Alex Ross: evaluation

Transcript context

…As an outsider, let me ask you a very naïve question. I have a single CD version of Wagner’s Das Rheingold by Rudolf Kempe. You probably know this recording. It’s beautiful. It’s a wonderful mini-opera, just the highlights. I can listen to the one disc. Why should I ever listen to the whole opera? I enjoy the one disc more. Can’t we just take out the highlights? No, that’s perfectly valid. The orchestral syntheses that were devised by Stokowski and many other conductors are very entertaining to listen to. And it’s an interesting question about excerpts and Wagner. He always had an ambivalent attitude toward the extraction of excerpts from his works. On the one hand, it was a great marketing device, and he was a brilliant marketer. He was a master of publicity and branding and all these modern techniques, and he knew that pulling the music of the “Ride of the Valkyries” out of Die Walküre would spread his fame because that piece had an electrifying effect on audiences from the moment it was first heard. The same with all the other excerpts from The Ring and the other operas. But at the same time, he always felt that something was lost and that the dramatic purpose of these excerpts tended to disappear when they just became orchestral show pieces. Take, for example, the end of Rheingold, the entry of the gods into Valhalla. It’s grandiose, splendid — not quite uplifting, but it’s very energizing. It makes you feel grand and important listening to it. It’s just the sheer pleasure and the power of masked orchestral sound. But in the context — and I talk about this in the book — it’s absolutely ironic. This is a catastrophe unfolding. The gods are entering Valhalla, ignoring the pleas of the Rheinmaidens to return the ring to the Rhine. Wotan has struck this evil bargain to pay off the giants for the building of Valhalla. And it’s always funny to remember that The Ring is a story of contractors not being paid for their work. So it is dramatically ironic. It’s an empty spectacle. It’s a hollow spectacle. I compare it to the end of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus entering the palace at the end of Agamemnon. So when you pull out the excerpt, you lose those levels of irony, those levels of dramatic richness. But it’s impossible to resist. You can’t listen to the entire operas end from end every time. You want to experience the highlights as the feeling moves you. But I do feel that Wagner is always at his richest when you take the entire conception in the theater, when you experience it as theater. That’s when it really comes alive and reveals its full power. Should we think less of Wagner because there’s so little humor in it? Or do you think there’s more humor in it than is commonly realized?…

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