Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
By William Henry Chamberlin Wagner Remains Good Box-Office' To me, the crowning glory of the current Metropolitan Opera season has been the revival of Wagner's Ring cycle. The shameful absence of...
...The two exceptions are by that most profound and haunting of Russian composers, Modest Moussorg-sky...
...The jam-packed standees joined the rest of the audience in shouting themselves hoarse after the climactic last act when Siegfried pierces the circle of magic fire and awakens Brunhilde, whose ecstatic cry: "Heil dir, Sonne...
...The Wagner operas were so popular that the cycle was repeated twice...
...If Wagner is "good box-office," modernistic efforts in opera most conspicuously are not...
...The Metropolitan repertory for 1957 could have been presented almost without alteration in 1917—impressive . proof of the sterility of musical creation since the First World War...
...and with a theater of perfect acoustic properties, where the latecomer was just out of luck and not admitted from the moment the first bar of music sounded...
...the foreigners, with the limitations of baggage which air travel imposes, usually appeared in much simpler dress...
...Invariably, this aria was followed by a prolonged burst of applause, which, I always felt, was not inspired entirely by the music...
...This is not surprising, because the plot is much more complex than that of Boris Godounoy and requires extensive knowledge of Russian 17th-century history and psychology by the opera-goer...
...Wagner was obviously "good box-office" in Germany and the rest of Europe, as his Ring was at the Metropolitan...
...One is Boris Godounov, in which the somber rhythms and melodies of Moussorgsky blend with the superb lines of Pushkin to create a tremendous drama of ambition, crime and remorse, a Russian equivalent of Macbeth...
...What sets Wagner apart is the sustained dramatic content of his work, the integration of poetry with music...
...I realized an old dream in 1955 when I made a musical pilgrimage to Bayreuth and saw three operas, Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser and Parsifal, in the special theater built to Wagner's own specifications for the annual festival performances of his music dramas, which began during his lifetime...
...The shameful absence of this mighty tetralogy, the world's greatest fairy story told in words and music of unsurpassed power and shimmering beauty, was defended by the Met director Rudolf Bing on the ground that Wagner is not "good box-office...
...Wagner was one of my first musical enthusiasms...
...One could make nationality distinctions according to sartorial lines...
...For me, Wagner's masterpieces (and, apart from his early Faust and Rienzi, he wrote no opera that is not a masterpiece) are on a different plane, musically, emotionally and intellectually, from any other operatic works, with just two exceptions...
...Here was Wagner under ideal conditions, with the finest European and American singers, including several from the Metropolitan ; with a specially recruited orchestra in which many concertmeisters of German orchestras were proud to play as rank-and-file musicians...
...One gets supporting evidence on this point by studying the recital programs of leading pianists and noticing how rarely a work of later vintage than 1917 or even 1900 is included...
...I often saw Khovanshchina in Moscow's Bolshoi Theater during the grim years of the First Five-Year Plan, the famine, the deportations and mass arrests...
...Many Germans appeared in full evening dress and fashionable gowns...
...The large festival theater was full to capacity every night, and probably a third to a half of those present were non-Germans...
...Which means that I am planning a second trip to Bayreuth, this time to see the Ring, in the summer of 1958...
...I timed one trip to New York to attend a performance of Siegfried, perhaps the least magnetic of the four operas, and found standing room only...
...But when the Ring was put to the test of performance, the reverse proved to be true...
...There is one aria in which one of the characters offers up a prayer for "Rus," the old Slavonic name for Russia, appealing to God not to allow "Rus" to perish...
...Heil dir, Licht" is one of Wagner's finest lyric passages...
...But I am getting away from Wagner...
...But the score contains some hauntingly beautiful melodies, and there are characters and episodes of touching beauty, set in a semi-Asiatic atmosphere of fanaticism, intrigue, cruelty and violence...
...The other is Moussorgsky's Kho-vanshchina, an opera which the Metropolitan produced in English translation a few years ago and then dropped...
...For some reason (it can no longer be the myth that Wagner is not popular), the Ring is not to be presented at the Metropolitan in '57-'58...
...It is only the conductors of leading symphony orchestras, alas, who make their captive subscription audiences guinea-pigs for the arid wastes of howling cacophony that are so characteristic of modern music...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 15
