with Wagner and opera as a result. It is definitely ridiculous as a story, taken on its own, but the music is so grand that it makes it work for me. It’s so melodramatic and bizarre that for me it works on some kind of primal dream level.
Seems a bit unfair to blame Wagner for the "silly" plot of Lohengrin when it derives from a medieval legend where, yes, Lohengrin lives in Monsalvat with his dad, Parzifal and yes, his favoured mode of transport is the Swan express, and yes, the fair maiden he rescues must not ask his name. But I'm not a big fan of early (or middle) Wagner so if Lohengrin is it for you, then that's OK by me. I'd have gone for any of the musical trash he wrote (the Centennial March, the Liebesmal, etc that you mention). It seems to me that Wagner couldn't write "pure" muic at all and only succeeded with the Siegfried Idyll and Wesendonck Lieder because they meant something personal to him. Wagner himself admitted how embarrassed he was by one of his early overtures in his autobiography and describes slinking out of its only performance under the baleful glare of the doorman to whom he had previously announced himself grandly as "the composer" of said overture.
Good comment! :) I just personally can´t agree that Wagner was not able to compose pure music; there is also the Faust Overture which i think is quite great actually and what is more importatnt - the many preludes and overtures to the operas (i mean those that precede the first act) are actually independent and great "pure" music unto themselves even when played outside of the opera. Some of them are even like 15 minutes long, that is as long as some symphonic movements! So I think there is great pure music by him and and also some okay-ish works beside those mentioned - and if he had lived longer, his plan was to write pure music after Parsifal
@@classicallpvault8251 it depends on what definition of absolute music one has - whether the hardcore Hanslickian one, or some other. Because if the first option is the case, than there would actually not remain that much truly purely absolute music - that is to say music comletely divorced from any extra-musical element whatsoever. what i mean is that we often speak of pure music and mean by that orchestral music, but the actual concept of pure music as defined by its champion Hanslick entails much more - so much, in fact, that even some musicians usually thought of as absolute pure musicians would not qualify according to his criterion :)
@stevemmcclue5759 I remember reading about the incident of the young Wagner skulking out of the concert hall in disgrace after telling the doorman he was the composer of that piece. But I think it was just an orchestral piece, not a complete opera. He was only about sixteen when he wrote it. 😢
@ainsa8746 I thought Wagner was going to write an opera on a Buddhist theme, called Die Sieger, right after Parsifal. He wrote the libretto, but died suddenly before composing the music.
I have all these fat books: Stories from Great Operas, which I could never get through. When you get some spare time, if you could do a video series -- like this one (for Lohengrin) -- where YOU tell us the stories & plots of all the operas, I have no doubt it would be the greatest contribution to people like me who really never understand what is going on. You've got all of those books beat. Besides, any of us who have ever fallen asleep during an opera will love hearing the plot, at least, with an explanation like this. An entire series would be priceless!
Most opera is incomprehensible even if you DO know the language it's being sung in. My husband once met a woman who was born and raised in Italy, and he asked her if she could understand Italian opera. "Of course not! It's opera!" she said. That's one thing I like about Benjamin Britten: his operas are not only in English, but in clear, comprehensible English. Perhaps because his partner was a singer, Britten took pains to make his operas easy to understand, which not all composers writing opera in English have bothered to do.@@horrornovelreviews8358
Not at all, sorry. He's putting on the guise of Auber, specifically La Muette de Portici. He admired Auber's pacing and ability to segue from one dramatic and musical moment to the next. Meyerbeer works more in blocks.
@@valerietaylor9615 If you read up on what composers say you'll generally find that at some point they've claimed the exact opposite. Take it all with a grain of salt - and I'm not even talking about how things get wrongly attributed, or mangled in translation.
The American commissions for which Wagner earned big money were anything but failures: yes, they represent hack work and are completely unmemorable, but they served their purpose which was to make him a lot of money. Imo, Wagner’s most embarrassing work is Die Meistersinger……apart from the nonsense of the singing contest (‘I’ll give away my daughter to the best singer-songwriter in town’), there’s also the fact we’re encouraged to admire a man who is basically an abusive employer. Then there’s the question of Beckmesser - a humble town clerk whose biggest crime is to have ideas above his station in coveting the daughter of the town’s richest man. The savagery with which Beckmesser is treated is out of all proportion to his ‘crime’ - in effect, he gets the same as Alberich or Klingsor, only at a domestic level. For a comedy, there’s no forgiveness. The music is something else, of course, but it has its work cut out distracting attention from that libretto …..
Beckmesser is supposedly a caricature of Wagner's sworn enemy, the powerful Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick. In that scenario it's no surprise he comes off as a total jerk.
@@Bobbnoxious that’s widely known (and, in drafting the libretto, Wagner supposedly characterised the Beckmesser character as “Hans Lick’).. Wagner is the best case I can think of of artistic genius residing in a small personality. Ironically, Hanslick was not wholly critical of Wagner and found many good things to say about his work, though he remained a Brahms man at heart.
Beckmesser is a plagiarist and is happy to be one as long as it gets him the girl and the money. Pretty much hoist with his own petard. He comes off no worse than his models, Dr. Bartolo or Don Pasquale. I think he's a rather adorable scamp.
what is nonsensical about song contests? :D there were real song contests in medieval Germany! :D and even now, who doesn´t love a good singing contest? :D but seriously, the winning of the bride is actually a quite widespread theme. And Beckesser's biggest crime surely is something different, namely that he is a conservative pedant who hates innovation, that he is a pedantic proponent of conservative rules and laws abou art - that indeed is the whole meaning of the opera, the conflict between conservative, mortified art locked in its own prescriptions (Beckmesser and the Mastersingers more generally) and revolutionary innovative art that doesn´t care about tradition at all and is therefore dilletantistic (Walter) - and the resolution of this conflict, which is Sachs, who respects tradition but at the same time is open to its rejuvenation through innovation so that it does not ossify
@@ainsa8746 that may be what it’s about, but consider Wagner’s dramaturgy: how much of a threat do we feel Beckmesser to be? He’s a loser from the moment he appears, a comical pedant in shoes that pinch - a petit-bourgeois member of a town guild who’s pitched up against a Knight. Yes, he represents the forces of unthinking conservatism (that are always, and will always, be with us) but Wagner invites us to laugh at him from the start. Wagner was, at his best, a dramatist of genius so he might’ve had a care for how his comedy was going to turn out. Alas, I think he allowed his loathing for Hanslick and all he felt Hanslick represented, to overflow and spoil things. Some modern directors recognise this point and have Sachs welcome a chastened Beckmesser back into the ceremony at the end, a stage direction not authorised by Wagner.
Hans von Buelow once told an unfortunate tenor during a rehearsal of Lohengrin, “ Sie sind kein Ritter von dem Schwan, sondern von dem Schwein”. ( You are not a knight of the swan, but of the swine.) Works out perfectly in German and English!
Hi Dave, I want to thank you for another aha! moment. Your comment about Wagner not liking action turned on a lightbulb that made me wonder how I've missed it all these years. And that takes me to what I thought you would pick as Wagner's most embarrassing moment: Siegfried's fight with Fafner. I actually had a more "philosophical" defense of that limp moment in Siegfried, namely that Wagner at that point in his life was replacing Siegfried as hero with Brunnhilde as hero, and so he lost interest in the confrontation with Fafner. But your answer is both more simple and more obvious: Wagner wasn't interested in swashbuckling. Same with Melot (or, as you prefer, Merlot) in Act 2 of Tristan.
Wagner is my favorite composer, and if you don't think he had a sense of humor read the collection of his 1840's essays "Wagner Writes from Paris." I've blown hot, cold and lukewarm over "Lohengrin" for decades; at first I thought it was a masterpiece, later I downgraded it (particularly because the title character is so one-dimensional, a far cry from the genuinely conflicted Tannhäuser), and the last time I saw it in a Met "Live in HD" telecast I found myself comparing Lohengrin to James Bond, a secret agent from an international organization devoted to righting wrongs without getting too close to anyone in particular. I've long believed that Wagner's traumatic confusion about his own identity as a child (for his first nine years he was called "Richard Geyer" after his stepfather, a name he hated because it sounded Jewish and "Geyer" is also the German word for "vulture") led him to write all these operas about identity and what happens to you when you find out who you really are (Siegmund, Siegfried, Tristan and Parsifal all make major discoveries about themselves once they learn their true identities). And Wagner's first opera, "Die Feen," is "Lohengrin" with the genders reversed: it's the woman (Ada, Queen of the Fairies) who marries an ordinary human but tells him he can't ask her who she is or where she's from.
King Ludwig II identified strongly with the character of Tannhaeuser, who was very conflicted sexually ( what with Ludwig being gay, a major no-no at the time and not very desirable in royalty, Frederick the Great notwithstanding), rather than the ( as Gutman put it in his biography of Wagner) “ rather neuter Lohengrin”. Your comparison of Lohengrin with Bond is an interesting one, which I wouldn’t have thought of myself as I always thought Lohengrin comes across as a neuter, compared to Bond. As for Wagner’s relationship with his stepfather, I’ve read that he really loved Geyer, but maybe there was a degree of resentment toward him on account of his “Jewish” name ( no doubt Richard got teased about it at school.) Gutman pointed out that Wagner’s works are filled with fathers who are either deceased, missing, or unknown. And Wagner never knew his biological father, who died when Richard was an infant. Geyer may even have been Wagner’s real father. Apparently, there was a lot of gossip at the time because Geyer was a lodger at the Wagner residence and neighbors thought there was something going on between Johanna Wagner and Geyer. Well probably never know the truth, alas.
I think i see your point regarding the figure of Lohengrin - however, simultaneously, i think that the certain one-dimensionality of his character is actually intentional, not least because Wagner talked about him along those lines - Lohengrin is basically an "angel", sort of a divine, ideal, alien being, coming from this otherworldy realm of the Grail (which is musically depicted in the prelude), so there is not much human "flesh and blood" in him - that is to say, he doesn´t really belong to the human world - and that's also kind of the reason why he fails and the work ends in tragedy
It’s a fine lyric opera, full of beautiful music and some well-managed dramatic incidents. The ‘fight’ music doesn’t offend me - like Siegfried’s battle with Fafner, it’s only there because it has to be - but the problem is, is almost impossible to stage, wha with so many singers being on the unatheletic side.
Nearly all Wagner's operas are about not asking/revealing the past of a male character (himself). It is only changed in Die Meistersinger and Parsifal. I vote for Rienzi.
How is that so? Siegfried, Tannhäuser, Wotan, Sachs, Parsifal and almost all the others have revealed identities or eventually find them/ reveal them. The theme of a forbidden question is basically only present in the first opera Die Feen and then in Lohengrin, not elsewhere
@@f.p.2010I think Liebesverbot is more fun but Rienzi just never let's up, it sweeps you along. Where else will you find a pantomime and ballet (in Act 2) that lasts longer than most entire "regular" operatic acts? Nearly 45 minutes. Really, the only way to experience it is the uncut version that the BBC did in 1976 supervised by Julian Budden. It runs about a quarter hour longer than an uncut Meistersinger.
Just a question for someone more knowledgeable.........wasn't Wagner's first opera an effort called Die Hochzeit, that's been lost? I've never heard of it being discovered or reconstructed.
Fully endorse a previous plea for guidance on how to approach listening to Wagner operas. I usually start with the absolutely sublime orchestral segments (Parsifal; Lohengrin, et al.) but meet my match when trying to digest the full works. If the plot doesn't drive me away, the sounds of singers barking does.
@@jerrygennaro7587 I think the best way then may be to try these works either in quick tempi (Böhm Ring, Böhm Tristan, Boulez Parsifal) or if it is specifically the singing which is the problem, then try Karajan here - he takes these works more lyrically and makes the singers sing in a more bel canto style :)
@@f.p.2010 Portentous: "foreboding some extraordinary and calamitous event; ominous, threatening" (Oxford English Dictionary). The Ring is portentous from the moment Flosshilde warns her sister to "stfu" about the power of the Ring.
Although I consider myself an operaphile and worked for many years at a major opera company, I never was able to get into Wagner--I could recognize his greatness when I read about his operas and theories, but as you say, actually sitting through one is a snooze. I had over the years seen all of his mature works except for Lohengrin, and I eventually figured I ought to see the work the famous Wedding March was from. I thought the use of supertitles might make it more palatable, but actually they made it more excruciating to be aware of how often everyone repeats themselves and how long it takes for any of them to actually say anything. At the end, after Elsa has finally asked him his name, his endless monologue answer grew so absurdly evasive, it was all I could do not to stand up and scream, "For God's sake, just tell her your freakin' name!!!"
"Weak and languishing"?? Brunnhilde? Still, A-hole though you may have admitted to being, I said I forgave you and I have. Each of your videos is fun. And besides . . . are we fellow JHU alums? I too had a die-hard Met habitue' friend there as well. Small world.
Although it is not an opera, I would be interested to hear a recording of the piece Wagner was commissioned for the American 1876 centennial. Supposedly he said that the best thing about the work was the money he got for it.
I'm a great fan of Wagner's operas for more than fifty years. But my the admiration of the Lohengrin was ever weirdly lukewarm. Thanks to your insightful video I understand now, why this was the case. For that I'm very grateful, Dave!
I went with my parents to hear Lohengrin in our city opera. I must confess that my mother felt sleep in the first act and we went home during the intermission because she couldn't stand it. Apparently it´s an opera with a strong narcotic power.
I love the sequence in the Marx Brothers movie "At the Circus" where Harpo and Chico cut the ropes on the floating barge stage while the orchestra bellows Wagner's Prelude to Act 3 of Lohengrin which then floats away, in pompous music, while heading back to Europe. That said, I like very much the lyrical and dramatic Prelude to Act 1. Concerning your insights toward the bad treatment of female characters in 19th century operas, I think the only exception might be Leonore from Beethoven's Fidelio, but even she has to disguise herself as a man, alias Fidelio.
I have to say Wagner's treatment of women in his operas isn't always so bad. For example Brunnhilde is the lead heroine of the Ring. I like Lohengrin very much and I disagree the remark about the Act 3 Prelude. However if you want to talk about a woman getting trashed before your eyes see Parsifal. I mean he does everything in his power to make Kundry seem like the ultimate villain even more so than Klingsor (the actual villain). And he makes her the stereotypical jew and everything. If I felt bad about someone in Parsifal it was definitely Kundry.
I've always loved Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, too. I'm sure I've heard it before, but right now I am listening to Mravinsky's recording once again and -- Yep! -- it's everything Dave promised. I once had to write an ending to it for full orchestra (Wagner segues right into the opera without a good concert ending.) Mravinsky solves the problem with a KA-BAM!!! The overall effect is like hearing a work that describes the effect of somebody accidentally opening the door to a jet airplane while in flight. Oops.
to understand Kundry you need to understand the religious symbolism behind her. I agree that she was treated rather clumsily as a character, but not because she's a woman
Surely, the figure of Kundry uses stereotypes, but from the libretto she comes out as a character with whom we should feel empathy - in the first Act, Gurnemanz defends her against the knights, in the third Parsifal forgives her, kisses her - and in the end she finds redemption. None of this can be said about Klingsor, who is really the ultimate villain. There is nothing in the libretto to make him look better than Kundry. Indeed, she is enslaved to him and he spiritually torments her and uses her. So while I see that you may see the portrayal of Kundry unfavorably, she surely is not meant to be seen in a worse light than Klingsor - and Wagner even explicitly expresses himself in this way in the private :)
I really do love the mature Wagner, but I think this is the right pick. I was convinced you were going to go after Parsifal again, but as sympathetic as I am to your misgivings, I’m convinced that you sell that work short. Lohengrin, though? That I can get behind. Though there is also an argument for the Siegfried Idyll: the work is treated like something of great value, but has anyone ever received a duller birthday present from a great composer? Dull as death and at a period of his development when he should have known better.
Funny how we hear different things in the same music sometimes. My favorite bit of Lohengrin is its Vorspiel, which is diaphanous and lovely. Indeed, given that Lohengrin and Parsifal, the characters, are such close relatives, I have always thought Wagner saw some of the more ethereal and luminous writing in the earlier opera as a kind of template for the later. But de gustibus non est disputandum!
I'm feeling less guilty about remaining fairly ignorant of Wagner previous to the Ring Cycle. I've made some efforts, none of them heroic, I admit. In terms of Wagner and sex, I've listened to and attended performances of Tristan und Isolde many times and still can't figure out if the two of them got it on, or were simply about to. Clearly it's beside the point. I remember years ago an article in High Fidelity in which the writer equated Puccini with a Nazi concentration camp guard, for his sadism toward his heroines. He claimed the cruelty was actually contained in the music itself, by doubling the high melody in the bass and having the harmonizing chords sandwiched in between. I'm not making this up. It certainly provoked a lot of letters to the editor in the next issue. Do you remember that?
@@valerietaylor9615I'm sure. Up through March, 1950, Faust racked up 476 performances. Lohengrin had 485. BUT I see that sometime in the 1940s, Aida passed both operas. But Lohengrin was still ahead of Boheme, Carmen and everything else. Obviously, people weren't packing the house for a good expensive nap. The one part that was a soporific for some people was the first scene, around 25 minutes (Ortrud-Telramund) of Act 2. The very scene which looks forward the most to the Ring cycle. Though Wagner was still repeating text to fill out musical form in a way that he would abandon afterwards, the advanced mysterious chromaticism and new orchestral colors were all there.
I agreed with most of Dave's comments about Parzifal earlier, and I think it Wagner's most embarrassing work. Lohengrin doesn't seem especially embarrassing. Compared to the pretensions of the later work, it's more of a straight-up fairy tale or medieval romance. There are interesting complexities to the characters, and the story has a distinctive take on illicit knowledge and human frailty.
The only embarrassing thing about Lohengrin is the Wedding March ( Treulich gefuehrt…) As for Tannhaeuser, I identify strongly with T. himself, due to my massive Catholic guilt complex regarding sex. 😊
And yet that wedding march is probably hands down the most frequently heard and well known tune in all of classical music. Just sayin'. (The other is Mendelssohn's wedding march.)
That’s the ActIII Prelude. The Act I Prelude is so soft, so ppp, that when Gustav Mahler was about to start rehearsing it with a strange orchestra ( I can’t remember which one) , before he even gave the downbeat, he said, “ Too loud.” Getting back to the Act III Prelude, it’s always reminded me of the Overture to Weber’s Euryanthe. It’s probably the other way around, though. Weber was a generation or so older than Wagner, and was a great influence on him.
Listening to Wagner can be a little like being kept hostage only to develop Stockholm syndrome. That is you are made to suffer through long stretches of misery and come to feel grateful for the little bits of relief granted you.
Rossini said “ Wagner’s music has some fine moments, but awful half-hours.” But those fine moments more than make up for the awful half-hours. I must have Wagner Syndrome.
The most embarrassing moment in all of Lohengrin still has to be King Heinrich's line "So künde nun dein wahr' Gericht / du Herr und Gott, nun zögre nicht!" ("Then reveal to us Thy just decree, O Lord our God, DO NOT DELAY!") after a seemingly hour-long build-up to the ridiculous fight scene in Act 1 - Here, Wagner's unintentional comedic genius is at its purest.
Thanks for another moment of truth, Dave. For myself, I would argue that ALL of Wagner is embarrassing once the singing starts. The orchestral interludes can be glorious, but the caterwauling is excruciating. And nothing excuses "Jewry in Music", or the blatant Aryan garbage of the Ring Cycle, or all that interminable delusional suicidal junk of Tristan, or the interminably unpleasant Night at the Leather Bear Bar that is Parsifal. Just my opinion, I certainly get why Wagner is important....nevertheless....as always, you rock!
I get this suggestion, but my pick would be Tristan und Isolde. Act I: “I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!” Act II: “I love him! I love him! I love him!” Act III: “The ship is coming! The ship is coming! The ship is coming! Love is death.” Four and a half hours of occasionally glorious but mostly boring music.
That's a very funny sum-up :D by chance, have you tried Böhm's Tristan? - he really pushes the score forward. Aside from that, there are great books on Tristan/with chapters on Tristan: Bryan Magee's Tristan Chord (in the UK i think its called Wagner and philosophy) and Eric Chafe's The Tragic and the Ecstatic. I case you were interested, I can highly recommend them! :)
@@ainsa8746 Thank you for these suggestions! I’m not currently in a state of mind where I take T&I all that seriously, but I will save this list for when I have an aha! moment.
I think Wagner is a lot like Mahler: all of his works are Masterwork and embarassing at the same time. Here lies the genius: being able to constantly be on the thin border between tr*sh and aulic, between the two extreme poles of the "sublime", without ever fully falling down into the former.
I personally don´t agree about any of the operas from Holländer onwards being "embarassing" - but regarding Tristan, Parsifal, Meistersinger especially i think this is not true - Tristan and Parsifal are actually quite emotionally introspective i think, and Meistersinger reveal a polyphonic contrapuntal skill and use of more traditional operatic forms that it sometimes seems rather like a neoclassical-romantic work
I thought Dave was going to go with Hollander because the music is terrible. But the case for Lohengrin is strong. One thing that Dave doesn’t mention is that since Wagner insisted on not dividing his acts into scena, he ends up composing pretty lousy “transition” music, during which a couple of characters will come onto stage to belt out a couple of lines to move the plot along, and then disappear again. In Vienna, Verdi must have been thinking, “What time is the next swan?”
?!?!?!? The music is terrible in Hollander?!?!?!? Fantastic overture, die frist ist um is a fantastic scene the only baritone scenes that are better are Wotan’s monologues in acts 2&3 of Walküre, the chorus at the beginning of the third act probably the best tune Wagner ever wrote, and it’s probably the most dramatically tight opera Wagner wrote. There’s nothing terrible about the music in Dutchman.
@@djquinn4212It bears the same relation in Wagner's work as the Eroica does in Beethoven's. I'm not saying it's anywhere near the equal of LVB's 3rd, but in both instances it was a breakthrough for their composers and art in general. I think it's Tannhäuser (1845 version) that is the embarrassment. It's always struck me as a step backwards from Dutchman except for the Rome narration. The original Venus isn't seductive, she's much more a dowdy hausfrau. In the Wartburg, much of the music is subpar Gounod and even John Stainer in a couple of places.
@paxpaxart4740 How can you say Wagner had not a whit of theatrical knowledge? He came from a theatrical family - his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, was an actor, and several of his sisters were actresses. And Wagner himself had quite a histrionic streak, according to his biographers.
Stepping back out of the classical music weeds, pretty much anything by Wagner is embarrassing. Sometimes moving and fascinating--or at least catchy--but often silly and cringy.
I know it’s a masterwork and all, I love the music, but I find the libretto of “Götterdämmerung” truly unbearable. The whole Gibichung plot is unbelievably crappy. Aggggghhh
the Götterdämmerung part of the Ring actually rather closely follows the plot of the source material of the medieval german Nibelungenlied, there's all of the winning of partners, changed identity, stab in the back on the only vulnerable part of the body... there's even a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak!
in his essay Religion and Art, which is sort of a artistic manifesto for Parsifal, Wagner specifically and explicitly states that with this work, its philosophico-religious message notwithstanding, he DOES NOT want to create any "new religion" in any way at all. Regarding the applause, this is a tradition that developed in Bayreuth later, it was NOT Wagner's instruction. If you would be interested in more detail, it is actually well summed up on wikipedia :)
@f.p.2010 I don’t think Wagner even understood Christianity. As for Mahler - if he were alive today, he’d probably be into New Age religion ( or is that considered spirituality? )
The most prevalent misunderstanding about Wagner's music is that it's "deep." Far from that, it's what we today would call "high concept." The leitmotiv system is a high concept premise whose essence can be explained in under ten seconds.
But Wagner loved to philosophize, and his characters do the same. The critic Deems Taylor wrote in an essay about Wagner ( titled “ The Monster”), that according to himself, Wagner was Shakespeare, Beethoven and Plato, all rolled into one.
